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Wittgenstein and Heidegger
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are arguably the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Their work not only reshaped the philosophical landscape, but also left its mark on other disciplines, including political science, theology, anthropology, ecology, mathematics, cultural studies, literary theory, and architecture.
Both sought to challenge the assumptions governing the traditions they inherited, to question the very terms in which philosophy's problems had been posed, and to open up new avenues of thought for thinkers of all stripes. And despite considerable differences in style and in the traditions they inherited, the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking.
Comparative work of these thinkers has only increased in recent decades, but no collection has yet explored the various ways in which Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be drawn into dialogue. As such, these essays stage genuine dialogues, with aspects of Wittgenstein's elucidations answering or problematizing aspects of Heidegger's, and vice versa. The result is a broad-ranging collection of essays that provides a series of openings and provocations that will serve as a reference point for future work that draws on the writings of these two philosophers.
Both sought to challenge the assumptions governing the traditions they inherited, to question the very terms in which philosophy's problems had been posed, and to open up new avenues of thought for thinkers of all stripes. And despite considerable differences in style and in the traditions they inherited, the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking.
Comparative work of these thinkers has only increased in recent decades, but no collection has yet explored the various ways in which Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be drawn into dialogue. As such, these essays stage genuine dialogues, with aspects of Wittgenstein's elucidations answering or problematizing aspects of Heidegger's, and vice versa. The result is a broad-ranging collection of essays that provides a series of openings and provocations that will serve as a reference point for future work that draws on the writings of these two philosophers.
- GenresPhilosophy
302 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2013
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April 26, 2022
Wittgenstein and Heidegger may be the most important, most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Given that not all that much history has gone by since their times, it’s hard to say if that will be proven true, and, of course, things like this are always controversial. But they are my own two most influential twentieth century philosophers, so that’ll do for me.
Despite really radically different styles of thinking and writing, and despite their having, so far as anyone knows, never met or even, aside from one comment by Wittgenstein, spoken or written of each other, there is a strong strain of commonality in their thinking. That’s what this book centers on, with each chapter a separate paper exploring what that commonality may be and where substantive differences may lie.
One core commonality, and this is reinforced in a number of the chapters here, is the contextuality of intelligibility — that the order and sense of the world we live in only happens in a context of social and historical life, practical involvement in activities, and, of course, language.
For both, this contextually is contrasted with a more traditional view of realism, truth, and justification.
For Heidegger, traditional realism misses a more foundational relationship with the world, one that he tries to communicate through the term “Being.” “Being” refers to how things, entities of any sort, are first disclosed to us. In Being and Time, he lays out in detail a world in which we (as “Dasein”) find ourselves always already practically engaged in a world. We both constitute that world by its significance in our practical involvements and are constituted by it, as it grants us the environment and possibilities for that engagement. That world includes the things with which we are involved (chairs, tools, natural objects), other persons, and the historical and social medium in which those things and the projects and activities we engage in, have their origin and life.
Crucially, individual human beings do not invent, for the most part, those practical engagements they participate in, or the things that have their place in them, or the larger roles and goals toward which the engagements aim. That world is historically and socially inherited by each individual — the sense in which it is “always already there.”
Wittgenstein offers no such detailed theory. In fact, he shuns philosophical theorizing, viewing philosophy, as he says, as a kind of “therapy” to rein in language when it goes beyond the bounds of our ordinary speech, as it does in philosophical theorizing, and loses the contexts that make it meaningful.
For both, realism, truth, and justification then have a kind of internality to them. For Heidegger, those concepts function properly internally to a world of practices and engagements — there is no “real,” no “truth,” and no justification of actions, reasoning, or judgments outside that world. For Wittgenstein, those concepts properly have only “ordinary” uses and functions — trying to stretch them into metaphysical or other traditional philosophical uses robs them of those contexts that make them meaningful.
From a traditional philosophical perspective, this leaves us and everything we do or say in a kind of “groundless” position, lacking the kinds of reasons and justifications we want to supply for our actions, beliefs, and judgments about the world.
So much is really background to much of the discussions in the book.
Lee Braver’s chapter is very good on pulling out the senses in which Heidegger and Wittgenstein seem to take common positions on the “groundlessness of grounds.” He takes the further step of pointing to arguments in both that we ultimately reach a level of justification for our acts of judgment, of calculation, or reasoning, . . . at which no further justification is possible, and we can only point to what we do.
From that point on, I think there is a divergence between the two.
Groundlessness in Heidegger really does lead to a felt anxiety, and on to his discussion of what he calls “death,” where “death” appears to mean essentially the ceasing of intelligibility, as something we do (articulating in our acting and speaking and thinking, an intelligible world). The chapter by Schear hints at this connection between groundlessness and death, although his discussion doesn’t center on groundlessness per se (or anxiety) but rather on what he terms different senses in which human understanding is finite for Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
By contrast, Wittgenstein treats that sense of groundlessness as a confusion or a mis-expectation (of groundedness) rather than the kind of “existential” condition conveyed by Heidegger (Unheimlichkeit, or un-at-home-ness, in Being and Time). Anxiety is, for Heidegger, seemingly part of the human condition (even, in the broader view, a healthy part) but for Wittgenstein it is an intellectual confusion.
