Composing Remarks for a Philosophical Grammar

This remark is part of a collection of notes written in a 270-page manuscript during the fall of 1931. Since this is an excerpt embedded in the Nachlass, in the center of which is the capital and incomplete work of Wittgenstein, the Investigations, its context certainly deserves more detailed attention. We always have to ask ourselves how this small segment connects with the wide network that makes up the single composite work of art. Thus, MS 112, the large notebook that encompasses that remark, is set in an environment where Wittgenstein is eager to publish a new book. Only two years had passed since he returned to Cambridge determined to give a clear account of some dramatic changes in his philosophical perspective after almost a decade of TLP’s publication. It is possible that this situation was still a little bit confused at that time because this was being simultaneously done in two distinct fronts: on the one hand, Friedrich Waismann, a distinguished member of the Vienna Circle, took charge of writing down all the author’s discussions with him and Moritz Schlick during the philosopher’s periodic visits to Vienna, at Christmas and Easter, and compiling enough material for the publication of a new book (VW, p. xvi-xviii); on the other hand, the author himself was composing in Cambridge a collection of manuscripts and typescripts for exactly the same purpose. Those changes of philosophical perspective were not precisely related to his determination to use philosophy for anti-cognitive and therapeutic purposes, since this was quite assured and clear already in the section § 6.54 of TLP (^{Conant, 2001}). Wittgenstein never departed from the feeling that the typically academic form of philosophy was foreign to him, and it was right in this direction that he was having a strong influence on Waismann and Schlick at the time (^{Wittgenstein, 1984}). But his natural reaction was to develop a kind of philosophy in which academic subjects are engulfed in literary forms, something that perhaps was not yet clearly noticeable to Waismann.

Cavell depicts this typical literary response as a sort of stream flowing through, and bounded by, two distinct shores with different dynamics over the river that runs alongside both of them (2004). In reality, within this river, it was his method that was suffering drastic refinements, and would still suffer in the subsequent years. As Wittgenstein’s response inside this dynamic always consists of a critique of the use of language, he went from a logical and abstract view of the uses of the proposition in the capacity of mirror of facts, which represents the perspective sustained in the TLP, to a view of the use of propositions, and even words, as parts of systems endowed with pragmatic purposes, on which he was actually working out in 1931, to finally arrive, from 1933 until the end, on the idea of language games practiced within forms of life. Of course, the idea of language games as well as his written expression continued to refine over the years. The beauty of accompanying the development of the Nachlass as a whole is to watch the parade’s procession of different methods and therapies along the years (PI § 133).

In the Cambridge front of the battle for writing this book, Wittgenstein composed 8 manuscripts between the winter of 1929 and the fall of 1931 (MSS 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, and 112). From these manuscripts, just three typescripts were brought forth: TSS 208 (from MSS 105, 106, 107, and 108), 209 (based on the TS 208), and 210 (based on the second half of MS 108). His philosophical development in this short period of time can be grasped even through the successive changing in the titles of the manuscripts. He went from “Philosophical Remarks” (MSS 105, 108, and 110) and “Philosophical Considerations” (MS 107) up to “Remarks Concerning Philosophy” (MS 111) and “Remarks Concerning Philosophical Grammar” (MS 112). Thus, MS 112 is characterized in this series for emphasizing the method of analyzing propositions and words inside systems endowed with pragmatic purposes, precisely seeking the grammars in which these propositions and words are immersed at the occasion of their application. This is the context in which we have to read his rare pedagogical indication.

The Philosopher Unexpected Spices

Taking all this background into consideration, I think that it is possible to rescue at least five indications contained in that remark, confirming them elsewhere in the same manuscript as well as in the Nachlass. So, the first element that calls our attention here is that it is completely indifferent in the excerpt about what kind of foods are to be offered to the pupil, that is, if they are the same or different from those he or she already knew. The point is that they have to be exotic to him or her, because the purpose of that teaching is to expand the pupil’s aesthetic repertoire. Nevertheless, there is nothing more difficult, indeed, than to change one’s taste, since it is inherited in one’s culture, and, for this reason, it is deeply entrenched by early education and family relations. Arbitrarily constraining a person to change his/her taste is a method that would clearly fail in this case. The only hope is to capture the pupil’s will by the visual aspect of the dish or through the condiments added to complement the foods. So, there is no doubt that Wittgenstein was working on an aesthetic plan to change cognitive attitudes through aesthetic means, but not exactly to please or entertain the learner. A later reverberation of this philosophical preference can be found when he says in the MS 162b, p. 59v that “People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc., to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them”.

