Ludwig Wittgenstein - Entitled Opinions

hands luga is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley author of several outstanding books and we'll be posting his full bio on our website but let me mention here only his two most recent publications one is on vit consign called Wittgenstein brought out by wiley-blackwell in 2011 the other goes by the title politics and the search for the common good that one came out in 2014 with Cambridge University Press these are two major books and what we've decided to do is to devote one show to each of them today professor Slough go will share with us his eminently entitled opinion about Vik consign the person the philosopher and the ethical thinker we'll follow up with him very soon with another show about his fascinating new book politics and the search for the common good we have a lot of ground to cover with my guest so let me welcome him to the show without further delay Hannes it's great to have you back on entitle opinions thanks for coming down from the North Bay to join us here on kzs you thank you our about for this generous introduction it's great to be back and I remember our wonderful discussion of Foucault and I hope we can do the same with Bhutan yes one of the very popular shows of entitled opinions so I let me begin by saying that victim science personality was as complex as his philosophy and your book deals admirably really in a way that I admire greatly with Vick consigned the philosopher tracing with great lucidity the meandering but steady course that his thinking followed from around 1911 1912 until his death in 1951 and in the show we'll have time to deal with only a few aspects of his thinking and also I hope a few aspects of his personality if we get a chance but let me begin with a broad question that you should feel free to take in whatever direction you want so when we did our show on Foucault I quoted from your faculty web page where you wrote the following I quote my overall philosophical outlook is radically historicism I believe that we can understand ourselves only as beings with a particular evolution and history for this reason I have been drawn to the work of Nietzsche and Foucault I am doubtful of the possibility of a pure a priori philosophizing in consequence I feel attracted to a realist and naturalistic view of things rather than any sort of formalistic rationalism so my question for you Wittgenstein was anything but a historicism Allen Ichiro Foucault nor am i convinced that he had a realist or naturalistic view of things yet you seem to be fascinated with him why well that's a great question to start with in fact you don't know how great the question is I am just in the process of doing a second edition of the Cambridge companion to vintage time which I and my student David Stern edited and published fifteen years ago already and one of the most popular best-selling Cambridge companions of all yes it's been extremely successful and so the publisher wants us to do a second edition I took one of my own contribution out of the old Edition and I'm writing now a piece called time and history and Vickers died it's a theme that hardly anybody has thought about very systematically and that seems to me nevertheless not surprising it from my perspective of course of great importance so the point is that he starts off really not thinking about time at all in the truck car does his first work there's hardly reference to time and history doesn't get mentioned at all in his work there is a wonderful sentence from the notebooks from which he extracted the truck titus 1916 in which he writes what has history to do with me mine is the first and only world and it's paradoxical and strange of course he is a soldier in the war is fighting in a great historical battle so what does this mean but I think the truck tortoise represents that kind of worldview is the kind of detached timeless perspective on a world of static facts and their timeless logical relations roughly but he gets away from this and that's what fascinates me he gets beyond that point tour and there are really two important steps I think one of them is that instead of thinking about language as a system of representation he begins to think about it as a system of use and communication and he's quite clear use in communication takes place in time so time becomes an essential category in his thinking about language and that is projected also into other ranges there are other areas like logic and mathematics he says we must give up thinking about mathematics as this crystalline timeless structure and sink instead of actual processes of calculation and transformation and transition and in mathematics this or the first point is uses meaning is use second one is that he reads us much Benglis famous and notorious book to the client of the West station he late 1920s and it opens his eyes to history and it's a a picture of history where the historical process is divided divides into different cultures and periods ages each one has its own structure to it culture proceeds from primitive beginnings to hardening to civilization and there are discrete and disjoint forms of culture so this cultural pluralism in historicism becomes greatly important for him it's something that he thinks through but comes to understand fully only very late in life in the 90s late 1940s in notes called uncertainty this picture of our understanding of the world as historical as consisting of different world views which each has their own history and her own background that's something that he slowly develops so I want to see his less an empty historicist thinker then you suggest and the picture of these worldviews is a naturalistic one rather than a rationalistic and formulas one that's now we're talking about the later victim stuff they convicted shy of God so before we trace the difference between the earlier later maybe the middle even though in that in the early period in the Tractatus Eve he doesn't mention history time is not really a concern nevertheless he did live through some very important historical moment and was a soldier during