I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right.
Wittgenstein (1980), Culture and Value, p.18e
How much we are doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is persuading people to change their style of thinking.
Wittgenstein (1967), Lectures and Conversations, p. 28
In this paper I maintain that Wittgenstein’s work may be given, broadly speaking, a cultural and literary reading which focuses upon his styles.2 Such a reading legitimates both the importance of Wittgenstein -- the person -- and the significance of his (auto)biography in a way that analytic philosophers might find hard to accept.3 In particular, I would maintain the question of style is a question inseparable from the reality of his life and the corpus of his work; indeed, we would maintain further that Wittgenstein himself actively thought this to be the case and that this belief is shown in his work. This reading also throws into relief questions concerning his appropriation as a philosopher who had something to contribute to education: Wittgenstein not as a philosopher who provides a method for analysing educational concepts but rather as one who approaches philosophical questions from a pedagogical point of view. One might say, in line with this interpretation, that Wittgenstein style of “doing” philosophy is pedagogical. I believe with many others who have made the point better than us, that the analytic impulse to want to extract a theory or method from Wittgenstein is wrong-headed and that to interpret him as offering a systematic philosophy is to miss the point of his philosophising entirely. His styles are, I will argue, essentially pedagogical; he provides a teaming variety and vital repertoire of non-argumentational discursive forms -- pictures, drawings, analogies, similes, jokes, equations, dialogues with himself, little narratives, questions and wrong answers, thought experiments, gnomic aphorisms and so on -- as a means primarily to shift our thinking, to help us escape the picture that holds us captive. It is this notion of philosophy as pedagogy that is, I shall argue, a defining feature of Wittgenstein’s later thought.
In terms of this reading it is also possible to see the connections between other aspects of Wittgenstein’s life -- his cultural background and preferences -- and his styles of philosophising. For example, his “architecture” (see Wijdveld, 1994) and his preference for certain musical and poetic styles and forms: it has only recently become known the extent to which Wittgenstein’s style of composition was directly influenced by certain poetic-musical forms. Michael Nedo, the Director of the Wittgenstein Archives, makes the point:
The structure of the manuscripts themselves was especially complicated because Wittgenstein’s thinking and writing were very musical, so you have structures and forms that are more common to music than to texts. When he comes to the borderline of his language, his sentences often break apart; one sentence ends and he produces a parallel second sentence that somehow oscillates around the idea of the first. These sets of sentences remind one of a partita where, in order to express something, one has to use different tunes (cited in Toynton, 1997: 32).
Nedo’s point is not the scholarly point that Wittgenstein used music as a paradigm for understanding in general (Worth, 1997) -- Wittgenstein frequently compared understanding a musical theme to understanding a sentence – but that his intense interest in music resulted in the conscious adoption of musical forms for his writing; that there is a “musical” aspect to his philosophical style (Zwicky, 1992).
In this regard, perhaps, Wittgenstein could be regarded in terms similar to Nietzsche not only in that Nietzsche gave music a privileged cultural status – the artist-philosopher who is able to create values is the “philosopher of the future” -- but also in that Nietzsche himself emulated musical forms in his writing.4 (The crystalline, “pure” structure of the Tractatus is so logical in its branching, tree-like form that it has been scored as a motet and put to music by Mary Lutyens.) The question of whether Wittgenstein, in like terms, self-consciously regarded himself as a “cultural physician” or “philosopher of the future”, able to cure both himself and his readers of deep disquitetudes in the forms of our language and culture, is not to be dismissed too easily.
There are, at least, three ways, which might demonstrate more robustly the pedagogical styles of his thinking. First, we may seek to investigate historically and (auto)biographically the connections between his styles of teaching philosophy, relying on accounts and reminiscences of his former students, and his styles of thinking. Second, we can also investigate historically accounts of his experiences as a primary and secondary school teacher in Austria during the crucial period of 1919 to 1929, and the influences upon his thinking during this period. Third, we can look directly at his writings to observe and document these effects on style. This paper is structured accordingly. In relation to the third section we will concentrate on the pedagogical elements of the dialogue form adopted by Wittgenstein in the Investigations.
There is more than a family resemblance between Wittgenstein’s styles of teaching at Cambridge and his styles of philosophising. They represent to all intents and purposes a profound and complex continuity: the dividing line between Wittgenstein’s teachings and his posthumously collected and edited works are blurred to say the least. The oral performance runs into and sometimes constitutes the written corpus. Many of his “works” are transcriptions, discussions, notes or lectures recorded by his students and colleagues. His “notes”, at another level of composition, are sometimes reworked even in the process of dictation. His styles of teaching and thinking in performance, therefore, comprise, perhaps more than any modern philosopher, a significant proportion of his extant works.