For his own positive part, I think Wittgenstein, but not Heidegger, hints at the next seemingly compelling move after groundlessness. Actions and judgements have their grounding and justification within communities. And Wittgenstein might be said to indicate community, either belonging to a community or seceding from one, as the available courses by which to respond to the feeling of groundlessness. It is, after all, by suspending what, in everyday situations, does count as grounding, that that feeling of groundlessness is induced. Declining to suspend those ordinary standards and practices would instead appear to be an act of affirming membership in a community that embraces those standards and practices.
The divergence could in part be due to what Stephen Reynolds in his chapter claims is a religious picture or framework behind Heidegger’s thought, particularly the “call of conscience” that calls us to a confrontation with our groundlessness, and that, in Reynold’s analysis, parallels the Lutheran conception of grace. The “call of conscience” is, analogous to the call of grace, something human beings do not initiate by their own thinking, but visits them as this felt anxiety of groundlessness, and, if answered in the right way, leads to what Heidegger calls “authenticity.”
Reynold’s treatment is brief, but provocative, given Heidegger’s early absorption in a religious outlook and even, at one point in his early life, the intention to pursue a religious vocation.
In their later writings, this divergence between Heidegger and Wittgenstein becomes only greater. As Wittgenstein, in later writings says, he wants to bring us back from “language on holiday” in the philosophical to language in the context of the ordinary and everyday, to eliminate philosophical confusions.
Heidegger though wants to delve into a “meaning of Being” hidden behind the ordinary and everyday. In his later writings, this leads him into a completely different style of writing and thinking. The later Heidegger is arguably “mystical” in the sense that he departs from philosophical argument and the recognizable form of philosophical claims and instead tries to provoke experiences of a particular sort in his reader, to induce the sense in which Being “happens.”
That’s not to say there is no place for the mystical in Wittgenstein’s thought. As early as the Tractatus, there are the difficult-to-interpret later propositions, including 6.522 which explicitly relates the unsayable to the mystical. Wittgenstein’s life and thought are infused with a sense of the religious, the ethical, and the mystical — topics we never really get satisfying theoretical treatments of, exactly because of their nature, as Wittgenstein would undoubtedly say.
Whether that sense of mysticism in Wittgenstein’s thought brings him closer to Heidegger, I don’t know. It may be the source of the one spoken comment Wittgenstein did make about Heidegger (quoted by Friedrich Waismann in his collection of conversations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle) — “To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety.” Tantalizing but not definitive, as usual.
Groundlessness, its source and its proper response, are a dominant but not the only theme in the book.
I much appreciated the different emphases in the chapters on romanticism in Heidegger and Wittgenstein (Anthony Rudd) and, relatedly, their attitudes toward modernism in architecture (David R. Cerbone). These were interesting papers, on topics I haven’t really put a lot of thought into myself, so they were something new for me.
Commentaries on Heidegger or Wittgenstein, much less both at once, aren’t going to lead to firm conclusions. That’s part of what is so compelling, and even entertaining, about them.
Just for the record, I should say that this is an academic philosophy book. it presumes a lot of background on the reader’s part, and a lot of patience with academic style. Comes with the territory, for better or worse.
Despite really radically different styles of thinking and writing, and despite their having, so far as anyone knows, never met or even, aside from one comment by Wittgenstein, spoken or written of each other, there is a strong strain of commonality in their thinking. That’s what this book centers on, with each chapter a separate paper exploring what that commonality may be and where substantive differences may lie.
One core commonality, and this is reinforced in a number of the chapters here, is the contextuality of intelligibility — that the order and sense of the world we live in only happens in a context of social and historical life, practical involvement in activities, and, of course, language.
For both, this contextually is contrasted with a more traditional view of realism, truth, and justification.
For Heidegger, traditional realism misses a more foundational relationship with the world, one that he tries to communicate through the term “Being.” “Being” refers to how things, entities of any sort, are first disclosed to us. In Being and Time, he lays out in detail a world in which we (as “Dasein”) find ourselves always already practically engaged in a world. We both constitute that world by its significance in our practical involvements and are constituted by it, as it grants us the environment and possibilities for that engagement. That world includes the things with which we are involved (chairs, tools, natural objects), other persons, and the historical and social medium in which those things and the projects and activities we engage in, have their origin and life.
Crucially, individual human beings do not invent, for the most part, those practical engagements they participate in, or the things that have their place in them, or the larger roles and goals toward which the engagements aim. That world is historically and socially inherited by each individual — the sense in which it is “always already there.”
Wittgenstein offers no such detailed theory. In fact, he shuns philosophical theorizing, viewing philosophy, as he says, as a kind of “therapy” to rein in language when it goes beyond the bounds of our ordinary speech, as it does in philosophical theorizing, and loses the contexts that make it meaningful.
