Description
I’d like you to imagine a strange scenario. Imagine, if you will, that there once lived an Austrian-born philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein. Imagine further that the principal burden of his philosophizing, like that of so many others in the first half of the twentieth century, was to explain how language works, and that his thoughts in that vein were drawn up in response to notions of linguistic meaning prevalent in his time. Where Wittgenstein’s predecessors had supposed that the meaning of a word (on the linguistic level, that is) was simply a matter of the whole record of the language in question, he argued that communicability often depended on more local conventions – that it entailed an indexing of the word to the “language game” that allowed the speaker to communicate with his/her intended audience. So far I have laid out nothing that might be considered strange, but here’s the twist: suppose now, if you will, that Wittgenstein’s writings fell into the hands of a company of readers who took him to be saying something quite different – that instead of seeing the “language-game” concept as an aid to understanding how the communicability of language is rooted in a shared “form of life”, they construed it as evidence for incommensurability between the discourses of different communities, which, by extension, they took as evidence that our
knowledge of the world is limited to how our community constructs the world through language. In other words, language (according to this view) does not “represent” the world it purports to describe, but rather describes a narrative whose relation to the real world lies (philosophically) beyond our ability to search out. In some versions of this account, it is even considered illegitimate to speak of a “real world” lying beyond language. In the end, a broad assortment of radical ideas are laid at the feet of this Wittgenstein, none of which he had any inkling, and for none of which his philosophy cleared the way. He sought only to show how language works, but somehow he came to be hailed as the great problematizer of Enlightenment approaches to epistemology. I wish I could say this is merely a thought experiment, or the plot for an Alan Arkin movie. Unfortunately, what I have described is the state of affairs in many circles, including the reception of Wittgenstein within Anglo-American theology. Postliberal theology looks to the later Wittgenstein (viz. the author of the Philosophical Investigations) as the principal architect of a radical view of language – a view denying that language “pictures” the world it describes – but it arrives at that view, in violation of Wittgenstein’s principles, more as a matter of saying than of showing.1 As P. M. S. Hacker recently wrote (with more than a hint of exasperation): “To attend to what Wittgenstein actually wrote would be very old-fashioned these days.” In what follows, I present a fresh reading of Philosophical Investigations (= PI) §115, which contains Wittgenstein’s well known reference to the captivating power of a picture. Postliberals typically see in this image a disowning of the so-called “picture theory” of language associated with Augustine. In its place, they claim Wittgenstein posited an anti-representationalist view of language, according to which the real world remains epistemologically inaccessible behind a linguistic (narrative) barrier. After discussing PI §115, I discuss the importance of interpreting Wittgenstein within the contexts that animated him, including his relationship with the Vienna Circle.
“Is the Postliberal Understanding of Wittgenstein Exegetically Defensible?: A Rereading of Philosophical Investigations §115”
I’d like you to imagine a strange scenario. Imagine, if you will, that there once lived an Austrian-born philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein. Imagine further that the principal burden of his philosophizing, like that of so many others in the first half of the twentieth century, was to explain how language works, and that his thoughts in that vein were drawn up in response to notions of linguistic meaning prevalent in his time. Where Wittgenstein’s predecessors had supposed that the meaning of a word (on the linguistic level, that is) was simply a matter of the whole record of the language in question, he argued that communicability often depended on more local conventions – that it entailed an indexing of the word to the “language game” that allowed the speaker to communicate with his/her intended audience. So far I have laid out nothing that might be considered strange, but here’s the twist: suppose now, if you will, that Wittgenstein’s writings fell into the hands of a company of readers who took him to be saying something quite different – that instead of seeing the “language-game” concept as an aid to understanding how the communicability of language is rooted in a shared “form of life”, they construed it as evidence for incommensurability between the discourses of different communities, which, by extension, they took as evidence that our
knowledge of the world is limited to how our community constructs the world through language. In other words, language (according to this view) does not “represent” the world it purports to describe, but rather describes a narrative whose relation to the real world lies (philosophically) beyond our ability to search out. In some versions of this account, it is even considered illegitimate to speak of a “real world” lying beyond language. In the end, a broad assortment of radical ideas are laid at the feet of this Wittgenstein, none of which he had any inkling, and for none of which his philosophy cleared the way. He sought only to show how language works, but somehow he came to be hailed as the great problematizer of Enlightenment approaches to epistemology. I wish I could say this is merely a thought experiment, or the plot for an Alan Arkin movie. Unfortunately, what I have described is the state of affairs in many circles, including the reception of Wittgenstein within Anglo-American theology. Postliberal theology looks to the later Wittgenstein (viz. the author of the Philosophical Investigations) as the principal architect of a radical view of language – a view denying that language “pictures” the world it describes – but it arrives at that view, in violation of Wittgenstein’s principles, more as a matter of saying than of showing.1 As P. M. S. Hacker recently wrote (with more than a hint of exasperation): “To attend to what Wittgenstein actually wrote would be very old-fashioned these days.” In what follows, I present a fresh reading of Philosophical Investigations (= PI) §115, which contains Wittgenstein’s well known reference to the captivating power of a picture. Postliberals typically see in this image a disowning of the so-called “picture theory” of language associated with Augustine. In its place, they claim Wittgenstein posited an anti-representationalist view of language, according to which the real world remains epistemologically inaccessible behind a linguistic (narrative) barrier. After discussing PI §115, I discuss the importance of interpreting Wittgenstein within the contexts that animated him, including his relationship with the Vienna Circle.