The accounts of his teaching by his students confirm an intensity of thinking that shows itself in his writings; this intensity is driven, in large part, by the ethical and aesthetic requirements of arranging or composing his thoughts. His writings mirror his approach to teaching philosophy and vice versa. Above all they reflect his honesty as a thinker and teacher. And if he was unforgiving in his treatment of his students, it is because he was unforgiving with himself. The long painful silences that interspersed his classes, his disregard for institutional conventions in pedagogy at the time and his relentless (self) criticism were an essential part of his style as a “great educator” (in Nietzsche’s sense).
Accounts of Wittgenstein as a teacher of philosophy are now legendary. D.A.T. Gasking and A.C. Jackson (1967: 51) report the following description Wittgenstein gave of his own teaching:
In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times -- each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a Londoner. Of course, a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide ...
This passage indicates Wittgenstein’s penchant for comparing doing philosophy with making a journey. It belongs to a characteristic set of spatial metaphors we find in the Investigations. Wittgenstein explains in the Preface how he tried to “weld” his thoughts together into a whole but never succeeded. What was to him essential was that “the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks” (our emphasis). He remarks how his “thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination” (our emphasis). The naturalness Wittgenstein refers to here is the process of thought itself, of having the thought and of emulating in the text the very processes by which he arrived at a particular thought. This naturalness is the naturalness of thinking and thinking aloud. He then comments: “The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings”. He suggests that the book is “only an album”, a series of sketches which together might give one a picture of the landscape.
Later, at #18 , Wittgenstein uses another spatial metaphor based upon the city, asking whether our language is complete and suggesting that the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of infinitesimal chemistry have been added to language, like new suburbs to a town:
Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
He also describes the thoughts of the Investigations as a series of written remarks or short paragraphs -- “of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another”. One might argue that Wittgenstein’s innovative method of composition here is more like a musical score -- expressing themes and refrains -- than a conventional philosophical genre. It is clearly influenced by the form of the aphorism, a favored poetical-philosophical form adopted by Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Gasking and Jackson (1967: 50) focus on the “technique of oral discussion” Wittgenstein utilizes, a technique they describe as, at first, bewildering:
Example was piled up on example. Sometimes the examples were fantastic, as when one was invited to consider the very odd linguistic or other behaviour of an imaginary tribe ... Sometimes the example was just a reminder of some well- known homely fact. Always the case was given in concrete detail, described in down-to-earth everyday language. Nearly every single thing said was easy to follow and was usually not the sort of thing anyone would wish to dispute.
The difficulty came from seeing where this “repetitive concrete” talk was leading. He lectured without notes but each session was, nevertheless, carefully planned. Sometimes he “would break off, saying ‘Just a minute, let me think!’ ... or he would exclaim ‘This is as difficult as hell’” (p. 52). Sometimes the point of the many examples became suddenly clear as though the solution was obvious and simple. They report Wittgenstein as saying that he wanted to show his students that they had confusions that they never thought they could have and admonished them by saying: “You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it” (p. 53). And they make the enormously important remark: “Whether this ideal is realisable in the form of a book is, in the opinion of many, not yet known; whether, if it were, the book would look much like what we think of as a philosophy book is discussible” (p. 53). Wittgenstein was clearly experimenting with the form his remarks should take: he is to be distinguished as a great philosopher not only for his thinking, or for his styles of philosophising, but for his deliberate attention to and constant (perhaps, obsessive) experimentation with philosophical form and genre.
G. E. Moore (1967: 44) in his memory of Wittgenstein’s lectures during the period 1930-33, writes:
I was a good deal surprised by some of the things he [Wittgenstein] said about the difference between ‘philosophy’ in the sense in which what he was doing might be called ‘philosophy’ (he called this ‘modern philosophy’), and what has traditionally been called ‘philosophy’. He said what he was doing was a ‘new subject’ which Wittgenstein said did resemble traditional philosophy in three respects: in its generality, in the fact that it was fundamental to both ordinary life and the sciences, and in that it was independent of the results of science.
Moore confirms the picture of Wittgenstein as the stylist and innovator when it came to “doing philosophy”. Wittgenstein is to be construed as “doing philosophy” equally when he is teaching as when he is writing and Wittgenstein went to great pains to develop a style in the form of his philosophical investigations that enables the reader to think for him- or herself.
Karl Britton (1967: 61) reports that Wittgenstein thought there was no test one could apply to discover whether a philosopher was teaching properly: “He said that many of his pupils merely put forward his own ideas: and that many of them imitated his voice and manner; but that he could easily distinguish those who really understood”. Wittgenstein urged his students not to become philosophers or to take up academic posts first because he had scant regard for professional philosophers and because philosophical thinking is strenuous with “long periods of darkness and confusion” (Drury, 1967: 69).
There are many other recollections of Wittgenstein as a teacher which testify to the way his style of thinking and teaching had dramatically changed in the last twenty years of his life and how his teaching was mirrored or embodied in his work (see, in particular, the contributions of Malcolm and Rhees in Fann’s 1967 collection). They call into question our traditional notion of a “work” in the same way that Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes question the notion of an “author”. Doing philosophy always took priority for Wittgenstein whether this was in oral or written form: it was important to show the deep puzzles in out language (and our culture and thinking) as well as dissolving them by “doing”. Doing philosophy let the fly out of the fly-bottle: it cured our buzzing confusion and allowed us to lead useful and practical lives.