For both, realism, truth, and justification then have a kind of internality to them. For Heidegger, those concepts function properly internally to a world of practices and engagements — there is no “real,” no “truth,” and no justification of actions, reasoning, or judgments outside that world. For Wittgenstein, those concepts properly have only “ordinary” uses and functions — trying to stretch them into metaphysical or other traditional philosophical uses robs them of those contexts that make them meaningful.
From a traditional philosophical perspective, this leaves us and everything we do or say in a kind of “groundless” position, lacking the kinds of reasons and justifications we want to supply for our actions, beliefs, and judgments about the world.
So much is really background to much of the discussions in the book.
Lee Braver’s chapter is very good on pulling out the senses in which Heidegger and Wittgenstein seem to take common positions on the “groundlessness of grounds.” He takes the further step of pointing to arguments in both that we ultimately reach a level of justification for our acts of judgment, of calculation, or reasoning, . . . at which no further justification is possible, and we can only point to what we do.
From that point on, I think there is a divergence between the two.
Groundlessness in Heidegger really does lead to a felt anxiety, and on to his discussion of what he calls “death,” where “death” appears to mean essentially the ceasing of intelligibility, as something we do (articulating in our acting and speaking and thinking, an intelligible world). The chapter by Schear hints at this connection between groundlessness and death, although his discussion doesn’t center on groundlessness per se (or anxiety) but rather on what he terms different senses in which human understanding is finite for Wittgenstein and Heidegger.
By contrast, Wittgenstein treats that sense of groundlessness as a confusion or a mis-expectation (of groundedness) rather than the kind of “existential” condition conveyed by Heidegger (Unheimlichkeit, or un-at-home-ness, in Being and Time). Anxiety is, for Heidegger, seemingly part of the human condition (even, in the broader view, a healthy part) but for Wittgenstein it is an intellectual confusion.
For his own positive part, I think Wittgenstein, but not Heidegger, hints at the next seemingly compelling move after groundlessness. Actions and judgements have their grounding and justification within communities. And Wittgenstein might be said to indicate community, either belonging to a community or seceding from one, as the available courses by which to respond to the feeling of groundlessness. It is, after all, by suspending what, in everyday situations, does count as grounding, that that feeling of groundlessness is induced. Declining to suspend those ordinary standards and practices would instead appear to be an act of affirming membership in a community that embraces those standards and practices.
The divergence could in part be due to what Stephen Reynolds in his chapter claims is a religious picture or framework behind Heidegger’s thought, particularly the “call of conscience” that calls us to a confrontation with our groundlessness, and that, in Reynold’s analysis, parallels the Lutheran conception of grace. The “call of conscience” is, analogous to the call of grace, something human beings do not initiate by their own thinking, but visits them as this felt anxiety of groundlessness, and, if answered in the right way, leads to what Heidegger calls “authenticity.”
Reynold’s treatment is brief, but provocative, given Heidegger’s early absorption in a religious outlook and even, at one point in his early life, the intention to pursue a religious vocation.
In their later writings, this divergence between Heidegger and Wittgenstein becomes only greater. As Wittgenstein, in later writings says, he wants to bring us back from “language on holiday” in the philosophical to language in the context of the ordinary and everyday, to eliminate philosophical confusions.
Heidegger though wants to delve into a “meaning of Being” hidden behind the ordinary and everyday. In his later writings, this leads him into a completely different style of writing and thinking. The later Heidegger is arguably “mystical” in the sense that he departs from philosophical argument and the recognizable form of philosophical claims and instead tries to provoke experiences of a particular sort in his reader, to induce the sense in which Being “happens.”
That’s not to say there is no place for the mystical in Wittgenstein’s thought. As early as the Tractatus, there are the difficult-to-interpret later propositions, including 6.522 which explicitly relates the unsayable to the mystical. Wittgenstein’s life and thought are infused with a sense of the religious, the ethical, and the mystical — topics we never really get satisfying theoretical treatments of, exactly because of their nature, as Wittgenstein would undoubtedly say.
Whether that sense of mysticism in Wittgenstein’s thought brings him closer to Heidegger, I don’t know. It may be the source of the one spoken comment Wittgenstein did make about Heidegger (quoted by Friedrich Waismann in his collection of conversations between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle) — “To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety.” Tantalizing but not definitive, as usual.
Groundlessness, its source and its proper response, are a dominant but not the only theme in the book.
I much appreciated the different emphases in the chapters on romanticism in Heidegger and Wittgenstein (Anthony Rudd) and, relatedly, their attitudes toward modernism in architecture (David R. Cerbone). These were interesting papers, on topics I haven’t really put a lot of thought into myself, so they were something new for me.
Commentaries on Heidegger or Wittgenstein, much less both at once, aren’t going to lead to firm conclusions. That’s part of what is so compelling, and even entertaining, about them.
Just for the record, I should say that this is an academic philosophy book. it presumes a lot of background on the reader’s part, and a lot of patience with academic style. Comes with the territory, for better or worse.
March 22, 2020
Goede en heldere vergelijkende uiteenzetting van Heidegger en Wittgenstein, met een (terechte) lichte voorkeur voor Wittgenstein. Wel veel herhaling.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews