I don't think anyone could quarrel with
the assertion that, in this century, the two most influential philosophers in
the English-speaking world have been Bertrand Russell & Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell, besides being a great philosopher,
was a tremendous public figure, immersed in political and social affairs nearly all his life. He became exceedingly familiar to the general
public as a broadcaster, journalist, and social critic. So people came to associate him, quite rightly,
with certain general ideas and with a particular approach to social problems, even if they
didn't know much about his philosophy, the best of which, in any case, was highly mathematical
and technical, and therefore not really accessible to the non-specialist. Wittgenstein was quite different,
he was only a technical philosopher. He took no part in public activity, shunned
exposure even within his own profession, and published very little. The result of this is that, for a long time,
his influence, though immense, was confined to full-time students of philosophy. Only comparatively recently has this influence
begun to seep out into surrounding areas of thought and effect people in other fields of activity. So the situation now is that a very large
number of people have heard of Wittgenstein who don't really have any idea at all
of what he did or why it's important. In this program, we're gonna try and rectify
that a bit, and as far as is possible in the short space of a single program, to bring out
clearly the main lines of Wittgenstein's thought, and say something about what its influence
has been outside as well as inside philosophy. This not easy task is being taken on by
Anthony Quinton, fellow at New College, Oxford where he's been teaching
philosophy now for over 20 years. Mr. Quinton is currently also writing a history
of philosophy in which Wittgenstein will be treated at some considerable length. But before I invite Anthony Quinton to start
talking about Wittgenstein's ideas, I'd like myself if I may to say something
about Wittgenstein the man. He was born in Vienna in 1889, and died in
Cambridge in 1951, having incidentally, become a British subject in his middle age. His father was the richest and most
powerful steel magnate in Austria. And as a young child, Wittgenstein developed
a passionate interest in machinery, which was to set the pattern for his whole education. His parents sent him to a school that specialized
in mathematics and the physical sciences, and he went on from there to become
a student in mechanical engineering. At the age of 19, he came to Britain as a research
student in engineering at Manchester University. And it was while he was there that he became
fascinated by what were, in fact, philosophical questions about the foundations
of the mathematics he was using. He read Bertrand Russell's great book, The
Principles of Mathematics, and this seems to have been a kind of revelation to him. He threw up engineering and went to
Cambridge to study logic under Russell. And within a very short time indeed, he
was producing original work of his own which many people have regarded
from that day to this as work of genius. It resulted in the only book of his to be
published during his lifetime, a book with the somewhat off-putting title, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, usually referred to by philosophers simply as "the Tractatus". It was published in Austria in 1921,
and in England in 1922. It's very short, but certainly, one of the
most influential works of philosophy to be published in this century. However, while it was exerting this tremendous
influence over subsequent years, Wittgenstein himself was becoming more
and more discontented with it. In fact, he came to the view that it was fundamentally
mistaken, and he produced a whole new philosophy which repudiated his earlier one. During his lifetime, this 2nd philosophy
was disseminated only to and through his students at Cambridge. But after his death, a whole mass of
writings came out which embodied it too. The most important of these was a book called,
Philosophical Investigations, which was published in 1953, and which then proceeded to have
as great an influence as the Tractatus had had 30 years before. This is a unique phenomenon in the whole history
of philosophy, a philosopher of genius producing two different and incompatible philosophies, each
of which decisively influenced a whole generation. Well now, we must go back to the beginning
and follow this story through in terms of the ideas involved. First, the Tractatus then,
produced during the 2nd decade of this century. Anthony Quinton, it's a very short book, it's less than 80 pages in the standard edition. What would you say are the central problems
that Wittgenstein was trying to solve in it? I think the shortest way of stating the
central problem of the book is as follows: How is language possible? People had assumed, made all sorts of
assumptions, about meaning previously-- how people attach meaning to words-- Wittgenstein immensely generalized the question
and said, how, in general, is it possible for human beings, by producing marks on paper,
or making noises, to represent something that was utterly different in character from the
marks and noises used to represent them? I think many of the people watching this program
might not see, at once, why that is a problem. People are inclined to take language for granted. Why should the very existence of language
present a philosophical problem? Well if one looks at the world in a more
or less statistical way, in a great deal of it, things interact causally with each other; rocks bang against rocks,
moons influence tides, and so on. But just here and there in the world is this
extraordinary phenomenon of some elements in the world intelligently reproducing
other elements of it in themselves. I agree, of course, it's the texture of our