Wittgenstein said “a philosophical problem has the form ‘I don’t know my way about” (PI: 49) and “A main source of our failure is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words -- our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity” (PI: 49). His style of teaching philosophy was designed to enable us to shift our thinking, to untie the knots in our thinking, to overcome our “mental cramps” by “clearing up the ground of language” but in the end by employing this style we are “destroying nothing but a house of cards”.
While we believe that there are significant resemblances one can mark out in terms of his method of composition and his style of teaching -- notes, discussions, confessions, meditations, dialogues and conversations were as much a part of his repertoire for thinking as they were chosen philosophical genres -- there is also an effective biographical element which closely ties in with the pedagogical style of his philosophising.
The years 1919 to 1929 are traditionally seen as years of dormancy for Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking or his active pursuit of philosophy. Yet this period of his life -- the period during which he designed his sister’s mansion, trained as a primary school teacher and taught in the Austrian system for some six years -- is instrumental (and highly underestimated) in the shift in his thinking and his style. His biographers do not spend much time on this period of his life and tend to underestimate its importance.
Ray Monk (1991), Wittgenstein’s biographer, devotes a chapter (“An Entirely Rural Affair”) to Wittgenstein’s years as a school teacher in rural Austria, yet even his otherwise brilliant account of Wittgenstein’s life, does not do justice to the importance of this episode in Wittgenstein’s life or its importance for his later philosophy. His account of Wittgenstein’s teaching service in the village schools of Trattenbach, Hassach and Puchberg is based mainly upon the personal memoirs of surviving pupils which paint Wittgenstein as a teacher with exacting standards, little patience, and one who was given to violent outbursts against his students.
These are significant biographical details. Indeed, it is suggested by Fania Pascal (1984: 37-8) that it was an episode in Wittgenstein’s career as a teacher that involved hitting one of his girl pupils (and which he later denied to the principal), that “stood out as a crisis of his early manhood” and caused him to give up teaching. Rhees (1984: 191), commenting upon this same episode, quotes from a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell: “how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing to settle accounts with myself!”. The event is highly significant for Wittgenstein: it constituted one of the two “sins” to which he wished to confess (see Monk, 1991: 367).
Monk also notes Wittgenstein’s misgivings of Glöckel’s school reforms and the publication of Wittgenstein’s Wörterbuch für Volksschullen -- a spelling dictionary -- in 1925, and yet Monk’s account of this period is overshadowed by Ramsey’s visit, the correspondence with both Russell and Ogden over the publication of the Tractatus, and Wittgenstein’s eventual return to philosophy. He does not recognise the significant of Wittgenstein’s experience as a school teacher for his later philosophy or for the question of style. Monk also refers to William Barley’s notorious suspected use of Wittgenstein’s coded remarks in his notebooks of the time to cast aspersions on Wittgenstein’s homosexuality. He ought to have given more attention, perhaps, to the substance of Bartley’s (1973) claims concerning the link between Glöckel, Bühler (a developmental psychologist) and Wittgenstein, a link which tends to get ignored in the literature. Glock (1996), for instance, in his intellectual sketch mentioning the “wilderness years” makes virtually no mention of the significance of these matters.
The furore caused by Bartley’s claims concerning Wittgenstein’s homosexuality has clouded the issue concerning the influence of Wittgenstein’s school teaching years on his later philosophy. It is now time, with the distance of some twenty years, to raise this matter afresh and to critically examine the nature of Bartley’s claims. Bartley (1973) despite his notorious and unsavory claims about Wittgenstein’s sexuality, is one of the few scholars to devote any space to Wittgenstein’s development during the 1920s. Bartley’s (1973: 20) major historical claim is that there are “Certain similarities between some themes of Glöckel’s program and Bühler’s theories on the one hand, and ideas which infuse the later work of Wittgenstein...” He documents how Wittgenstein enrolled in the Lehrerbildungsanstalt in the Kundmanngasse in September 1919. He suggests that the Wittgenstein family in the immediate postwar years of reconstruction had turned its attention away from patronizing the arts to social welfare programs. (Margaret Stonborough was Herbert Hoover’s personal representative in charge of work for the American Food Relief Commission). Otto Glöckel was administrative head of the socialist school-reform which was directed at both the economic redevelopment of the countryside and re-education of the peasantry. Under these circumstances, Bartley comments, Wittgenstein’s decision to become a teacher of elementary school was not eccentric. Other talented Austrians also entered the school-reform movement, including two philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle -- Karl Popper and Edgar Zilsel. Indeed, Bartley (1973: 89) maintains that “The Vienna Circle itself, in its first manifesto, associated itself with the aims of the school-reform movement”.
