Thoughts on Wittgenstein and Chuang Tzu

    One of the nice things about my job is that I get to take a leave from teaching every so often (we get one semester off after three years on, or one year off after six years on).  I am on leave now, a nice time for writing and reading and thinking that is rapidly coming to an end (I am formally back on the teaching rolls in January).   What makes all this even nicer is our little Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, where faculty on leave get offices and share writing with one another. 

    Yesterday's seminar was led by a philosopher here, Steven Gerrard, who presented us with a marvelously insightful consideration of the analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and  American painter Edward  Hopper.  He focused on Hopper's painting , "Morning in a City," and used it to reflect upon, among other things, Wittgenstein's notions of the mystical and immanence.  It was a masterful presentation (for those interested here is a link to one of Gerrard's web-published papers in a similar vein). 

       Gerrard is a "New Wittgensteinian," which means, among other things, that he rejects the standard interpretation of a break in Wittgenstein's thought between his first great book, The Tractatus, and his second, Philosophical Investigations.   One of the ways Gerrard does this is to bring out the necessary immanence of Wittgenstein's ethics and orientation.  The famous ending of the Tractatus is especially important in this regard:

6.54   My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb beyond them (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must overcome [or defeat] these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

7    Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

    The standard interpretation (if I have this right) sees in that very last line an opening to a kind of transcendent mysticism: there are things beyond the capacities of our language and about such things we must be "silent."  That "silence" does not deny all expression; it points out the impossibility of linguistic expression, but leaves open the realm of artistic expression.  Art then becomes our avenue to the mystical beyond language.

     Gerrard, and New Wittgensteinians more generally, I believe, focus on the penultimate passage, 6.54.  What can this mean?  It could be that, to paraphrase another idea, language has meaning only in the stream of a particular life.  The language I use to understand my world might be helpful for another person in understanding his world but, ultimately, my words will not be able to capture his world accurately or completely because... language has meaning only in the stream of particular lives.  He can learn from my words but will, eventually, have to discard them in order to "see the world," his own world, which is different than mine, "aright." 

   If that is the case, then the very last line might mean something like: be careful! don't think we can come up with general ethical rules that capture the complexity of all cases.  Rather, keep constantly vigilant about particularities, focus always on the details and distinctions of specificity. There are limits on the generalizability of our language.

     Gerrard invokes a line from the Philosophical Investigations to make this point: "When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day."  Gerrard then goes on to make the link to Hopper (this is taken from his seminar paper which may well change as the text moves toward publication...):

"What would the language of everyday look like if it were painted, rather than written or spoken?  Perhaps like "Morning in a City".  What do we see: an ordinary woman in an everyday room in a city so ordinary it is not even named. 

"Indeed, Hopper is famous for his depiction of the ordinary, everyday, quiet scene, distant from the dramas of public strife."

  There's lots to think about in all this.  But one thing that jumps to my mind, and which I shared with Steve, is Chuang Tzu, who tells us to "dwell in the ordinary."  Here is the whole passage, which many of you already know is one of my very favorites from the Inner Passages:

Sufficient because sufficient.  Insufficient because insufficient.  Traveling the Way makes it Tao.  Naming things makes them real.  Why real?  Real because real.  Why nonreal?  Nonreal because nonreal.  So the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things.  There's nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing [beauty] Hsi Shih, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange - in Tao they all move as one and the same.  In difference is the whole, in wholeness is the broken.  Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again.

Only one who has seen through things understands moving freely as one and the same.  In this way, rather than relying on you own distinctions, you dwell in the ordinary.  To be ordinary is to be self-reliant; to be self-reliant is to move freely; and to move freely is to arrive. That's almost it, because to arrive is to be complete.  But to be complete without understanding how - that is called Tao. (23-24)

    Maybe Chuang Tzu is more radical than Wittgenstein here, moving beyond simply asserting the limitations of language to embracing the fundamental inadequacy of language.  But there are family resemblances.  Both philosophers, and Hopper, ultimately find refuge in the particular, the immediate, the concrete, the "ordinary."  We'll give Wittgenstein the last word:

6.4311  If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Comments

[Tracy]

Sam,

While doing some reading on Gadamer for a paper("hermeneutic circle" and his interest in the phenomenology of "play" in language), I came across a comparison & quote from Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" (sorry I don't know how to do italics in this format!) which seems to correspond to your thoughts.....I think. Anyway for what it's worth here it is: "You must bear in mind that the language-game...is...unpredictable....it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there- like life."

[Sam]

Tracy,
I wonder if what he means is "unpredictable" in a rationalist sort of way; that is, we cannot impose an externally-generated (external, that is, to the context of the language itself) standard of interpretation or understanding. Within the life-world of the language itself, it can be quite predictable....

[Metta]

It sounds like the Center for Humanities and Social Sciences is amazing - a lot like what I visualized academia being. How wrong I was in general drove me out.