whole inner lives, the use of language, the understanding of language; our communication with our fellow men,
of course, principally, though not exclusively, takes place through it. I think it's just one of those questions that
seems so obvious that most people don't bother to ask it, rather like Newton asking seriously
why the planets didn't charge off in all directions, why stones dropped when
released from the hand. It's got the same naive pristine fundamentalness. In other words, we have this ability to think
about it, and therefore handle, in a sense, things which are not present to us, and this is made possible by language, or
at least, partly made possible by language. And this raises two sets of questions: What is the relationship of language to the world? And what is the relationship of language to thought? And I take it you'd agree that both of these
questions are central to what the Tractatus is trying to do? Yes, people had asked questions about these
things, as if were, in a piecemeal way before. The great fascination of the Tractatus is they're
asked with the utmost conceivable generality. And to both of the things you mentioned,
he has answers to give. There's this apparently, not very helpful
answer at first glance, that language represents the world by depicting it. Propositions are pictures, he says, of facts. And equally, propositions are expressions
of thought, they're the vehicles of thought. They're what we think with. Now, there's another side to this coin
that he was also concerned with. The very fact that he was concerned with the
limits of what could be expressed in language and discovering what the limits were to what
language could do, meant that he was also concerned with what language can't do. This was a very essential feature of the
whole operation and perhaps, in some ways, one of those that's had the largest possible
influence, his insistence that the limits of language were clearly stateable. And all this followed from his idea that language
is essentially -- and I have to insist literally -- pictorial in character. There's a well-known anecdote about Wittgenstein
hearing of the use of some models in a French law court, I think it was, to represent the
state of affairs in some street accident. And he had confronted with this a sort of an
experience that Archimedes cried "Eureka" about. This is it,
I've got it! He said that is the essence of language. And this put serious constraints on language,
that language had exactly to mirror states of affairs in which objects were engaged. And so this put limits to a very marked
kind on what could be said, in his view. In particular, he thought, that the relation
of language to the world itself couldn't be meaningfully represented in language
or discussed in language. I think we've got a pretty clear view now
of what the problems were that he was addressing himself to in this book, we now have to start considering what
the solutions were that he put forward. What did he come 'round to saying the
scope of language was, and to saying the limits to its use were? The fundamental thing I think here could
be put in two points. First of all, that language has to fit the world very directly, in that
it has to be constituted of a meaningful assertion. A meaningful proposition has to be constituted
of names that fit directly onto objects that are exactly correlated with the
objects they're the names of. And then, a true proposition, a genuine proposition,
will be an arrangement of names that mirrors the arrangement of the objects it treats of. Now, this limits language, in a sense, to
description of that which is outside language. That's the limiting feature of that. Oh God, I'm sorry, I foozled it,
I've lost the second thing... You've mentioned what's often referred
to as the picture theory of language. I think it's very difficult for people to see
in what sense a sentence can be a picture of a fact, or a sentence can be
a picture of any piece of reality. Can you explain that a bit better? Well, I think his point is that the sentences
of ordinary language don't look like pictures. But his contention is if they are to have
any meaning, they must be capable of being analyzed or decomposed into a set of
ultimate elementary sentences which really are pictures, which consist purely of names
directly correlated with the objects that are being talked about; and in which
the arrangement of names mirrors the arrangement of the objects. Let me recapitulate this to see if we've
got it absolutely clear between us. That Wittgenstein thought that if you analyze any
utterance about the world, you could analyze it down into words which were names of things, and the
relationship between the words in the sentence corresponded to the relationship
between things in the real world. And in this way, the sentence
was able to picture the world. That's right. And that was a purely argumentative assumption,
as it were. He argued that from first principles. He argued that it was necessitated by the
requirement he laid down that every genuine proposition must have a definite sense. And he thought no proposition could have a
definite sense unless it was ultimately made up of these fundamental pictorial propositions. Well now...sorry -- He doesn't give any
examples of these pictorial propositions. Other philosophers he influenced
came forward with examples of them, but he abstains altogether from giving the examples. He just says it can, he thinks, be proved,
that there must be propositions of this ultimate pictorial kind. But now, one immediate query that occurs to
one is this: a great many of the things we say are false or untrue. That means that I, in those cases, utter something
to which there is nothing in the world that corresponds. Now how does he explain that? Well, it emerges fairly simply
from what's come out so far. Objects can be arranged in various different ways and the names we have for those objects
can also be arranged in various different ways. A significant proposition assembles a set