the First World War he was also as you've point out so persuasively in your book that he was Parramatta Covey's own historical time can you can we first maybe can you tell us something about how you see him as being so much belonging to his particular historical moment in in that specific geography that was Austria and Vienna in the early 20th century so when I look at the protection literature today then I'm struck by how various variable and various it is I mean it's not only philosophers who write about Wittgenstein but cultural critics cultural historians people concerned with literature on music and in particular of course be the history of late the late austro-hungarian Empire and of founder/ceo Vienna and witness time was very much part of this cultural milieu so he was born in 1889 and he grew up with people like Johannes Brahms and mr. Malla and Sigmund Freud and of Louis the architect Karl Kraus the critic of culture and so on so it's Vienna was a very small world and everybody knew everybody and the red kitchens were very much part of this environment and so he reflects many of the attitudes Frances this attraction he has to Schopenhauer is something that's deeply Viennese at the time this pessimism what culture something very Viennese and at the same time this modernism that also appears in the work of Schoenberg and mala and out of laws and Klimt there too is very very nice and so he represents this combination of this pessimistic look backwards to a world that is fall apart but also concerned with a new world modern world which is one of logic and rationality in technology and indeed his pessimism was quite extreme he believed that we that Europe was going into a dark age he believed that there were there well I'm thinking now of a book of his was called philosophical remarks where maybe it was as a result as you mentioned above reading Spengler and the decline of the West but he has a preface there and you draw attention to it in your book where he says about philosophical remarks that this book was written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit this spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand that spirit expresses itself in a non words movement in building ever larger and more complicated structures the other I'm his spirit in striving after clarity and perspicuity in matters in no matter what structure and then he goes on to say that the first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery in its variety the second at its center in its essence so here he does seem to have a sense that European American civilization is it's been a long stream and there's a kind of long history that adds layers and layers of complexity and that in a certain sense maybe his essential istic thinking is trying to be the counter movement to that to get back to a certain kind of clarity and simplicity that was certainly characteristic of his early work and probably even its later work yes and so this sentiment actually gets repeated of course in the preface to the better-known philosophical investigations where he says it's possible that his work will help to illuminate his time but it's unlikely given the darkness of the time so he get and gets back again to this idea of the dark times in which we are living yes this pessimism very powerful but of course many philosophers ignore all this as a kind of sentiment surrounding the actual work and they concentrate on the formal specs of the work so what he says mod logic or language and meaning and forget about these cultural backgrounds that the cultural kind of motivations that really get it going do you see strong parallels if not convergences between something like the Tractatus the early work and the architectural I don't know what the technical term for it is but it would say architectural minimalism of Alfred knows for example and you know Vic consigned himself got was involved in in building a house there in in in Vienna with angleman and was was a student of Alfred Lawson and there seems to be remarkable parallels between the the the two structures so yes loss is certainly very important figure in his life he's a forerunner of my house architecture and therefore American modernist architecture of course as well and he meets Lowe's forget exactly what the circumstances he gets to know him personally and they kind of talk to each other they write to each other and there is this moment when law says you and me are the same so I was saying I am yeah and is that because both of them were looking trying to get back to the essential get away from ornamentation yeah and be almost not the atomic that would be the consigns word but but the the formalistic purity of in one case architecture in the other case formal logic yes there's such kind of aesthetics they share write me that the beautiful must manifest itself not in decoration attached to the front office to the facades of houses but it must express itself in the structural forms in the relationships of the forms to each other and I think the truck artist wants to kind of elaborate that kind of an Matsu instantiate that kind of aesthetics as well it's a work of literature as well as a philosophy yeah well let me say a little bit about my frustration with that consign over many many years where he just seems to me the archetype of the philosopher he to fit into the the notion of someone who inherited a great sum of money because his family was one of the richest families in Europe he gives it all the way artists another and there are many periods in his life when he lived almost in a monkish way gardening school teacher and it seems like he embodied a wisdom a philosophical understanding that is beyond me and and for years I've been trying to follow this promise that if I stick with him long enough he's going to deliver some rich insight or some feast of wisdom or knowledge but I've come to the conclusion that if there is such a piece it's just not for me because I always come away from him hungry whether it's the early beacon sign or the or the later one and it's because there's something about the sphere let's say straight jacket that he begins with info philosophically that also is has parallels with the house that he built in in Vienna and let me quote what he said about his own house I mean he didn't sign the whole house he only was responsible for certain aspects of it but he says the house I built for Gretel is the product of a decisively sensitive ear and good manners and expression of great understanding but primordial life wild life starving to erupt into the open that is lacking and it's that lack that he sensed in his own house that I often sense when I read both the early because I know above all but sometimes also even the later philosophical investigation not so with culture and value and when you speaking about religion another thing is different do you do you have a certain frustration with the what I would call this overly inhibited manner of doing philosophy for those of us who are used to for example reading Heidegger or Jean Paul faster the phenomenological tradition where they let it rip a little more yes I mean the austerity of which constructs pros of his thinking of his lifestyle are both astonishing and frightening I think at times I'm always ambiguous about this I feel I'm a much more Baroque personality I'm open to lots of influences lots of ideas a much more kind of dynamic way of seeing the world and wanted to see the world in dynamic terms but I think he represents a certain kind of thinking that is characteristic of a great deal philosophizing he is as I said a kind of paradigmatic thinker of modernism high modernism I compare him to artists like Malevich Kandinsky the formalistic Kandinsky that is or Mondrian I mean this idea of the reduction of aesthetic forms to simple straight lines and plain surfaces that is something that appeals to him he was brought up as a Catholic so his family had a Jewish background but there is something very Protestant in a modernist Protestant way to this way of thinking and as though I find this problematic I nevertheless think it tells us something about who we are in our own century in our time that's what's so revealing about it for sure so can I ask a few follow-up questions on number one Schopenhauer you I was very impressed and convinced by what you write in your book that Schopenhauer was an influence on him all the way to the end and that he never even though he had some critical remarks about Schopenhauer later that the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer stays with him but also Schopenhauer in the world as will and representation making this distinction between what can be said and then something which is beyond language or beyond expression which would be associated with the aesthetic and the mystical and there is this drive towards the unsayable and and the mystical already in the Tractatus you know whereof one can may not speak thereof one should remain silent and that most of the things having to do with art and morality and so forth are are beyond limits of representation any whether it's formal logical representation or other kinds of representation and you see a strong Schopenhauer Ian inheritance here that's certainly true I it's a point that hasn't been noted that much but I think it's a key in some ways to understand actual vision Schopenhauer was very much widely read in late Viennese culture he was the philosopher that everybody had read he also writes an extremely powerful and attractive prose he's the teacher of nature in some ways of course and Wittgenstein we have heard read as his first philosopher Schopenhauer in the 1930s he gives us a list of the thinkers who have influenced him and Schopenhauer comes first alright and when you read the Trotters you can see that if you have the eyes to look for enough course if you have read Schopenhauer himself and so the first sentence of the Tractatus is actually modeled on the first sentence of Schopenhauer's great work the world as well in representation and which Schopenhauer says the world is my representation my idea Wittgenstein says the world is everything that is the case this this ambitious over ambitious attempt to say something about the world as a whole and what it is is something unique and puzzling and and let me share and they both end up taking back this initial proposition Richard Shan says that ultimately we have to come up to these propositions as senseless we have to abandon them and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent mystical silence ensues and this is exactly also where Schopenhauer ends up as well he says ultimately it's the mistakes and their silence that we have to to follow and we have to overcome these metaphysical inclinations we have to overcome metaphysical drug will as he puts it right so do you believe that all that which in the Tractatus is beyond the limits of sensible meaningful speech was really victim Stein's primary concern even though his logical atomism if you want to call it that forbade him to speak of it well I see a kind of developmental process in the toccatas right he reached open how a first before he really takes up philosophy seriously in a technical way then he gets to know Russell he works with Russell and the only positive mental counters kind of reflect Brazilian ideas very much in Russell Ian issues but we see from the notebooks how in the middle of the wall when he is composing the Tractatus he suddenly comes back to Schopenhauer in questions about the meaning of life and he quotes Schopenhauer at that point he clearly reads him again at this point so I think there is a return from Russell and Frager the two great influences in this preceding period two gods have back to Schopenhauer right and then he he writes in 1929 he gives a lecture on ethics which is one of the few I guess pieces of writing which is deliberately devoted to ethics and there again you use you think that Schopenhauer returns there in in that essay where you Schopenhauer had written of the ambitions of philosophy that quote to become practical to guide conduct to transform character our old claims which with mature insight philosophy ought to finally in Bandhan for here