The school-reform movement, under Glöckel and others, had attacked the old “drill” schools of the Hapsburgs based on passive rote learning and memorisation (influenced strongly by Johann Herbart), to argue for the establishment of the Arbeitsschule or “working school” based, by contrast, on the active participation of pupils and a doctrine of learning by doing. Bartley notes that Wittgenstein was far from being an advocate of the movement; rather, he mocked its slogans and made fun of its slogans considering them vulgarisations. Bartley provides a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s six years teaching at Trattenbach, Otterthal and Puchberg: he recounts the story of Wittgenstein slapping the face of one of his girl pupils, the “conspiracy” against him led by Piribauer who also instituted legal proceedings, and finally the trial at Gloggnitz that acquitted Wittgenstein.
Bartley conjectures that the themes of the Austrian school-reform movement and, in particular, the views of Karl Bühler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the Vienna Pedagogical Institute, in large measure accounted for the profound change in Wittgenstein’s philosophising in the late 1920s. He suggests that Bühler, who was invited to Vienna by Glöckel and his colleagues in 1922, strongly influenced Wittgenstein’s thinking. He bases this claim upon the “striking similarities” between their ideas and some historical circumstantial evidence. First, Bühler’s critical variant of Gestalt psychology (said to be close to Piaget’s) was opposed to psychological, epistemological and logical atomism, and stressed, by contrast, a configurationism or contextualism in which theory-making was deemed to be a basic function of the mind. Second, Bühler’s doctrine depended upon a radical linguistic conventionalism and; third, he had developed a notion of “imageless thought” which emphasised that the intentional act of representing did not require an image or model of that which it represented (Bartley, 1973: 145-9).
Strikingly similar ideas, Bartley claims, figure strongly in Wittgenstein’s later work and were instrumental in bringing about his change of philosophizing. Bartley documents the fact that Wittgenstein had met but did not like Bühler and hypothesises that he had probably read Bühler’s Die Geistige Entwicklung des Kindes that was a standard text in the new teacher training colleges.
Bartley (1973) also provides some textual evidence; he quotes Wittgenstein (1981) in Zettel (#412) “Am I doing child psychology?” [“I am making a connexion between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning”, Zettel, 74e], and mentions, in this context, Wittgenstein’s word dictionary. He also recounts a story that Wittgenstein used to tell his pupils in Trattenbach from 1921 concerning an experiment to determine whether children who had not yet learned to speak, locked away with a woman who could not speak, could learn a primitive language or invent a new language of their own. He asks us, by way of corroboration, to consider that the Investigations begins with a critique of St. Augustine’s account of how a child learns a language and suggests that an important theme of the first part of the Investigations is how children learn their native tongues (Bartley, 1973: 85, 149).
In a further paper, Bartley (1974: 324) extends this thesis concerning the influence of Bühler to include Karl Popper, who also became a school teacher in Austria during the twenties, restating his position on Wittgenstein as one which entertained: “the possibility of construing the later thought of Wittgenstein as that of an amateur but gifted child psychologist who turned, partly as a result of his experiences in school teaching during the twenties, from an essentially associationalist psychology to a configurationalist or contextualism closer to that of the Gestaltists”. Yet he climbs down from the strong claim: “Whether Wittgenstein was directly influenced by Bühler or other of the Gestalt theoreticians is uncertain. He definitely was familiar with Bühler’s ideas” (Bartley, 1974: 325).5
Bartley is not alone in advancing such ideas. In fact, Stephen Toulmin (1969) had advanced similar ideas some five years earlier. Toward the end of an article considering Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Toulmin (1969: 70) broaches the historical question concerning the sources of Wittgenstein’s ideas for his later philosophical teachings: “How ... did he [Wittgenstein] arrive at his later view of semantics, as part of ‘the natural history of man’?” He answers his own question thus: “... his experience as a schoolmaster in the 1920s would naturally have redirected his attention to language learning as a fruitful source of idea and illustrations” (p. 70). Toulmin goes further to mention an occasion when Wittgenstein’s sister Margaret (Stonborough) brought Moritz Schlick and Wittgenstein together with Karl and Charlotte Bühler. (This is surely the source of Bartley’s reference and possibly the historical basis of his overall thesis?) Toulmin describes Bühler as one of the chief founders of development psychology (establishing a tradition in which both Vygotsky and Piaget come to stand) and a major contributor to modern linguistic theory. Further, he describes Charlotte Bühler as an original psychologist in her own right.
Further, in a footnote Toulmin (1969: fn 8, p. 71) acknowledges Theodore Mischel’s confirmation that the debate over “imageless thought” had “led Bühler to concentrate on precisely those topics -- language as the bearer of intentionality, meaning as consciousness of rules rather than images, etc. -- that Wittgenstein later put to such good use in philosophy”. The issue is left unresolved by Toulmin: it may have been simply a remarkable historical coincidence.