of names in one of the possible configurations that those names allow for. And the possibilities of combination of the
names is directly parallel to the possibility of the combinations of the objects. So, a meaningful proposition as such
depicts a possible state of affairs. If the arrangement of the objects referred
to by the proposition is identical with the arrangement of the names of the objects in
the proposition, then the proposition is true. So the counters can be moved around,
as it were, in various configurations. Most of these will represent
simply possible states of affairs. When they're configured or arranged in the
way the objects referred to are arranged, then the proposition is true. A lot of the things we say in ordinary life
and indeed in philosophy too aren't about states of affairs at all. We make moral judgments, aesthetic
evaluations, and so on and so forth. How are these explained
by this theory of language? Well, as far as ethical & aesthetic judgments
are concerned, they're not in fact explained, they're just said to be not part of language proper. This is a very eccentric thing for anyone to say, isn't it? Ethics is transcendental. Ethics,
he maintains, does not deal with fact. And he insists that the real function of language
is the describing of fact, truly if possible, falsely, if meaningful. But that is what language fundamentally is. In other words, when I utter a sentence about
the world, I am arranging names together in a way which corresponds to a set of
possible arrangement in the world. If that arrangement is actualized in
the world, then my statement is true. If it's a possible state of affairs
in the world which is not actualized, then my statement is false. If the state of affairs isn't possible in the
world at all, then my utterance is meaningless. That's correct. So we've got a three-fold analysis
into true, false, and meaningless. Now, this theory of language implies
that the world must be of a certain kind. That is to say, that the world, independently
of us and language, must consist of ultimately simple objects which are related to
each other in certain ways. Is that so? That's precisely what he says. And that is what he asserts right at the
beginning of the book in an unargued way. He says the world consists of facts,
facts are arrangements of objects, objects must be "simple",
to take up the word you used. And, these come at one, as one reads
the book, simply as dogmatic affirmations. But they receive their support
later on from the thesis that language has to have a definite sense, and it can have a definite sense
only if it is of a certain structure. And therefore, the world must be of that
structure in order to be capable of being represented in language. Now what about the unsayable? We were talking earlier about Wittgenstein's
concern with what can't be said as the other side of the same coin with his
concern with what can be said. What does the theory of language as we've now
drawn it out have to say about what can't be said? I suppose the central feature of the doctrine
of what can't be said, the one that's most philosophically important about it,
is that nothing can be said about the relation of language to the world. This is the vital paradox of the Tractatus.
That right towards the end, he says anyone who understands my propositions will recognize
that they're senseless; and then tries to mitigate the paradox by saying you must conceive
of them as a ladder on which he's mounted to a level of understanding,
which he then kicks away. His thesis, after all, is that language and
the world have to share a certain structure for it to be possible for language to represent
the world, and then says that this is not a fact about which discourse can proceed. It's something that shows itself in language,
but language can't be used to report. And so, philosophy, as it were,
undermines itself in this mode of argument. Would it be true to say that
this is what he's doing then: That, for a sentence to mirror the world,
there's not only got to be a one-to-one correlation between names in the sentence and objects
in the world, there's also got to be a structure internal to the sentence which relates the
names in the sentence to each other in a way that corresponds to the way that objects
in the world are related to each other? And that this structure is exhibited by the
proposition, it's not something that's stated by it. Therefore, it's shown in the proposition
that can't be expressed in language? Yes. In the light of that then, he has to represent
his own remarks in the Tractatus as drawing our attention to what is open to view, and
what is there shown, if we only look the right way, but that the propositions themselves
are literally senseless. But of course, much else is said
to be nonsensical by him. You mentioned a few moments ago
judgments of value... These, he says, are, in a rather
unhelpful word, "transcendental". But it simply means they're not
matters of describable fact. And he gives no positive account in this book
as to what they are then as an alternative. And, of course, he's extremely hostile to
past philosophy, which purports to tell one all sorts of things about the world, when
what it is in fact doing is saying things in a hidden dialogue, in a hidden dialect--a
code, almost--about the relation of language to the world which has to be
shown and can't be described. Why did people think that this
doctrine was so marvelous? I mean, why did this philosophy
have the enormous impact that it did? Because it does seem to me to be a very strange one
and it does seem to me to leave an awful lot out. For example, I would've thought that the most
expressive uses of language that there are are those in creative arts, in poetry, drama,
novels, and so on; both the most sophisticated uses of language and the profoundest. And yet, this theory of Wittgenstein's simply
seems to allow no place for an explanation of these uses of language at all.
