Stephen Mulhall’s essay “Realism, Modernism, and the Realistic Spirit: Diamond’s inheritance of Wittgenstein, early and late” (Nordic Wittgenstein Review 1 (2012), 7-33) is a thought-provoking inquiry into ways of applying Wittgenstein. (The essay is now available on the journal's website.)
I shall here comment on
one section of the essay (2: 3).
As Mulhall notes, we
commonly think of Wittgenstein’s concepts “language game”, “grammar”, “forms of
life”, “criteria”, ”rule-governed” – what Mulhall calls his signature concepts
– as “forged by Wittgenstein himself in the service of simply putting things
before us as they really are”. Mulhall, however, draws attention to the risk
that
if ... this set of signature concepts is sufficiently substantial or
robust to acquire a life of its own, then they might on occasions stand between
us and an ability simply to acknowledge how things really are; rather than
helping to subvert our tendency towards the imposition of a philosophical
’must’, they may actually subserve its further expression (p. 10).
In other words: the
language game metaphor was meant to draw our attention to the actual activities
in which we utter and respond to words. But there’s a danger that this perspective
will come to impose its own preconceived notions on how we see things. (Thus, I
suggest, we may forget that the language game is indeed a model or metaphor,
and start imagining, say, that it has rules just like football, or that the
limits of the game must be precisely circumscribed, etc.)
I believe this warning is of the utmost importance. Mulhall
tellingly compares this situation to the development of realism in the novel:
The history of the novel since Defoe, Richardson and Sterne might
... be written entirely in terms of the ways in which novelists repeatedly
subject their inheritance of realistic conventions to critical questioning in
order to recreate the impression of reality in their readers (p. 9).
Mulhall
illustrates his theme by reference to some of Cora Diamond’s work, among other
things her essay “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy”
which I touched on in an earlier blog.
There Diamond speaks about certain experiences – such as the encounter with the
photograph of six young men that were shortly afterward to be killed in the war – “in
which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or
possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or
perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability”(p. 99 in her essay,
quoted on p. 18). She calls this “a difficulty of reality” and says that to
appreciate it “is to appreciate oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks,
how one is apparently supposed to think” (p. 105; p. 19).
Mulhall comments:
[P]roperly to register the essential nature of a difficulty of
reality asks us to acknowledge the capacity of reality to shoulder us out from
our familiar language-games, to resist the distinctively human capacity to word
the world, and thereby to leave us as bewildered and disorientated as a bird
that suddenly finds itself incapable of constructing a nest, or a beaver of
building a dam... (Ibid.)
Not everyone will
have the same response to Cora Diamond’s examples (this is one of several she
invokes). If one does not, it is no use staring at the example and trying to
discover what she is talking about there
– one will simply have to find one’s own examples; cases in which one feels
words fail one. (Nor should we forget that what strikes someone about an
awesome experience may not primarily be her inability to put it into words;
that, on the whole, is the reaction of someone who is preoccupied with
describing things, with “wording the world”. Anyway, in a given case someone might
feel that silence is the only adequate response.)
But if we are not all
struck in the same way by the same examples, the question arises, what makes something an experience of the
relevant kind? On what authority could I claim that this is a case in which
words fail us, if someone fails to
see it? Am I blind to something, if I personally fail to recognize this? Evidently,
those questions are out of place. There is no right or wrong here. This kind of
experience is not grounded in anything, it is our unmediated, primitive, subjective
response. But then to say that it is an experience of the language game giving
out would be a strangely objective way of putting the matter – for one thing, it
makes it appear that one needs access to the concept of a language game to be
able to have the experience. (It also makes it sound as if the rules of the
game laid it down that this is out of bounds. But this would be giving them the
kind of jurisdiction that we are concerned to question.)
I find it exceedingly hard
to get a grip on this discussion. What complicates matters, I believe, is the way two different things
come together: the speaker’s predicament in front of the experience, and the
philosopher’s predicament in trying to account for the speaker’s predicament. Mulhall
explicitly puts them side by side:
Surely difficulties of reality ought ... to resist the grammar of
“language-game”, “grammar” and “form of life” (however flexibly they are
projected) just as radically as they resist that of any other aspects of our
thinking and talking? (Ibid.)
This is what I
feel like saying: the speaker is bewildered about how to respond to what’s in
front of her. The philosopher, so far,
is not facing a question: it’s not for the philosopher to tell the speaker how
she might respond, nor to say that here
language gives way. The problem for the philosopher arises, if it does, after
the speaker has responded. Depending on what was said, the philosopher may
reflect, say, that the speaker’s words reflect her bewilderment about the
experience – on the other hand, of course, her verbal response (whatever her
reaction) may be down-home and trivial.
Mulhall asks:
Would it be at all helpful in clarifying this highly distinctive
aspect of our relation with our words to say that being shouldered out of our
language-games is just one more language-game, or to declare that words have a
grammar when they fail us just as they do when we effortlessly employ them to
word the world, or to describe these uncanny encounters as just another element
in the homely forms of human life? (Ibid.)
My response here
would be to say that the usefulness of the language game metaphor (like the language
game itself) doesn’t come to an end in this or that particular place, rather it
gradually peters out.