Bartley’s work has been criticized. Eugene Hargrove (1980), for instance, disputes that Wittgenstein was an active participant in the Austrian school reform movement and that this involvement significantly influenced Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It is difficult to assess the dispute as presented by Hargrove because it depends upon personal communications and on supposition. Hargrove establishes that Wittgenstein was not an active participant in the Glöckel reforms but this was not a claim Bartley had made. Indeed, Bartley acknowledges that Wittgenstein made jokes about the movement. Hargrove (1980: 458) maintains that “Karl Bühler’s book was not read at the teachers’ college not were his pedagogical ideas discussed there”, a claim he bases upon personal communications with Franz Schiller and Hans Plass, both of whom attended the college with Wittgenstein. This claim is impossible to assess and yet it is the case that Wittgenstein attended the teachers’ college in 1919 and that Bühler was not invited to Vienna until 1922. This does not mean, of course, that Wittgenstein did not read Bühler and we must remember that the Bühler’s, between them, published many books.6 Most of Hargrove’s effort goes into establishing his case against Bartley over the first claim. He disputes the textual evidence Bartley provides and yet acknowledges with Paul Englemann that it was the direct effect of Wittgenstein’s contact with children rather than the school reform movement or Bühler’s ideas that influenced Wittgenstein’s views about language:
I believe we can see the influence of Wittgenstein’s time as a teacher on almost every page of the Investigations, for there are very few pages in a row that do not make some reference to children. Throughout his later philosophy, Wittgenstein often supported the points he was making by citing personal observations about children. It is these observations, which he made as a school teacher and used as a pool of data later, that, as I see it, are the true influence on Wittgenstein’s work, and not principles taught at the teachers college or waived in his face by the school reformers (Hargrove, 1980: 461).
Hans Sluga (1996: 13), most recently, has suggested that having qualified as a primary school teacher in 1919 and taught for six years that Wittgenstein’s “school experience proved an important source of philosophical ideas in later life”. He suggests that it was primarily his school teaching experience which encouraged Wittgenstein to shift from his concerns with the logic of language to the informal language of everyday life: “His attention was now drawn to the way language is learned and more generally to the whole process of enculturation. His teaching experience forms the background to the turn his philosophical thought was going to take in the 1930s” (p. 13). A concern which took Wittgenstein back to Mauthner’s critique of language, which Sluga maintains, influenced Wittgenstein to adopt a view of language, not as a formal calculus based on logic, but rather one emphasising language as a medium “designed to satisfy a multiplicity of human needs”. In a footnote to these observations Sluga (1996: fn18, p. 32) remarks: “The significance of this episode of Wittgenstein’s life for his subsequent philosophising has yet to be sufficiently explored” (and he mentions Konrad Wunsche’s 1985 Der Volksschullehrer Ludwig Wittgenstein as making an important start).
Dialogue is the quintessential pedagogical form of philosophy; it defines both a style of philosophising based upon the give and take of question and answer, and a process of inquiry. It emulates the form of conversation which, over time, has become more disciplined in its logic. As such and within the tradition of Western philosophy dialogue has been institutionalised as certain set of pedagogical practices and uses: teaching per se; the instructional text as dialogue; “the pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire, 1972); the oral or written examination; the free exchange of ideas exemplifying the democratic form of life (John Dewey). Above all, dialogue has been characterised in relation to Socrates and a “method” based upon the logic of the dialectic.
Wittgenstein’s way of “doing philosophy”, as we have noted, differed from traditional attempts to do philosophy: it is aporetic but not Socratic; it is dialogical but not in the traditional philosophical sense7 . Wittgenstein (1980) writes: “Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling; what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing” (CV: 14e). Wittgenstein (1958) is concerned that Socrates’ question “What is knowledge?” (the demand for an essence) in the Theatetus is a demand for an exact definition where there is no exact usage of the word “knowledge” (BB: 27) and that in asking the question Socrates “does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge” (BB: 20). It is not just that Socrates’ method rests upon the demand for an essence for which the dialogue seems an unnecessary and elaborate artifice or that such a demand rules out the procedure of advancement by way of examples or that Socrates holds the view that names signify simples and speech is the composition of names8 : it is also the idea that Socratic dialogue is inherently unjust. He elaborates further the way in which the game of eristics takes place unfairly, without justice:
Socrates keeps reducing the sophist to silence, -- but does he have right on his side when he does this? Well, it is true that the sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can’t be a case of “You see! You don’t know it!” -- nor yet, triumphantly, of “So none of us knows anything!” (CV: XX).
In so far as dialogue can be regarded as a classical pedagogical for philosophy, Wittgenstein embraces it although not exclusively nor without reservation or innovation. The Investigations is Wittgenstein’s primary example of a dialogical work. Yet clearly it is not dialogical in the traditional sense established by Socrates. And judging by Wittgenstein’s comments on Socrates it is evident why the Investigations does not follow or try to emulate the Socratic form or method. While the Investigations is written in the form of a dialogue, it draws upon a repertoire of dialogical strategies and gestures. Terry Eagleton (1993: 9) recognises this when he writes:
[The Investigations] is a thoroughly dialogical work, in which the author wonders out loud, imagines an interlocutor, asks us questions which may or may not be on the level ... forcing the reader into the work of self-demystification, genially engaging our participation by his deliberately undaunting style ...