It seems very limited, very partial. Would you accept that criticism of it? Yes.
It is limited, but I think, if called upon to defend it,
he would perhaps say that all other uses of language, insofar as they can be taken
seriously and aren't some form of wordplay, require the explanation of this fundamental
descriptive employment, world-describing employment of language first of all. But about why people thought it was important:
You mentioned, as an argument against its being important, that it was strange. But I should've thought part of the
fascination just was that it was so strange. It's not one, might say, a terribly modestly
expressed book. In the preface he says: "I am convinced that the final solution to all
philosophical problems is contained here". And of course, quite compatibility with that,
he there and then gave up philosophy once, for a considerable period, 10 years or so,
once he completed the Tractatus. So its strangeness is part of its appeal. But it's not only that, its
literary quality is rather striking. It's like a voice speaking out of a whirlwind;
these short, pregnant aphoristic sentences. I'll give you a couple of examples. The first one: "The world is
everything that is the case." It's one of those baffling announcements
that one doesn't quite know what to make of. The last one: "Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must remain silent". Well, at first sight, that looks like a truism,
and then one realizes it isn't quite a truism. He says it's the essential message of the
whole book, to draw the limits of what can intelligibly be said. I suppose the first thing that strikes anyone
about the book when they pick it up for the first time, is the way it's written. Because it's written, not in continuous prose
at all, but in very brief paragraphs, numbered according to a very elaborate system of subdivisions,
and sub-sub-divisions and even sub-sub-sub-divisions. And some of these paragraphs are only one
sentence long. And as you've just indicated in what you said, the connections between
them aren't always very obvious, nor is their meaning in itself very obvious either. Why did he write in this enigmatic,
almost hermetic way? Well, he was an immensely fastidious
man in all respects, I presume, but certainly, there's evidence for any reader of
what one might call his intellectual fastidiousness. He detested what I suppose one would have to
call "bourgeois academic philosophy", the idea of philosophy as a trade, a 9-to-5 occupation
which you do with a part of yourself, and then you go off and lead the rest
of your life in independence of it. He was a man of the utmost moral intensity
of extreme passionate seriousness. He took himself with very great seriousness,
he took his own work with very great seriousness. When it wasn't going well, he got into
a desperate and agonized condition. The result of this displays itself in his
manner of writing. You feel that his whole idea of himself is behind everything that he says. Well, this also means that he rather tends
to disregard or to despise philosophy produced in a more easygoing, relaxed, business-like,
vocational manner; that he wishes to distance himself from that altogether. And he
doesn't want to make the thing too easy, he doesn't want to express himself in a way
that people can pick up by simply running their eyes over the pages. This is an instrument for changing the whole
intellectual aspect of its readers' lives. And so, the way to it is made difficult. I think that could be a justification, relative
to his intentions of his way of proceeding. I must say, the prose does seem
to me to have extraordinary quality. I find the sentences supercharged, they have this haunting capacity to stay in
the mind and one finds oneself quoting them very easily after one's read the book. I would regard Wittgenstein as one of those
few philosophers, like Plato, or Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, who are also great
literary artists, great writers. Would you agree with that? I think he is. He's certainly a very conscious artist, he
was a distinguished mind, a cultivated man. He didn't make a mess of it, therefore. There's nothing--you couldn't say of
his work that it was ever pretentious. It pretends to great things,
it makes claims of itself, but it seems to me the literary garment of
his thought is worthy of the seriousness with which he presented those thoughts. I think we must go back a bit now
to what some of the doctrines were. We talked about this central notion
of language picturing the world, and you explained how he distinguished
between true utterances and false utterances. Does he provide us with any way of seeing
if a statement pictures the world, of seeing if our utterances are true or false? What kind of analysis of the utterance
will show us whether it's true or false? There's absolutely no explanation, as I
said earlier, of what the simple objects are. And therefore, there's no account given of, so to speak,
how we come to be aware of the simple objects. All he talks about is what the relation
between the basic propositions of discourse and the objects to which they relate must be. What he does do is suggest various ways
in which the sentences of ordinary discourse can be analyzed or decomposed into these ultimate
basically pictorial sentences. That his theory is that every genuine proposition that isn't
itself one of these ultimate sentences --and he doesn't give any examples of
actual every day propositions that are-- Every such proposition must be
