When did Wittgenstein become a Continental Philosopher?

"You are doing sociology not philosophy."

• That was not intended as a compliment

"I am from Brazil, and I never understand continental philosophy, but I found your paper clear."

• That was intended as a compliment.

"What's your relationship to Feyerabend? You seem very influenced by him."

• That was also intended as a compliment.

"You know, of course, you have been anticipated by Neurath in many ways."

• That was meant as an encouragement and a scholarly correction to do my homework.

This is a sampling of remarks I received during the last six weeks at talks I have delivered. The first, very hostile comment was offered in private by a senior figure I had never met before. The second was an attempt to get an open-minded conversation going. (I had to fess up that I was not a Continental philosopher, so that dialogue was cut short.)  The third was a remark by a student. The fourth by a senior scholar that I admire, and who has always been encouraging.

A few years ago, I wrote a methodological paper (on philosophical prophecy) that overlapped with Continental themes. While writing it, I became aware of this, and I was not surprised when one or two friends mentioned a variety of French and German thinkers that I had echoed. I acknowledged the point in a footnote, but decided that I lacked the skill to try to thematize it in the paper.

It's true -- as a biographical fact -- that by analytical standards I have read a considerable amount of continental philosophy and I have some sense of its internal dialectic. (The best bit of evidence for this claim is probably this blog post.) I taught Fanon more than a decade ago; I have recently taught some Deleuze in a seminar; a half decade ago I also taught some Feyerabend, who always had been frowned upon by my teachers, in another seminar. I also think Searle was utterly out of his depth in his engagement with Derrida, so maybe I have fallen into some deep philosophical abyss. But I also adore analytical metaphysics, I still read formal philosophy for insight, and I am still capable of writing with great joy and appreciation about the greatest achievements of science.

My appreciation of features of continental philosophy is not organic; I am not part of its internal dialectic; Don Rutherford is right to note that qua historians of philosophy we try to get this dialectic right. But at some point I decided that the varieties of internal dialectics that make up analytical philosophy were shadowed and subtly shaped by external dialectics (continental philosophy, Straussianism, literary theory, gender studies, feminism, etc.) that remained in the shadows because they had strong pejorative valence. I have made an effort to explore these dialectics as if I was entering these areas in order to become a skilled historian. ('If I can learn to read Spinoza or Newton, I can also read Deleuze...')

 

A striking fact of my adult life is that I have come to notice that in some circles Wittgenstein and, more exactly, Wittgensteinianism is taking on the trappings of some such pejorative other in which ignorance is combined with hostility. (I have rediscovered Wittgenstein. But I am no friend of Wittgensteinianism, and have received my own share of abuse for being, well, not deep by members of the charmed circle.)

The reason I mention the changing valence of Wittgenstein in the profession as an example is three-fold: first, there is something contingent about such changing valences. For example, I think the logicians and mathematical philosophers surrounding Husserl (e.g. Weyl, Oskar Becker, etc.) could have become part of a future dialectic internal to analytical philosophy in some nearby possible world. Second, even if Wittgensteinianism becomes as alien to analytical philosophers as, say, W.E. Johnson or even Sartre, there would always be non-trivial sense in which Wittgenstein and his followers had infiltrated the dialectic internal to any future analytical philosophy. Both observations are, in part, due to the fact that analytical philosophy is not hermetically sealed, but sponge-like.* (Some analytical philosophers did read Becker's and Weyl's work in modal logic when it appeared and Weyl's philosophy of physics, which, indirectly, through Howard Stein, did impact the development of mainstream philosophy of physics.) Third, I do wonder when (how/why) did Wittgenstein become a Continental philosopher (in the pejorative sense), say, in England?

 

Now, it's true that qua philosopher, I believe that one can shape future dialectics that may well re-organize how the past is perceived--such that once mutually opposing dialectics come to be seen as somehow mutually reinforcing (or whatever); a discovery (to me) I made as a historian. And, perhaps, the fact that I am suddenly eliciting unusual (for me) responses to my talks (or have become better at recognizing them) is that I have found myself in the midst of some such attempted reshapings. (The jury is out, of course.) I am convinced that once a true metaphysician or true political philosopher writes the history of analytical philosophy, Stebbing will be fully rediscovered.