Of course, both Wittgenstein and Socrates employed a range of dialogical styles and “devices”. The Socratic approach, however, has tended to be construed as a single intellectual process -- at the same time “both the rational path to knowledge and the highest form of teaching” -- which assumes “that dialogue can, and should have a definite, predetermined end point” (Burbules, 1993: 4, 5). This is what Burbules (1993:5) calls the teleological view of dialogue, which he distinguishes from the non-teleological. The non-teleological view of dialogue is both more critical and constructivist in the sense that it does not assume “that in practice it will always lead its participants to common and indubitable conclusions; its benefits are more in edification than in finding Truth”. This notion dialogue as conversation which emphasises edification (or education) rather than Truth, owes an intellectual debt to both Hans-Georg Gadamer (1982) and Richard Rorty (1980). It is not surprising that in such a context that Burbules (1993: 7) should be seeking an approach to dialogue which can respond to the postmodern critique; by which he means a form of dialogue: that respects difference; that accepts the relational character of dialogue and, therefore, challenges the hierarchical power relations embedded in traditional conceptions of teacher authority; that rests upon a critical and constructivist view of knowledge, which is construed more as a process of mutual edification rather the discovery of right answers or eternal Truths; that accepts (perhaps, after Wittgenstein’s private language argument) that dialogue is not first and foremost an individual performance but rather a cultural act; and, finally, “keeps the conversation open, both in the sense of open-endedness and in the sense of inviting a range of voices and styles of communication within it”.
Wittgenstein’s Investigations might be said to embody each of these features and to explicitly teach us the postmodern respect for difference; a respect for the diversity of voices, of styles, and of language use which characterises a way of “doing” philosophy that no longer conforms to the Platonic search for essences or final Truths but rather attempts to shift our thinking in a never-ending process of mutual edification. Wittgenstein, therefore, defines himself philosophically against those – like Plato, St. Augustine, Martin Buber, the early Martin Heidegger, perhaps Gadamer, and even implicitly, Jürgen Habermas – who suggest that our Being is essentially dialogical; that the essence of the self is dialogue.
Like Burbules, Bill Readings (1995) investigates what he calls non-dialectical forms of dialogue (rather than non-teleological forms) in the work of Jean-François Lyotard and in relation to the question of pedagogy. He suggests that for Lyotard the pedagogical “scene” is structured by a dissymetrical pragmatics such that it belongs to the sphere of justice and ethics than of truth and he continues in a way that throws light on the notion of non-dialectical forms of dialogue – a kind of dialogue, I think, addressed by Wittgenstein in his remarks on Socrates and well exemplified in the Investigations:
Lyotard’s dialogues are not divided monologues … the dialogue form is not designed to display his capacity to occupy both sides of the question; rather, it is dialogic in M. M. Bakhtin’s sense. The dialogues form is not organized dialectically, to arrive at a single conclusion that will be either the vindication and reinforcement of one position (Socrates’ opponent is forced to agree with Socrates) or a synthesis of the two (as in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the fusion of horizons or James Joyce’s “jewgreek is greekjew”). The dialogue does not thaw and resolve itself into a monologue. To put this another way, the dialogue form is not controlled solely by the sender; it is not a formal instrument in the grasp of the writing subject (p. 196).
On the basis of Lyotard’s work and the attention Lyotard pays to Emmanuel Lévinas account of an ethics based on the Other, Readings (1995) wants to shift our thinking away from the notion of “emancipation” in pedagogy to that of “obligation” in the development of a “heteronomous politics of education”.
It is no accident that we have brought together Readings, Lyotard and Wittgenstein in this way. Lyotard makes active use of Wittgenstein. In The Postmodern Condition Jean-François Lyotard (1984) locates the problem of the legitimation of knowledge and of education within the general context of the crisis of narratives and distinguishes between the modern and the postmodern in terms of the appeal to a meta-language. The postmodern, he defines simply as “incredulity towards meta-narratives”. The rule of consensus that governed Enlightenment narratives and cast truth as a product of agreement between rational minds has been rent asunder; the narrative function has been dispersed into many language elements, each with its own pragmatic valencies. In arguing this position Lyotard views himself as philosophising “after” Wittgenstein. The later Wittgenstein, according to Lyotard, teaches us how to philosophise after the end of metaphysics when philosophy can no longer appeal to a meta-language as a final arbiter to settle matters of Truth; indeed, Lyotard interprets Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a response to the question of nihilism, that is, how to philosophise after the loss of all transcendental standards.9
This is the philo-hermeneutical context within which we can usefully view and interpret the Investigations as a pedagogical form dialogue more concerned to edify – to change our style of thinking – than to arrive at timeless Truths, in the manner of traditional philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations self-reflectively mirrors and models the multiplicity of language-games and gestures it attempts to describe. Stylistically, we might say that the Investigations achieves the same consistency of form and content as did, albeit in a radically different way, the Tractatus. It functions as an exemplary pedagogical text the aim of which is not for Wittgenstein’s students to imitate his thoughts or his style of thinking but to think for themselves.