decomposable into them. And his thesis is, to put it in a slightly technical
way, that every genuine proposition whatever is a truth function of elementary propositions,
which, in effect, means that it's just an abbreviated formula for a vast assemblage,
a conjunction of elementary propositions and the negations thereof. Well, I think before we move away from the
Tractatus and its doctrines--which Wittgenstein himself did, because he came to think
they were unsatisfactory--it would probably be helpful if you would summarize, if you now
could, what the central doctrines of that book are. Well, the central doctrine, I think, is that
language, in its fundamentally distinctive use as a means for describing the world,
can work only by picturing the world. How it pictures the world is through configuring
names of simple objects into arrangements that correspond, where the proposition is
true, to an actual arrangement of objects, which correspond, where the proposition is
false, to a possible arrangement of objects. From this, of course, it follows that the
world is an array of some sort of simple objects, exhibiting one of the possibilities of
combination that are open to them. Connected with this is the view that, although
many of the genuine propositions we utter don't seem to be of this form, they can be
dismantled, analyzed into propositions of this form. There is the one thing we haven't talked about
which is of very great influence: his view of the nature of logic and mathematics. He insisted that this, the propositions of logic
and mathematics don't describe the world, they're, so to speak, a byproduct of the
abbreviated nature of actual language. What a logical truth does is state what should
be evident, namely, that one proposition contains within itself another proposition. That is, some complex of elementary pictures
of the world contains in its content certain other. So in other words, according to that
theory, all the truths of mathematics, like all the truths of logic, are tautologies..
sort of unpacking what is already there in the proposition. Yes, that they gave no information
about the world itself, they're simply symbolic in character,
as it were. They talk about the relation of symbolism. And, again, he said that these propositions
were senseless, in that they had no factual content. They didn't tell us anything about how things
were, when, how things were was different from how they might have been. They simply reflect the character
of the language we use. Now what was the influence of this
early philosophy of Wittgenstein? It was in fact very great, wasn't it? Very considerable, but it was exercised through
only a small part of the work he produced. The greater part of the Tractatus is concerned
with this theory of propositions as pictures, words as names, the things propositions related
to as configurations of simple objects or facts. That's the great bulk of book, the first,
say, 2/3 of it or something like that. And in that form, I think it's fair
to say that nobody took it up at all. People were baffled, and astounded,
and puzzled by it. But the group of philosophers who claimed
to derive their main inspiration from Wittgenstein, --namely, the positivists of the Vienna Circle
--although they accepted the view that there must be some basic propositions which
relate, as it were, directly to the world; there must be a point in language where
direct contact with the world is made.. They gave a much more straightforward,
and easily intelligible account of this relation. In essence it was that these elementary
propositions simply describe the sense experiences of individual observers. So they report immediate occurrences of experience,
feeling, perceptions, by individual persons. And then that everything else could be, all
the other beliefs we held could be analyzed out into propositions of this kind: propositions
about continuing material objects that exist unperceived, propositions about minds other
than our own, propositions about social institutions. That all of these could be analyzed, in the end,
down to simple reports of private experience. Now when Wittgenstein began to become
dissatisfied himself with this philosophy of his that he published in the Tractatus,
which way did his own dissatisfaction proceed? I think a person might say a little bit here
about what Wittgenstein was doing in the interim. You spoke earlier, in general terms, about
his career...the engineering at Manchester, the becoming interested in the nature of mathematics,
the studying of Russell, the going to Cambridge to work with Russell. And at this period, he was an extremely isolated
figure, perhaps locked up mainly in his own thoughts, talking to one or two people, particularly Russell. And the philosophy of the Tractatus reflects that in a
way by being an immensely individualistic philosophy. There's no suggestion of language in a
way being a communicative instrument, it's an instrument for reporting
to oneself, for describing. There's no emphasis on its being a medium
--a social institution... Well, as I said, quite compatibly with the
doctors of the Tractatus, he thought he'd got all the answers, and so,
at that point, he gave up the subject. And for a number of years in the 1920s,
he was an elementary school teacher, then he worked as a monastery gardener,
helped design a house for his sister. And it wasn't until the end of the 1920s
that he took the subject up again. He got into conversations with various leading