what is a question of the worth or worthlessness of existence of salvation or damnation not the dead concepts of philosophy decide the matter but the innermost nature of man himself the demon which guides him and he you claim that that is how we consign ultimately understood the ethical as something that is inward and not normative it's not the Ten Commandments it's not counts categorical imperative it's not telling you what is how to act and what is what is right and what is wrong it's this sanctuary within a self that exists beyond the reach of the world of X plus a the external world yes so what I what I call both shopping dollars and big concerns ethics is it's a visionary ethics it's a an attempt to see oneself and the world in a certain way and that this one gives one an understanding of the meaning of once its existence that resolves the existential problem right and so I think we should point out of course that Schopenhauer as I said this is the great forbear of nature and through nature has an influence on the existential tradition is in a certain way the first existential philosopher with considerable in significance also for Heidegger and so I see a self existentialist element in which constant thinking appear in their Sushil Panola well it certainly seems very existential when for example when when you quote I guess from his notebooks where he's in the trenches in World War one saying I can die in one hour I can die in two hours I can die in a month or only in a few years this seems very much like Heidegger's being done to death but in a very concrete situation and you write living constantly under the gun he is keenly aware that he may have no future ahead of him and therefore he concludes quote man must not depend on accident neither on the favorable nor the unfavorable so then his question becomes you say how must I live in order to persist at every moment to live in the good and the beautiful until life ends by itself and this is what the ethical amounts to in a sense for for bit consigned because I see goes on to say his own ethical experience is that of wonder at the existence of the world it's also the experience of this is I'm intrigued by feeling absolutely safe whatever may happen and finally the experience of feeling guilty not because of anything one is done but absolutely an existential egh ill tea in the face of God so this would seem to put ethics in a very different sphere than one normally associates it with not in the sphere of normative behavior and right and wrong but this inward place of the self where one's being in the world takes on its own form yes so if one thinks of these three examples of the ethical that occurs in this lecture one certainly want to say these are religious attitudes that are expressed there the wonder of the world is the thinking about creation right the creation of the world out of nothing ex nihilo being completely safe is the salvation he talks is that what are you infer I don't and yes I think it is a song about salvation and feeling guilty whatever one does is original sin so these are I want to say not only Christian but deeply Catholic sentiments he expresses in in this fashion here but I got a certain way of seeing oneself in relation to the world as a whole right that's that's what ethics is really about and thereby finding a meaning in one's life I was tempted to read that thing about feeling absolutely safe as if I can in these trenches with all the bombs going around if I can achieve clarity about life about the limits of language if I can get to this fill if I can resolve the philosophical quandary that have been afflicting me and the history of medicine then I can feel completely safe because I achieved what he calls that clarity and perspicuity that he speaks about in the preface but I think now you've persuaded me that he's probably talking about the absolute safety of salvation whatever would happen yes so Indy in this water notebooks becomes clear that he's also quite strongly drunk on Tolstoy and Tolstoy's Christianity and the other word safe is sometimes replaced by the word saved three right I'm saved in a way the Christian soul is saved by this confidence in salvation and then there's that feeling of guilt the absolute guilt is almost like crime or deol guilt do you think that Vidkun Stein suffered greatly from a sense of guilt for which behavior was not the issue it was just an almost like existential ontological condition yes definitely but he's not the only one who suffers from this there is a deeply built into the Christian ideology and it's also even more strongly something felt by Viennese people in the in the late 19th century it leads Freud Sigmund Freud to identify this feeling of anxiety this neurotic sense as a deeply profoundly human phenomenon that needs treatment so it's no accident that there is a connection between Freud and Wittgenstein he calls himself at some point a student and disciple of Freud even though he rejects Freud's theories he thinks Freud's conception of the self as sort of always in a state of anxiety and needing to be released from that is precisely what human life and what philosophies about so if we can move on as to some of the fundamental let's say concepts of the philosophical investigations which is the latter part of his career in our philosophical reading group which has been going on in Sanford for a long time when dick roryd II was still alive he we had a reading group on the philosophical investigations and many of us nourished on the Continental tradition and existentialism so we were trying to figure out what the big deal was in the philosophical investigations that it didn't seem either to be so surprising what Wittgenstein was presuming discover nor particularly interesting and Richard Rorty said if you haven't suffered from the disease then you don't need the cure but many of us who were nourished in the analytic fulfill esophageal tradition you know caught that disease which is believing that language and the world and logic whereas victim sign had described in the Tractatus and that therefore Vic ensign needed to be