This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein

by Newton Garver

Wittgenstein has most often been treated as a thinker whose ideas can be discussed independently of any intellectual tradition. Garver, a leading exponent of Wittgenstein's thought, insists upon-and demonstrates in detail-the mutual relevance of Wittgenstein's work and the tradition of Western philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy

340 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1994

Reviews

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Garver collected some previously published essays (and three new ones) about Wittgenstein (a few of them more about Kant). There are some redundancies but all in all he manages to give a coherent picture of his views of Wittgenstein. Which is, lets say, idiosyncratic. Which is not (necessarily) a bad thing.

There are three parts, Wittgenstein in context (where he tries to establish his view that Wittgenstein can be seen a critical philosopher in the Kantian sense), Wittgenstein’s early work and Wittgenstein’s later work.

Although he differentiates an early and a late Wittgenstein he deserves credit for seeing a continuity in his work which was still unusual in the mid nineties when this book appeared.

His final verdict goes something like this. As a critical philosopher Wittgenstein renounced “criteria of significance that have not been shown to be justified.” How can such a criterion be justified? “For it seems that something must be taken for granted, or accepted as given, to get started at all... The idea is to take for granted something wholly unphilosophical but disticntly human (factual judgements, moral judgements, everyday language, and so on), and then derive one’s critical criterion from a description of how these things are possible.”

Now, Garver says, Wittgenstein’s attempted to revive Critical Philosophy in the Tractatus by showing how sentences are possible. This attempt failed (he says) because the Tractatus was, “by its own lights, nonsense”. The later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigation on the hand succeeded in reviving Critical Philosophy. Because now he takes for granted “that we humans speak languages, that speaking a language means having mastered innumerable language games, that grammar is the description (not explanation) of languages in terms of the rules which make them possible (constitutive rules), and that making grammatical remarks [...] is one of the language games that is universal, albeit not primitive.” (273)

Just to be clear, grammar and Lebensformen “seem Wittgenstein’s analog of Kant’s objects of transcendental knowledge, such as space, time, and causality”. (275)

Like I said, this is somewhat idiosyncratic. On the other hand understanding means finding simuliarities to what you already know. So finding Kantian themes in Wittgenstein by a Kantian scholar is perhaps not unnatural. (I personally find this not very helpful.)

The most interesting essay in the first part is the one about Wittgenstein’s reception in America. Wittgenstein’s prestige, he says, is enormous but his impact minimal. He compares him to Velikovsky who was wideley noticed but had no impact on science. This may be a bit exaggerated but seems not wrong to me. Even among analytical philosophers he does not seem to have had much influence. And if he had impact Garver thinks they misunderstood Wittgenstein. (Here I would at least exclude Dennett who has, I think, learned a lot from Wittgenstein.) As soon as he gets concrete I disagree with Garver though. He calls it a distortion that Wittgenstein is seen as a logical atomist. (77) That Wittgenstein was not a logical atomist is a theme throughout the book and is, I think, plainly false. I will come back to this.

The essays of the third part I found mostly boring and where they try to say something new not very illuminating. If you have read the PI and did not understand what Wittgenstein is saying with §43 e.g. reading Garver will not help you.

So just a few words to the chapter on Private language. Wittgenstein is supposed to have claimed that you cannot have a private symbol for some sensation. You put, say, the symbol 'S' into a diary every time you feel a certain sensation. This, according to Garver, is absurd and he has poor Descartes as an avatar holding this absurd claim. Only it is of course not absurd. Garver is puzzled when Wittgenstein says that maybe blood-pressure rises whenever there is sensation S. Which would turn the sensation (and the sign) into a useful result. What is puzzling is that the sensation and the sign would remain the same even if I never discovered the connection to blood pressure. But this is the point. What Wittgenstein is saying is not that the sensation and the sign are absurd but that an 'inner process' stands in need of outward criteria. (§580) So if I suffer from vertigo I may be the only one in my tribe to do so. And then there would be no word in the language. That does not make the feeling less real. But I have a connection between the sensation and outward criteria and it results in an action. I avoid climbing on heights. Or lets say I have a certain kind of pain from time to time and I put a sign into my diary. But I put it into the diary because I am trying to finds its causes. So I also put down the things I have eaten. And after a while I find the connection. Eating strawberry precedes the pain. Now, if someone tells me, yes your pain is called Heartburn this information does not make the sensation any more real.

The whole private language argument aims at making the claim absurd that there is an inner language (a language of though) that is independent of the outside world and a community of speakers. That is a completely different thing. And maybe all Wittgenstein did with his sensation/diary example is to add confusion.

The essay on the form of life (“this complicated form of life”) is also not helpful. This is, according to Malcolm, a phrase whose importance in Wittgenstein’s thinking could hardly be exaggerated. I do not think so. Anyway Garver puts a lot of energy into his idea that there is only one form of life for humans. “So our form of life is determined by the capacity to use language”. (265) Dogs, cats, and raccoons have different forms of life. (264) What that means is that a banker in New York and an Inuit and a dweller in some cave 20,000 years ago share the same form of life put a panther and a tiger have different forms of life. Well, what then is explained by the concept? If a lion could talk we would not understand him. Says Wittgenstein. That is, explains Garver “since there is no common behavior of lions in which they use language at all.” What kind of explanation is this? If a lion would speak, then maybe I would not (fully) understand when he talks about the pleasure of hunting down an antelope but if he said that he is tired why should I not understand him? (Actually I understand him when he is just yawning.)