figures of what was to become the Vienna Circle. And this interested him in philosophy again. I mean, one could reasonably suppose that
philosophical thoughts were going through his mind in the interim, but it clearly wasn't
part of his plan of life to continue thinking about philosophy after the
publication of the Tractatus. Then he was stimulated into thinking
about philosophy again, and of course the very different 2nd philosophy
of Wittgenstein developed from that period onward. Now at first, it seems, that he was quite
well disposed towards the particular interpretation that the Vienna Circle gave of his account
of what the fundamental elements of language are: namely, their view of them as reports of
experience, not just configurated names of simple objects with no explanation of
how those objects relate to our awareness. But he moved away from that
I think reasonably soon. Remember, he returned to Cambridge in 1929,
and stayed there in various capacities until getting involved in various sorts of war work. And in this period, he produces a completely
different philosophy, which does not offer one clear, definite, abstract principles about
the essential nature of language, but approaches language as a natural human phenomenon,
something that we find going on around us, this very complicated overlapping array of human practices,
like one another in some ways, different from one another in other ways. And an essential feature of this later philosophy
is that language is essentially a public or social phenomenon; that it can only function
if there are rules that are accepted by more than one person, so that, any one person's
use of the rules, which guide him in speaking, is open to correction and improvement
by another person's observation. I think probably the easiest way into the
later philosophy of Wittgenstein, and into seeing how it differs from the earlier philosophy,
is to start with the two different theories of meaning in the two different philosophies. We talked earlier about how the central theory
of meaning in the early philosophy was that a proposition is a picture of the world,
a picture of reality. This central metaphor is changed
in the later philosophy. He no longer sees meaning as being a
picture of the world at all or anything like that. He sees the meaning of an utterance as
consisting in the use to which it could be put. In other words, he sees a sentence
as not a picture, but a tool. And the meaning of this sentence is, so to
speak, the sum total of its possible uses. And this, of course, as you were just saying,
relates it to human activity and ultimately indeed to different ways of life. Now, this shift in the view of what meaning is
is absolutely fundamental to the whole philosophy. And a whole mass of changes from the earlier
philosophy then follow from that, don't they? Can you, so to speak,
take the story up from there? Yes. What we've got here I think is, in a way,
best expressed through the two metaphors that I think both cropped up in what
you just said then. First of all, the constant reference to language
to games, which is incorporated in a crucial technical term in the later philosophy, the
notion of a language game--Incidentally, can I just interrupt to say I think that this
metaphor has been extremely unfortunate because a lot of people have concluded from
the fact that Wittgenstein is always talking about language games and the use of language as
a game, that he somehow regarded all utterance as frivolous. And that confirms a lot of the prejudices that
some people have about linguistic philosophy: that they're just playing with words. That was certainly not his intention. It was just to draw notice to two features
of games, the first one, simply, that they're rule-governed practices. And a lot of follows from this in a way
about how the rules of a game can change, and the games can resemble one another
in all sorts of different ways. That second point leads on to the second feature
about games, which is that there's no common characteristic to all games. Games, as he says, are related to
one another by 'family resemblance'. And that, applied back to language, means
the various kinds of activity we perform with language--asking questions, cursing, greeting,
praying, to give some examples he enumerates-- these are all different things we do with language. Now the game analogy, I agree, might seem
to carry with it a suggestion that, therefore, these are things just for fun,
or pastimes, or what have you. But the other analogy that you mentioned was
the analogy of language to a system of a set of tools, which are used with a purpose. These two things about language: it's a purposive
undertaking, and yet it's carried out with items, which are governed by conventional
and alterable rules. Well now, this notion of language had
a lot of its influence outside philosophy, especially in anthropology and sociology. Can you say something about how they were
affected by this new notion of meaning? Well I think one needs to precede that by
one remark about his later view of the nature of philosophy itself. There is a great continuity between his earlier
and later general view about philosophy: namely, that it's essentially an activity, and not a
theory--to use the formula of the Tractatus-- it's something that you do, philosophy,
it's not something you arrive at, and-- it's not a body of doctrine that you can formulate
-- statable final body of doctrine. He says that quite explicitly in the Tractatus. It remains the case in the Investigations. He says one shouldn't put forward