cured from his earlier misconceptions but I suppose I find it hard seeing language and I when he says the world is all that is the case my high daguerreian says what wait a min look what what do you mean by world what does being in a world mean and is there a world without design is there an investing or surrounding world is there also you know a larger cause well anyway do you agree that the philosophical investigations have their most value in terms of a therapy for those who are sympathetic with the kind of philosophy that the Tractatus is a great manifest or testimony you can certainly say that the book is first of all kind of self diagnosis right he's looking back at his own earlier views and now taking apart and trying to show what was wrong with them but the views of language and meaning and language as a system of representation with a very precisely defined deep structure which we must bring and can bring out is a picture of language that is still very much around so is not only a diagnosing himself not only diagnosing a philosophical view held by people at Frager and russell earlier on and immersing yourself but it's also one which is still deeply embedded in our culture so I would say what he's attacking is for instance a picture of language as this has been developed by Noam Chomsky more recently and there many linguists who hold that the Chomsky and picture of their being deep structures which we can identify may be universal deep structures and language is still very much around universal deep structures is of language i can buy i might buy it that's wrong metaphor but it holds a lot of suasion with me what I cannot take very seriously is the correspondence theory of of truth that you have in the Tractatus where you have propositions that have to have the same logical form as the facts that they represent and the facts are are things in the world events in the world can cut concatenations and you know for me I think in 1912 I was reading in there was a Cambridge moral sciences club and Vick concern gave a four-minute paper in 1912 where he defined philosophy I'm quoting all those primitive propositions which are assumed to be true without proof by the various Sciences and I say to myself oh my that's for me apply so well to the Tractatus you get all these propositions that are stated apodictic ly and they they are told and not shown and they don't seem to have any proof or he doesn't feel under the obligation to prove any of them so the question you're absolutely right that many philosophers academic philosophers of our own time are still caught up in the in the in the interview that you get in the picture theory of meaning and so forth why have they not been persuaded by reading the philosophical investigations that they are utterly wrong about that that's a very good question for which I really don't have a full answer what is and I think what shows itself above all is how strong our drive towards theories but both in philosophy and outside philosophy we obviously there must be somewhere even if we haven't got it right now there must be somewhere a complete comprehensive theory of everything and that's what we are striving for and what Wittgenstein the later Wittgenstein tries to convince us of that's a mistake right and what we have indeed instead is a world in which we live with certain human practices which we have acquired in a completely natural historical fashion and we maneuver and manage more or less adequately in there and sometimes that expresses itself in some theory and bit of see but the assumption that there is a theory for everything is a mistake and a mistake that he felt he was himself engaged in in his earlier work so he says very interesting things about the truck tardis later and he says firstly it's a piece of complete dogmatism every everything is a dogmatic assertion in it second he said every proposition in it is like the heading of a title of a chapter in other words it doesn't smell any details it just puts very large claims before us and leaves in there and the third one is the most intriguing one he said every one of the propositions is the symptom of a disease very very girl right so he completely abandoned all this and tried to fashion a completely new form of thinking and of course he was convinced that he got to the later thinking only by having gone through the fire of this earlier philosophize ignorant because the later thinking conceived of itself as a therapy yes no definitely not changing the world but but as a cure a healing process that's where florid comes into let's where he predicts it's metaphor the author Sarah Pugh ticks from right so in Freud we are we have certain neurotic feelings and the analyst helps us to describe them to identify them and thereby they dissolve they maybe get displaced and you neuroses appear somewhere else nearly tend to be described and analyzed and so the picture of the philosopher now becomes someone like this he is concerned with philosophical confusions and trying to therapeutically dissolve these confusions which however may manifest themselves in new ways it's another place so he was very much against theory and he did do a lot to dismantle theories to get back to the essence oh I deconstruction would be the wrong word to use in his life I'm perfectly happy to call him I I am as I said the Tractatus isn't subsets already the first deconstructed piece of philosophy I see yeah because I would say then that the what he says in the philosophical remarking the preface about having to get back to the center and go against the current of a European American civilization which has constructed more and more complex structures and that philosophy philosophical theories metaphysical theories need to also be dismantled and get back where he says that philosophy has to return to the center of our true needs to get back to this essence and that would involve a kind of deconstruction of and clarification of the way we use words so in that in that respect if you haven't again that's dick already said if you haven't suffered from the disease maybe you don't need that