I know some sociologists and admire them (even as social theorists in a philosophical register), and I recognize that I am no sociologist. Even so, I had to suppress the urge not to punch the senior citizen that called me a sociologist.

 

*Of course, because some of the founding myths of analytical philosophy are shaped by the interaction with Heidegger (etc.), continental philosophy is always a (unwholesome) part of analytical philosophy.

Comments

[Enzo Rossi]

In haste: insofar as Wittgenstein has a bad name in some analytic circles, it's arguably on account of his quietism. Much analytic philosophy sees itself as engaged in a positive enterprise of constructing concepts (ein Aufbau!) rather than tearing down philosophical houses of cards. Continentals are closer to the latter attitude -- even phenomenologists. I remember how at St Andrews even a giant like Crisping Wright had to overcome some anti-Wittgensteinian prejudices.

[Ed Kazarian]

Interestingly, Deleuze despised Wittgenstein's conceptual quietism, to borrow Enzo's phrase above, and the continental retrieval of W has, as far as I know, been led by Derrideans (Jack Caputo, for instance, did a seminar on him in 1997 or 1998 at Villanova, which felt like a watershed moment to is, at least). Not sure what this means, but I hope it's an at least interesting data point.

[Enzo Rossi]

Yes. Deconstruction vs construction indeed. Or something like that. Maybe. Also, I misspelled Crispin's name.

[Pete Wolfendale]

There is a long tradition of quietist bridging of the analytic/continental divide from either side, usually between some variant of Wittgensteinianism (e.g., Cavell, Rorty, etc.) and Heideggerianism (e.g. Derrida, Levinas, etc.) by means of a joint commitment to the overcoming of 'metaphysics'. As someone who works on both analytic and continental philosophy, but is decidedly anti-quietist and pro-metaphysics, I find this no end of frustrating. I wrote something on this a while back if you're interested: http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/burning-bridges/

[Colin Cmiel]

1. Continental Philosophy is a huge tent. My understanding is that Delleuze also disliked Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology in general.

2. There seems to be a growing appreciation that Wittgenstein's views are very close in some important ways to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. They are all responding to Kant by bringing together the transcendental and the empirical, essence and existence, form and content. For example, I think it's pretty clear that Merleau-Ponty's account of object constancy via style is _very_ similar to Wittgenstein's discussion of family resemblance. Also, Avner Baz has argued (convincingly in my view) that there are important similarities between Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein's account of language. Maybe most importantly, they all take seriously the Kantian position that the conditions of the possibility of experience are also the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience. Heidegger: the world is the totality of tools; Merleau-ponty: the thing is the correlate of my body; (early) Wittgenstein: the limits of my language means the limits of my world. Consequently, they end up with similar (deflationary) responses to Cartesian skepticism. Obviously this needs much more defense than I'm giving here.

3. If I'm right, then it's an amusing twist of history that Wittgenstein ends up being philosophically closer to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty than to Russell/Carnap/Frege.

4. I'm really unsympathetic to the desire of philosophers to score points without really understanding the alternative position, which seems pretty common with critics of Wittgenstein these days. Since their goal surely can't be to convince the other side it seems more like a sort of self-congratulatory performance.

5. Finally, I think there are a lot of ways to understand quietism, and I think we would have to spell them out before concluding that Wittgenstein is a quietist. Another way to put this, I don't think that quietism is the same as therapy.

[Colin]

What I should have said in my point about quietism. James Conant and Cora Diamond defend a reading of Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein's goal isn't to get us to stop doing philosophy and force us to return to 'non-philosophical' ways of talking (i.e., quietism), but to show us how to get out of the tangles we find ourselves in when we inevitably do philosophize. Philosophy isn't something bad; it's what happens whenever we try to make sense of the world; it's just that when we try to make sense of the world we tend to find ourselves tied into knots. A goal of PI is to show how we can untie ourselves from these knots -- to bring us from disguised to undisguised nonsense.

On this reading the problem _wouldn't_ be constructing concepts, but confusion stemming from uses of concepts (whether new or old) that may seem to have a clear sense, but (on closer inspection) don't have any sense at all. They might lack sense for many reasons, but on this reading concepts _don't_ lack a sense because they violate some rule of language. If this reading is correct, then I don't think Wittgenstein would have any problem with philosophers generating concepts like being-in-the-world, differance, etc so long as those terms have been given a determinate sense.