The second significant element in that remark is that our author is really committed to a profound modification of the dominant culture in which the pupil is immersed. But curiously his engagement is with the individual, not with the society as a whole. For a person who believes that education is only conditioning, this is a very eloquent sample of a belief in the individual’s capacities, apart from any social coercion, however rooted it may be. This is probably an indication that Wittgenstein wants a more complete form of revolution than simply overthrowing one social or political regime and replace it with another. It seems to be a revolution on our life system as a whole, on our way of thinking, reasoning, and conceiving life as it is implied in the word progress: “our civilization is characterized by the word progress” (MS 109, p. 207). This is a kind of change that cannot simply be produced by the same forces that sustain our present civilization, and that can only occur suddenly and unexpectedly by accident, such as the result, for example, of a pandemic:

The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it was possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual.

Think of the use of the motor-car producing or encouraging certain sicknesses, and mankind being plagued by such sickness until, from some cause or other, as the result of some development or other, it abandons the habit of driving (RFM, Part II, § 23).

As for what he saw as a real revolutionary change, he characterized it thirteen years later by saying: “The revolutionary will be the one who can revolutionize himself” (MS 165, p. 204).

The third important element I want to highlight in that remark is that the cookery’s attractiveness is actually dispensed through writing. This is revealed two pages later in the manuscript where he notes: “I must be nothing more than the mirror in which my reader sees his own thinking with all its deformities & with this assistance can set it in order” (MS 112, p. 113v). Obviously, what is expected as a result of widening one’s aesthetic repertoire is that the reader can finally recognize the difference between before and after, and, subsequently, see things differently. But recognizing deformities in one’s thinking and set it in order is dependent on comparison with a standard, so what will be the accepted measurement? The answer is none but the reader’s own thinking, since the text is meant to be just a mirror. In other words, the reader is allured by a text in which she or he expects to get something in the same way that a gourmet looks forward to exploring cuisine’s pleasures. But, in return, neither the reader, nor even the gourmet, really gets what is expected.

So, the fourth element is about the frustrating results. Seeing specifically oneself means that there is no cognition about empirical matters, no piece of new information about anything, and, worse than that, nothing alluring or hidden at all, because “everything lies open to view” (PI § 126). It is all about the same things we’ve been doing all the time and couldn’t see because of its familiarity and closeness (PI § 103). It is interesting that in the same page 113v, already alluded to, that we can find other two significant remarks. The first reads: “The only dignified task of philosophy is: to destroy the old idols of philosophy. That is, its only connection with gods”; and the second: “Philosophy takes all of its emphasis from the conception it destroys”. Both are clearly resounded in the section § 118 of PI, quoted above. It is in this sense that we can see that the real question when this task of destruction is complete can only be: “Then, what is left?”. The answer, also hinted at PI § 118, is just the ground of language on which those conceptions were built up. Consequently, the real discovery was already there all the time, it’s not a discovery at all, except those about “some piece of plain nonsense and the bumps that the understanding has got by running up against the limits of language” (PI § 119). This means that the reader’s conceptions and assumptions probably were ill founded according to the same material from which they were built up in the first place. The image in the mirror simply prompted us to ask what we did to ourselves with what we had previously at hand, and who or what forced us, after all, to become like that. At our disposal rests our own confused employment of language. As attested by the continuation of PI § 119, “the bumps make us see the value of that discovery”.

The fifth element, of course, has to do with the bumping after-effects particularly designed to the right kind of reader, the only one who is able to open the locked door. And perhaps this is the main reason why Wittgenstein is not ultimately interested in the universal competence of human reason, despite assuming it anyhow. Inner competence is not enough to open the door. The only capacity that can be exercised from that point on is the efficient use of the will. So, revolutionizing oneself is a previous condition.

This was expressively demonstrated a bunch of pages before in the manuscript, when Wittgenstein commented about Ramsey’s bourgeois mentality by doing philosophy of mathematics:

Ramsey was a bourgeois thinker. I.e. he thought with the aim of clearing up the affairs of some particular community. He did not reflect on the essence of the state - or at least he did not like doing so - but on how this state might reasonable be organized. The idea that this state might not be the only possible one partly disquieted him and partly bored him. He wanted to get down as quickly as possible to reflecting on the foundations - of this state. This was what he was good at & what really interested him; whereas real philosophical reflection disquieted him until he put its result (if it had one) on one side as trivial (MS 112, p. 70v-71r).