particular form of therapy although we do need philosophy I believe to get us back to the center of our true needs and what those true needs are he's not very 8 he's not very let's say expansive but what I admire so much about your book is at your last chapter refuses just to give us an intelligent summary of the coherence that consigns career as a philosopher and a thinker but that you say well ok there are certain things there in this corpus that will have a great deal of relevance to something that could consign never engaged in himself which is the political and you draw out the possible pertinence of some of the main concepts of the philosophical investigations above all for what would amount to a project of a creative retrieval of victim Stein and a reprojection of his thinking in a new sphere about which he did not have very much to say and here these are concepts that have to do with his understanding of language what he means by a form of life what he means by a language game and the application of rules can you speak a little bit more about what you were up to in that final chapter of your book yes so let me begin with a wonderful quote from one of his collaborators at friends Ludwig - photoshops Mansouri and advice one was a mathematician and he wanted to kind of write down in a systematic way which turns ideas about mathematics and so they would get together every week and they would discuss the issue of ice one would go home write it down bring it back to Wittgenstein and rakish I would say no no all wrong or wrong we have to start all over again Wiseman at the end said it was impossible to write this book because he tears everything down that he had previously built up I see but could shine the whole British I'm really very much in the light of this this idea and I mean that he is constantly reconstructive and up and also D D constructive and destructive thinker and so for me learning from it which time doesn't mean to repeat and work out in more detail what he has already told us but rather to ask yourself what is the next step of destruction and construction that's the first note the second one is what interest me invitation is biasing you such a great singer like Heidegger or Plato or can't on account is that he who really wants to identify the deepest and most pressing problems that exist for him and battle with us and I want to say those problems that he worried about are no longer our deepest from so the foundations of mathematics was a deep problem at the beginning of the 20th century because there was a crisis in mathematics that has long passed we need to ask ourselves what are our deepest problems and these are really the problems of our social and political existence I say so we need to rethink with which time and what we can do what we can learn from him by looking at these questions that's taking Wittgenstein and which could sharing concepts in a direction which of course he didn't at all anticipate and which however we maybe can do something you give wait right oh yeah well this is um either holding Heidegger's retrieval which is not repetition in the mechanical sense that you repeat a thinkers thought but you give it new life by bringing out potential future legacies of it and I agree with you that you are what you do in that last chapter is bring the consign thinking around the center of our true needs in our particular historical moment which is in the early 21st century where the political or namely how can we live with one another this is the crucial issue of our how can we all live together human beings with human beings but even human beings with nature and that's how I understand the political so could you get a little bit more specific when you discuss things like words or rules and how you think one can make that transfer into the political sphere so there are of course other people who have thought in this direction before me one of them is Peter wench who in the late 1950s I think already wrote a book called the very idea of a social science and what he did was to use vintage science thinking about language and use and meaning as a critique of the idea of social science science our understanding of the social world can't be can take the form of a scientific theory of the kind that we have in physics or chemistry I feel sympathetic to that so I also think that it is one of history's important contributions as a critic of this idea of a scientific theory of society politics then later there was David Brewer Scotsman who wrote about first British Dean and a social theory of knowledge seeing that our human understanding is in fact a social phenomenon and has to be understood and interpreted in these ways and I think that's again right and then my Berkeley colleague Hannah Pitkin wrote a book called vintage time and justice in which he did already ask this question what Kant with which time tell us about politics and what she focused on was how he is so concerned with concepts that we take our concepts for granted we give them an essentialist interpretation think that the essences we identify with and what we see is that these concepts have a much more complex structure in a complex use and there between shine can help us essentially in thinking about such issues and app it can also show she wrote this book about British and she also wrote a book on the concept of representation and saying look we have this very simple-minded idea of what is political representation but we need to kind of dissect this concept and this I think was done in a in a deeply Mediterranean spirit and you think the consign can help there specifically well certainly the idea of concepts as expressing family resemblances that is an important one so so I do want to say that there is no such thing as politics as the politics has no single essence it's really a field of related activities and institutions and structures and people relating to each other in manifold ways and therefore there is also no such thing as the common good because how we understand the good in a particular situation will change because the nature of the political changes that