philosophical theories, they simply augment confusion. What one does as a philosopher is to assemble
reminders about the way in which language is actually used in its various forms, areas
distinct but not totally unrelated language games in which it is employed. One assembles reminders of these to prevent
people from running away with misleading analogies. The misleading analogy he had perhaps most
prominently in mind was the tendency to think because we say, "I felt a pain", or "I have a
pain", a pain is some kind of definite identifiable inner-object, private to us, which we notice
within ourselves, and report to other people. And he--a very great deal of the Investigations
is concerned to break the hold of that picture of how we talk about our own mental life,
that it's a reporting a private experiences. That picture is precisely the sort of picture
that his earlier theory of language, as put out in the Tractatus, would lead one to adopt. Do you think that there's any truth in the
following? That when Wittgenstein published the Tractatus, he was, as it were, bewitched by a
single theory of language, namely, the picture theory, that he later came to realize that this was
false, and that being bewitched by a misleading theory of language had resulted in a
wholly mistaken way of doing philosophy? And therefore, he came to think that, before
you could really do philosophy, you had to carry out an investigation of the different
ways in which language can mislead us, so as not to be misled in our thinking
about the world. And that this, itself, became a way of doing philosophy? In other words,
a multiple investigation into the different ways in which false assumptions about language
can mislead us in our thinking about the world... Do you think there's any truth in that way of putting it? Well, it's undoubtedly true that a great deal
of Investigations takes the form of a criticism of his early doctrine. Certainly the first quarter of it, is largely
directed towards attacking the notion that words are essentially names. His view is that the use of names is one of
these language games, one element in language, the teaching of names is a language game. We have to understand a great deal of language
he maintains, in order to understand the activities that someone's engaging in who's trying
to tell us what the name of something is. So he wants to argue there's no absolute or
fundamental priorities to the notion of naming, it's just one of the things that language does. From that, he goes on to attacking this idea
that there are ultimately simple objects and ultimately simple propositions. He insists that simplicity is always
relative to some particular investigation. So there's this enormous sense that has developed
of language as a public, available, social reality, not language as some kind of essence
which you can work out in your head by pure reasoning in the later work. One analogy that's been drawn a great deal is
with psychoanalysis, in the following sense: that Wittgenstein is saying that we, first of all,
become, as it were, knotted up in our view of some particular aspect of reality by a false
use of language, and the task of philosophy is to untie these knots. And this, so to speak, therapeutic aspect
of philosophical activity has often been said to be very like what Freud thought the
psychoanalyst was doing in another direction. Do you think that a similarity exists there? Yes, I think there certainly is a similarity,
in that Wittgenstein's abstention from theory in his later philosophy is just like the Freudian
analyst's abstention from saying what's wrong with you is you’re madly in love with your
mother, which doesn't produce any effect at all. The procedure has to be much more circuitous,
in that the person has to be brought by re-living a whole lot of past experiences; by being
reminded of all sorts of thoughts and feelings he's had, that his emotions have a certain
peculiar structure, so that something is eventually brought up out of the unconscious. In Wittgenstein's case, what is hidden
isn't hidden in quite the same way. What has to be made evident to the philosophically
confused or perplexed person is the way the rules of the language games that people actually use. What has happened to him is he's, on the basis
of an analogy he's seen between the way words work in one game and the way they worked in another, he applies the rules of the first game
to the second one, and gets into a fix, thinks that because in a shop I said that's a bicycle,
that's a television set, that's a so-and-so, I'm doing something just analogous to
that when I look within myself and say: "I have an acute pain in my left knee", "I have pronounced desire for a cup of tea",
and "I wish that it was Friday". He wants to say these are two utterly different
operations of oneself, not just listing off things that one finds within oneself in self-description. And the way to do this, he maintains, is to
consider language in its natural setting, to see all the circumstances in which people
say things, the behavior that characteristically accompanies their saying certain things. Can I bring you back to the question of what
the influence of this philosophy has been, especially outside philosophy? I failed to take up that question,
you're quite right. The influence of it has been, I suppose,
to encourage a certain kind of relativism. because the abstention from theory means,