Wittgenstein is clearly interested in getting us out of this bourgeois state and does not admit any compromise solution with the rationale of which he describes as “the prevailing European and American civilization [...], the expression of which is the industry, architecture, music, of present day fascism & socialism” (MS 109, p. 205). It is because of this that he cannot but conclude that the philosopher must always be an outsider: “(The philosopher is not a citizen of a community of thinking. That is what makes him a philosopher.)” (MS 112, p. 72r). Making oneself understood out of the bourgeois system, or to lost oneself in the language’s labyrinth of paths and confessing “I don’t know my way about” (PI § 123), surely is such a condition. This is also made clear when we read eight pages ahead of the remark in focus that “Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of well-kept wrong turnings” (MS 112, p. 116v). Finding and inventing ways through the maze wandering, and thus creating surveyable representations that could get us to “see connections” (PI § 122), should provide us with the kind of understanding we need in such a tragic civilizatory condition, as far as I can tell by reading such remarks. It is in such capacity that the mirror created by the author’s writing might serve as “... signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings, to help people past the danger points” (MS 116, p. 116v).

A Claim for Inclusive Education

The operative side of the therapeutic cycle is clearly up to the reader. Wittgenstein’s texts simply don’t offer a model to be applied, nor even they are able to be easily followed. In fact, it is quite the opposite: the reader is compelled “to travel crisscross in every direction over a wide field of thought” (PI’s preface). Through this journey, she or he assembles all the sketches of landscapes that could be collected during the excursion the way that looks best to her or him. The fact is that PI, and, for that matter, the whole Nachlass, is just an album, that is, it requires a much more interactive approaching than a regular book of philosophy; it demands a kind of reading agency that reminds those types of judgments for which Kant has circumscribed to the will the dominant part: spontaneous acts of judgment exercised in the realms of ethics and aesthetics. While in the cognitive realm the imagination is reproductive and restricted to applying models received from conceptual frameworks, in the latter the imagination is rather productive and creates for itself rules according to which it will conceptualize, in an unprecedented way, the material perceived in the empirical world. According to this conception, the spontaneity of the human will assemble the necessary capacities to set this operation in motion.

Wittgenstein never confines to merely the human reason the decisive role, as if the most fundamental questions of philosophy could be reached solely in terms of the rational use of the argument. This is exactly what he wrote about Moore’s proof of an external world: “From its seeming to me - or to everyone - to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it” (OC § 2). That is, he always appeals to the human will as the fundamental kind of engagement in which certainty is deposited in grammatical settings. Globally speaking, Wittgenstein incites the reader to a rebellion for which there is yet no model available, as if it were a permanent resistance in human nature waiting for the formation of something still unpredictable, whose realization still depends on everyone being adequately prepared. To be sure, ideals like these are easily found in the Schillerian romantic paradigm of Aesthetic Education. But, despite the similarities, and although having quoted Schiller so many times (MSS 110, p. 256; 156b, p. 33r; 116, p. 292; 128, p. 4, 7; 129, p. 146; 130, p. 154; 183, p. 25-26; 134, p. 34r; 136, p. 80a; TS 228 §§ 212, 296), I doubt we could establish any kind of metaphysical affiliation to such form of thinking. Wittgenstein is a much closer follower of Goethe’s morphological program (GB, p. 133), which he pragmatically employs into his synoptic methodology (PI § 122).

These are the aesthetical parameters, so it seems to me, in which the author expects something could be taught. Just like when he quotes Nietzsche and the need for a literary form of philosophy (see above), it is notorious how easily he uses the verbs “lehren” (to teach) and “belehren” (to instruct) in connection to aesthetic situations, as in this curious commentary on American movies from 1947:

A foolish & naive American film can in all its foolishness & by means of it be instructive. A fatuous, non-naive English film can teach nothing. I have often drawn a lesson from a foolish American film (MS 134, p. 89).

This productive use of the imagination is expected as long as the reader therapeutically works out the texts, engaging her/his will or reckoning with her/his own imagination to see things differently after bumping her/his head sometimes against the limits of language. But looking for a way out of the maze of philosophical confusions by establishing surveyable presentations of the problems is an exercise that is entirely up to the reader.

I think this revolutionary summoning within an aesthetic environment is, in fact, a form of inclusive education, but in the reverse direction of customary pedagogical practices. Instead of widening opportunities to include people into the kind of instruction that ultimately feeds the same system that excluded them in the first place, the imaginative Wittgensteinian proposal seems to summon the necessary capacities to bring together the excluded through a pedagogical form primarily based on a sort of strange education of the senses in order to eventually change the world.