that leads over of course to my next book yes and we're going to talk about your textbook and the next installment because this last chapter actually but it's almost like a preface to the next book it was all this written eyes that actually was I was working at most books at the same time but to remain within this last chapter of yours you mentioned that between theory and practices can be like the relationship between astronomy and you know the cosmos that maybe you can map something but no matter what we do in astronomy it was not going to change whatsoever the configuration of solar systems or galaxies or superclusters of galaxies it and that one of the problems in political theory is that is there any kind of theory that will have any efficacy as in terms of action within the political sphere so there the question would be that if the consign can help us clarify concepts and some confusion surrounding our concept of representation for example or what we mean by the good or the common good or and why the political is not just a it doesn't have an essence but it's a whole set of practices and life forms of life and language games and income even if we gain the utmost clarity that we didn't have before would that still have any direct intervention in the political itself or would we still be like astronomers mapping out something that exists on it in its own right well if fiction has anything to tell us about politics it would be at the methodological level how to think about it but get me back let me get back to this this idea of astronomy versus social science right so the stars move quite independently of what series we have about them but when we look at the social world of course it turns out that the ways we see this social world is itself part of the social world strangely enough and therefore if our thinking gets changed changes about the social world that changes also the social reality itself so that's that's I think the idea lying behind the usefulness of such a bit good shiny analysis for sure but here we can go back to the the consigns idea of a language game which is his way of naming a context a social cultural context in which the use of words take on meaning and frankly we in academia belong to a we speak a language that is part of a language game it's one among pulped orality of them and unfortunately often we just speak among ourselves because our words are not transitive no matter how much we may clarify for ourselves in complexify the notion of the political and representation and so forth only rarely does it get beyond the walls of academia and and therefore I hear what you're saying that the way we think about something as a group actually changes the society that we live in but we might be changed will we be doing more than changing our own academic community and and the way in which we use our language games here in academia or because that's what we're always frustrated by know as thinkers intellectuals we feel on the margins and that there's a certain thickness about our own clarifications of complex issues in the political sphere well let me go back to to hide ago whom we have mentioned before he once said and I thought this was a wonderful sentence he said questioning is the piety of thinking that is if we really ask ourselves what's the point of all why why is thinking important its philosophical thinking Heidegger suggests that it consists in this asking of questions and in the realization that we don't necessarily have an answer in remaining within the question as something questionable right and I think Whitney Stein has something similar to offer he at some point said it should be possible to write a book of philosophy consisting of nothing but questions all right it has no answers at all it only has these questions and it leaves the questions there and it leads you to grapple with these questions so I sometimes say to my students what you should realize is that philosophy is not a systematic sea rising what it has contributed to human knowledge is the question mark right and and it is true of course that if in politics we ask questions all the time but we are also always full of convictions which we can't really back up and which we fight for quite irrationally and against all good questioning and so the philosophy providing us with this questioning spirit does something absolutely central not only to politics but to human life I think that's what it but it does right now I hear your hands and I am a little conflicted because I I understand the piety of thought being in questioning and I understand that I would not never myself read a book philosophy that's the only question and in fact when I when I read sometimes philosophers who start multiplying question after question after question I lose my patience I actually like it when when all right I believe philosophy is under an obligation to posit and to affirm and to take a stance because otherwise you are like Hegel's skeptic as he says in the preface of phenomenology of spirit that the skeptic or we could say the questioner if if all if we conceive of the vocation of philosophy only as a questioning then it always then it has to have something to question therefore it's parasitical of that which is questioning and it as Hegel says skepticism is the result of maybe some dogmatic assertions and I'm not sure that we can do without not a dogmatic philosophy but something that victim Stein associated with what he called faith as opposed to wisdom something that has a fervent commitment or what your colleague at Berkeley Bert Dreyfus when he was speaking about you know the internet and any and invoking Kierkegaard's notion of an infinite passion if we do not have an infinite passion or an unconditional commitment to something a principle or a faith or a belief or some call it even a Dogma then our questioning will just be nothing but a an endless kind of bad infinity and in the Hegelian sense I that's what I worry about if if we reduce philosophy only to the active questioning usually I don't know if that well I may be I'm less skeptical about skepticism than you