Which brings me to the second and best part. Garver sees a dualism in the Tractatus. There is the realm of facts that make our world and the realm of things that makes up the substance. Facts (or states of affairs – he mixes them up a bit) are complex and independent whereas things are simple and dependent. (Kantians love this kind of symmetry). He adds to this: “Therefore there are no Tractarian atoms.” (109) – (I have no idea how these premises lead to his conclusion. But the question whether Wittgenstein was an atomist or not does not seem to play any role in the rest of the argument.) The things in any case are of no great importance. You can see this, he says, by observing that in the numbering system Wittgenstein puts in an additional 0 when he first mentions them: 2.01.

By far the best essay (or chapter) is the one about Dualism where he repeats some of the points of the previous one. But here he manages not only in giving a short but complete (as far as I can judge) summary of Frege’s Dualism but also to point out the weaknesses (the infamous concept of a horse that is not a concept or the reference of a sentence) and he shows how Wittgenstein takes up Frege’s thoughts and eliminates the strange stuff. So only names have reference, and only sentences have sense. He comes up with a nice table of Frege’s dualism and compares it in a table with Wittgenstein’s dualism. All this is very good and I learned a lot. Then Garver continues to explain how Frege’s dualism still “lurks in the pages of the Investigations”. Metaphysical objects become ‘use in the language’. I am not so sure about this, but still it is worth thinking about.

This has been a long review. I am aware that reading interpretations about some philosophy that one is acquainted with and where one has formed his own opinions over the years mainly leads to finding faults in the interpretation unless the interpreter happens to agree with you. This is bad but I at least cannot help it. Reading this book did manages to at least add some new ideas about Wittgenstein’s philosophy to my views. And where I think he is wrong, his explanations were at least challenging and prompted me to think about how I would try to find counter arguments. And this is the best I can say about a book like this.

7/10

[Goon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best Wittgenstein secondary literature I've read. Some parts are a little hefty and require you to be very familiar with the debates around Wittgenstein, but even then, there is good stuff to read. The last chapter on Forms of Life was fantastic.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A “FRESH LOOK” AT WITTGENSTEIN AS A “CRITICAL” PHILOSOPHER

Newton Garver is professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has written other books such as 'Derrida & Wittgenstein,' 'Wittgenstein and Approaches To Clarity,' 'Jesus, Jefferson, and the Tasks of Friends,' 'Nonviolence and Community: Reflections on the Alternatives to Violence Project,' 'Naturalism and Rationality,' etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1994 book, “Seeing Wittgenstein within the tradition of Western philosophy requires a fresh look at Wittgenstein as well… Wittgenstein needs to be seen in the context of the critical philosophy of Kant. I shall put forward the doubtless-controversial claim that Wittgenstein’s later work solves the Kantian problem that his early work stumbled over.

"The key to his later work is the substitution of grammar for logic as the basis of philosophy… The Tractatus… was a first attempt to work out a twentieth-century version of the self-referential critical criteria that are at the heart of Kant’s enterprises. It was a brilliant effort… but it was an obvious failure, as Wittgenstein makes clear with the memorable invocation of silence in the final paragraph.”

He observes, “Kant and Wittgenstein are both critical philosophers. Both disparage speculative philosophy, and in particular both criticize certain contemporary philosophical disputes as in some way absurd. For both the absurdity arises because of a misuse of words or concepts, and their diagnoses are similar. Both hold that certain empirical conditions or presuppositions are required for the felicitous employment of words or concepts, and that the relevant conditions or presuppositions are ignored by participants in speculative disputes.” (Pg. 51)

He suggests, “Wittgenstein was never an empiricist about philosophy, although he certainly did at times agree with the positivists that there are no significant philosophical questions. He insisted emphatically, from his early work through the later, on sharply distinguishing philosophy from science… So if philosophy deals with questions of meaning, these questions cannot be scientific questions, however much certain passages may suggest this possibility.” (Pg. 78-79)

He states, “In this essay I want to make a limited contribution to understanding how Wittgenstein came to adopt dualism in this particular form, and what happened to it in his later work. My main idea is that the doctrine is due primarily to Frege, but that the details… come from Wittgenstein’s attempt to revise and perfect Frege rather than to follow him slavishly.” (Pg. 112) Later, he adds, “Wittgenstein’s sense of carrying on Frege’s work probably accounts for the disappointment with which he concluded that Frege did not understand a single word of his work.” (Pg. 123)

He asserts, “It would nonetheless be extremely interesting to work from … the problem of reconciling Spinoza’s noble ethic with the indeterminacy of modern physics, to see whether Wittgenstein’s identification of God with fate, and his further identification of both with the universe conceived as an aggregate of facts, might provide a way of bringing Spinoza’s ethico-religious philosophy into harmony with twentieth-century views about science and nature. For the present, however, it is enough simply to see how the recognition of Wittgenstein’s pantheism helps to reveal the coherence of the Tractatus.” (Pg. 145)

He summarizes one of Wittgenstein’s positions: “We do not have REASONS for following such a rule as we do; we are rather trained to follow it when we learn the language… I do not believe Wittgenstein intends that we can never give reasons for having the criteria we do, but rather that we need not and ordinarily do not. In the special case of the technical language of the sciences, where theory plays a large role and precise neologisms are frequent, the justification of criteria is probably more common than in lay speech.” (Pg. 187)

He states, “Wittgenstein’s insistence on the priority of natural history over natural science, of certainty over knowledge, of deeds over words, and of practices over rules all come to focus on the point of intersection of naturalism and the transcendental---that there is no reality other than that of the natural world, but there are significant certainties and other modal features about that world that are both presupposed by science and also exempt from its questioning or confirmation.” (Pg. 284)

This is an excellent collection of essays, that will be of great interest to anyone studying Wittgenstein’s thought and its development.