Recently, Jane Heal (1995) has argued not only that the Investigations is a dialogue (in a precise sense) and that rather than defining himself against the philosophical tradition Wittgenstein employs the dialogue form as a means to pursue in a discursively rational way traditional philosophical questions. Heal (1995: 63-64) argues:
We may both recognise a rationale for Wittgenstein’s [dialogical] procedure and also see that there are things to be said against it; we need not be locked into an outlook which thinks that that use of conventional expository forms is a betrayal of Wittgenstein, or a betrayal of lack of understanding of him; but equally we need not think that his particular way of writing is an unnecessary and regrettable obfuscation.
I think that Heal’s analysis of the dialogue form of the Investigations is helpful but I believe – for reasons that must now appear obvious -- that her interpretation that Wittgenstein in the Investigations is not defining himself against the philosophical tradition, is incorrect, if defining himself thus amounts to a denial that Wittgenstein was actively seeking a new way of “doing” philosophy.10 Nothing follows from my position concerning the use of conventional expository forms. Wittgenstein’s adoption of the dialogue form, along with his adoption of and innovation with other styles -- and his close and deliberate attention to the different forms of philosophy – was part of Wittgenstein’s deliberate experimentation designed to shift our thinking. He certainly did not want his students to imitate him – in either the forms or the contents of his thought. If his students could think differently using conventional forms then I would imagine Wittgenstein would be perfectly happy.11 And yet it is clear that Wittgenstein adopts extra-discursive forms, in addition to conventional forms, in an experimental and innovative attempt to break down the traditional view that there is only one way to “do” philosophy.
In a close textual examination of sections #146-147, #208-211, and #258, Heal (1995: 73) argues that the Investigations is a deliberately crafted dialogue making use of many different kinds of speech act, in which “the other speaker is each of us, if we recognise ourselves in the words and are willing to enter the exchange”. She comments that there is no consistent device that Wittgenstein uses to signal dialogue: there are no named characters in the tradition of Plato, Berkeley or Hume. It is only from the context that we can identify the other voice; a voice which is not “the soul talking to herself” but a genuine “other” to the dialogue, that is, the reader, who understands.
Heal attempts to dismiss the interpretation of the Wittgenstein of the Investigations as defining himself against tradition. By this she means a view of Wittgenstein as non-argumentative and anti-philosophical and she argues that to hold this view one must also hold to a dichotomy “between arguing in a discursive rational manner and promoting insight by means other than argument” (p. 76). Heal argues against holding the distinction suggesting that Wittgenstein “wishes to get us to apprehend differently the point of philosophical thinking or the spirit in which one should do it” (ibid.). The appropriateness of the dialogue form, Held (1995: 80) suggests, is intimately tied up with
The difference between one who has read a theoretical non-dialogue version of the thought and one who has pursued them via the dialogue route is closely analogous to the difference between one who realises ‘All humans are mortal’ and one who realises ‘I, like everyone else, am mortal’.
In other words, for Heal, the question of the appropriateness of the dialogue form is tied up with the therapeutic conception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy which acts as a sort of prophylactic to relativism (and conventionalism) and, at the same time can provide personal liberation and an enhanced sense of self responsibility and freedom.12 The dialogue form, then, makes us recognize where we stand (we stand here!) and that, as it happens, “we do make such and such judgements with full sincerity” (p. 82). Heal’s remarks in this context are, we think, perfectly in order. We would simply say that the appropriateness of dialogue is demanded by the pedagogical style of Wittgenstein’s investigations which has as its aim to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The aim of the great educator is to teach us to think for ourselves.
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1. This paper was written while Michael Peters was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Research School of Social Sciences, Political Science Program, 1998. I would like to thank Professor Barry Hindess for his kindness and support. A version of this paper was presented at the conference Wittgenstein: Philosophy and Biography Prof Klagge, Philosophy Department, Virginia Tech and State University, March, 1999 and another version appears in Michael Peters and James Marshall, Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy, Westport, CT and London, Bergin & Garvey, 1999.