and is connected with, a recognition, so to speak, of the equal rights of all language games. Provided that it passes the test of workability
as a social instrument of communication, then it constitutes what he calls a "form of life". And he doesn't think you can really understand
some, as it were, unfamiliar language game without actually participating,
without playing it, so to speak. Well now, you spoke of influence of
this on anthropology and sociology. A certain form of anthropology and
sociology, looks at social orders utterly different from those in which the
student of the subject, himself, lives. And he then proceeds to criticize what's going
on there, in the light of the accepted rules of his own society, when--the whole notion,
as it were, of the savage, where people say, well, presumably savage languages, because
their life is so technologically unadvanced, their language is presumably going to be a few grunts. Whereas, of course, this is not true at all. The languages of technically primitive people
are of an enormous degree of complexity. And then, one sees, I don't know, rules of
taboo, or rules that we call taboo, which is already a somewhat derogatory phrase,
because it suggests this is a rule which is based on false assumptions
of what connects with what. He would say I think that's just a misunderstanding,
bred by not actually being a party to, not fully being within the form of life
in which these taboo rules operate. What, speaking for yourself, do you
think is wrong with this later philosophy, unless, of course, you buy it whole? No, I certainly don't buy it whole. What I think is important about it: I do
think the philosophy of mind, the account of our discourse about our own mental life,
and that of others, has given very good reason for abandoning an assumption that was traditionally
made, that there was a kind of huge cleavage between our thought and discourse about the
physical world, and our thought and discourse about the mind. It did bring to light that a great deal of
what we have to say about our own and other people's mental lives is
essentially tied to behavior. Being generous--the test of whether a person
is generous is what they give and when, not whether they have generous impulses. A person who claims to have endless generous
impulses, but actually always lets the plate pass by, one supposes is either being
insincere or is, at best, deceiving himself. Well, the generous impulses, as it were,
Wittgenstein's point is they're neither here nor there. It's just for a person to be generous is for them
to act in a certain way in certain circumstances. And yet, after all, generosity is a character trait, it's part, an aspect, of an individual's mind. The mind isn't a hidden, private thing, altogether. And that, I think, is important for the later work. What I object to, myself, is the abstention
from theory, if you like, that nothing ever seems to come to an end,
nothing ever gets settled. The examples are heaped up, and then, as it
were, they're offered to you to take or to leave. It seems to me an intellectually unsatisfactory practice. The whole manner of exposition in the Investigations
is a kind of cumulative and disorderly persuasion, rather than definitely setting out something
that is to be discussed, and saying, well, in favor of it, so-and-so is to be said,
against it so-and-so is to be said. I don't say this is, in any sense, a
mannerism on Wittgenstein's part, it represents a commitment, a belief on his part,
that this is the way the subject should be done. I just don't believe it can be done like that
or that understanding of a lasting kind is achieved by this consciously,
inconclusive way of proceeding. If one takes three paces back and looks at
the two philosophies of Wittgenstein, the earlier and the later one, there seem to me
to be at least three ways in which they are viewed by other philosophers, who
are themselves very distinguished. I suppose a large number of philosophers,
perhaps most, regard both the early and the late philosophy as being works of genius. But some -- Bertrand Russell is an example --
regarded the first philosophy as being a product of genius, but the later philosophy as
being trivial, and well, really, he kept saying that he thought a worthless exercise. There are other philosophers, and Karl Popper
is one, for example, who doesn't think at all highly of either of them. How do you evaluate them in
their relation to each other? Well, I'm perhaps docile enough to be quite
convinced that Wittgenstein is a genius, and that both stages of his work are works of genius. But, as so often in philosophical works, this
isn't because everything said in them is true. Who would deny, after all,
that Plato was a genius? Yet, who would believe Plato's view of the
universe, that what really exists is abstract timeless entities, and the world of things in
space and time is a sort of shadowy appearance? One could recognize the genius of a philosopher
without, in fact, accepting very much of what he says. The genius might consist, as one might say, very
evidently in the case of Kant, in asking questions of a more fundamental and powerful kind than
people had asked before, challenging assumptions that had gone hitherto unchallenged. And I think in both parts of his work this is achieved. Thank you very much. I must say that I think that you've succeeded
in doing something that is very difficult to do, and that is making two philosophies
intelligible in the space that, in this series, we're normally devoting to one.
Thank you very much, Anthony Quinton.