or my colleague that drivers are I think we have as human beings we have such a tendency to believe seems to be dogmatic about things to be completely convinced that philosophy the skeptical questioning as an antidote is an important contribution that philosophy makes to human life and I would also say it is the socratic contribution to human life and in my Cambridge companion in the introductory essay I end up comparing which we share to Socrates and saying that's how you should read him I know that I know nothing but I'm questioning myself and others and of course in this process hopefully truth will emerge but the truth will be subjected to new questioning and we don't want to and should not want to shut this off too early oh no no I I think it needs to go on in a very vigorous and healthy manner but at the same time if Plato had not posited certain truths that have that are in need of questioned for example equating beauty with truth and truth with goodness and or saying of positing some kind of ideal beauty of world of forms and so forth in our questioning will dry up very quickly if it feeds only on its own questioning so I think philosophy needs both the that spirit of skepticism as well as the the spirit of taking the risk of comity of embracing some kind of faith in the secular sense of another faith existential commitment so to get back to Wittgenstein I would say that one I mean there are many controversies around the question how to read them and he's read in many different ways but one one line of course is to read him as a skeptic essentially that's what what his big contribution to philosophy is he tears down rather than establishes anything and even the thesis that meaning is used is not a theory it's a kind of destruction of the attempt to say what meaning really is because use has come in so many different ways there's really no way in which we can spelled it out in advance but there are others who find that he is after all advancing some positive view and they want to kind of extract certainly this seems evident in the but even in the investigations what could set out and try to extract a theoretical substructure and so there are writings of Richard shine which try to reconstruct and systematize the view of language meaning life the mind that he advances right so um he detects a very elusive at times as you know right there he puts things before us and often he leaves it to us to kind of make up our mind how we are supposed to respond at this point and so they open themselves up to to more than one reading and we need to kind of cross battle this out right oh no I agree with you there and then that one statement of his which I quoted that philosophy needs to return to the center around which our needs revolve that opens up the question of what are our needs and and our needs are and now we're going back to the first question with which we opened our show namely how do things stand in in the historicist reading a bit consign our needs as you point out historically evolve they change and we always have to be able to identify what is the need of the moment of our of our world at present and that philosophy has to respond to that and now as I agree we're we're in our greatest need is something that falls loosely under this this word the political which in our next installment we're going to do on your on your book the political in the search for the common good that we're going to ask what exactly does the political mean what is a common good and we're going to do it in a spirit of questioning but without forgetting the fact that there are real needs here that are beyond just language games in the kind of demotic sense of games now that we're doing more than just playing around so I certainly think that British I never really becomes a historical historically oriented thinker in the way in which Heidegger Francis did on nature and many others but he thought about this question of history certainly so he is start off as I suggested at the beginning could have in a strictly anti historical stance and then he modifies this and opens himself up to he but he that doesn't become a historian I I'm a historian sister I think he has our needs and problems the fundamental problems change over time I think his work realized much more on the idea that there are certain stable set permanent questions about the mind-body problem that saying which always come back and which we then need to always to think about so so there I go beyond him definitely right then but I opened myself up to a lot varying an open-ended view of what philosophy is or should be that's what makes your book on the consensus special which I highly recommend all our listeners just called vixen Steen by Hans fruga so I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Hans fruga from the University of Berkeley and that this is the first of two shows it's going to be followed up with a discussion of his more recent book published in 2014 called politics or the search for the course excellent and the search for this common good I am NOT my title the publisher wanted it oh is that right Cambridge University Press wanted it yeah well it's it works it works a is data type it's a good title and it attracts a lot of attention and it's been getting a lot of attention so we're definitely looking forward to having you on very very shortly cons for a follow-up discussion on that I want to remind our listeners that this is Robert Pogue Harrison for entitled opinions and that we're going to be with you next week thanks again for coming on thank you Robert

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 29,912

Rating: 4.7799044 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Tractatus, Epistemology, Historicism, Ontology, Theory of Knowledge, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty, Correspondence Theory of Truth, Ethics, Philosophical Realism, Skepticism, Language Game, Empiricism, Relativism, Metaphilosophy, Limits of Thought, Theory, Logic, Limits of Language

Id: Q9nD0GLlWaY

Length: 57min 4sec (3424 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2017