2. The earliest and most significant �cultural� reading of Wittgenstein was given by Janik and Toulmin (1973). There have been relatively few �literary� readings of Wittgenstein (but see Lang, 1990, 1995 and contributors to the special edition of New Literary History, 1988). Most who adopt a �literary� approach tend to focus upon his aesthetics and/or want to extract a theory or distinctive approach to literature (Brill, 1995; Perloff, 1992, 1996). Brill (1995: 142-3) concludes �A reliance on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein will prove to be enormously useful to the future of literary criticism and theory (metacriticism): from issues of axiological debate …, to investigations into the foundational grammars of critical and literary language games; from a realization of the possibility of organic certainties which need not be hegemonic not adversely limiting in their efforts, to an acceptance of the importance of useful critical discriminations.�
3. The traditional analytic position is that there is not only a hard and fast distinction between form (or scheme) and content, (logical and empirical statements), fact and value, but also between the philosopher and his or her works. This effectively rules out the significance of (auto)biography to philosophy. Yet Wittgenstein was fascinated with forms of philosophical writing (the Meditation, the Confession) which �inserted� the writer or thinker in the text or made the writer/thinker central. For instance, he was interested in the form of the Confession as a philosophical form (and form of life) as it was practised by both St. Augustine and Leo Tolstoy. He also engaged in the practice of confession himself at least on one occasion, even after the loss of religious faith (see Monk, 1991). Justin Leiber (1997) presents a convincing account of Wittgenstein�s Investigations as an unconventional biographical narrative, and in a passage which anticipates part of my reading of the Investigations (in the final section of the paper), writes: �But clearly nonetheless Investigations is straightforwardly first person narrative: The I is co-referential with Ludwig Wittgenstein of the title page, and then some, the narrative anchor piece, like the I of Descartes� Meditations, although Wittgenstein�s I easily becomes we when a general human understanding is examined. But Investigations is also second person: you are asked questions, your answers are suggested or implied and then explained, criticized, or expanded; indeed, there is even second person narration in which you are described as going through various exercises or routines. There is no book I know that is more conversational, interactive, and narrational: you almost hear your responses … and then find yourself caught and turned about by his reply. You want to say, how can I be having an intense conversation with a man who died many decades ago?�.
4. Note Nietzsche�s (1968) comment in The Will to Power, at #810: �Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make uncommon common�; and compare Nietzsche�s discussion of nineteenth century musicians at #105 and #106, with Wittgenstein�s aphoristic statement in Culture and Value.
5. Bartley acknowledges two further papers on these matters: Stephen Toulmin�s �Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl B�hler and Psycholinguistics�, Mimeo, 1968; and Bernard Kaplan�s �Comments on S. Toulmin's �Wittgenstein, B�hler and the Psychology of Language�, Mimeo, 1969. Bartley says that both papers are forthcoming in the same issue of the Boston Studies of Philosophy of Science in which his paper is published, but neither Toulmin's nor Kaplan's paper appear in that issue.
6. Bartley says B�hler's book is published in 1918, i.e., one year before Wittgenstein attends teachers� college, whereas Toulmin says it is published in 1927.
7. For a recent account of dialogue in relation to teaching, see Burbules (1993: x) who uses the term to refer to �a conversational interaction directed intentionally toward teaching and learning�. Interestingly, Burbules uses Wittgenstein�s analysis of �game� and his notion of �language-game� to explore the metaphor of dialogue. He is concerned to develop a theory and practice of dialogue that can respond to the postmodern critique.
8. See the Investigations (#46) where Wittgenstein asks �What lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?� and answers by reference to a statement made by Socrates in the Theatetus that names are simples and that the essence of language lies in the composition of names. Wittgenstein is combating a picture of the essence of human language and the (Socratic) idea behind it. He suggests �Both Russell�s �individuals� and my �objects� (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) were such primary elements� suggesting that he and Russell stood in the same tradition of western metaphysics which proceeded by trying to capture the essence of things.
9. For various readings of the relations between Wittgenstein and Lyotard, especially in terms of education and the postmodern condition, see Peters (1989, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1996).
10. The accent on �doing� philosophy � on philosophy as an activity � is important for Wittgenstein not only in terms of his philosophy of language where he suggests that �the whole, consisting of language and actions … [is] the �language-game�� (PI: #7, my emphasis) or that �the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life� (PI : #23, my emphasis) but also, as he says elsewhere quoting Goethe, �In the beginning was the deed�, suggesting that all forms of �saying� or �speaking� and �writing� are, in some sense, acts or performances. This observation has the intended implication concerning his own philosophising, in oral or written forms.
11. Indeed, it is the case that most of his first generation �students�, including, for instance, Rees, Anscombe, Malcolm, Wright, Winch, and Barrett, use conventional expository philosophical and traditional discursive argument forms to �do� philosophy. None of these notable Wittgensteinians could we call radical innovators in terms of style; nor do we see any real attempt to emulate Wittgenstein�s own style. One might argue that, by contrast, Stanley Cavell not only addresses himself to the question of style in philosophy but consciously experiments with the form of philosophical writing.
12. Heal (1995 82-3) also suggests that Wittgenstein�s way of proceeding can have its own pitfalls and dangers: it �can lead to the adoption of a kind of bullying tone�, it may result in a lack of self-irony � a vigilance against all frivolity, and like other forms of therapy and exercises in personal growth, it may lead to the attempt to endlessly recreate feelings of release rather than to encourage us to move on to tackle genuine problems of the self.
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