2104987

International Phenomenological SocietyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research

Wittgenstein's PhenomenologyAuthor(s): Thomas N. MunsonSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Sep., 1962), pp. 37-50Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2104987Accessed: 21-05-2016 19:41 UTC

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WITTGENSTEIN'S PHENOMENOLOGY

In a paper offered last year to-the Aristotelian Society, Mr. Charles Taylor attempted to plot some points of comparison between the methods of phenomenology and linguistic analysis. His effort, successful or not, could not fail to evoke a resounding "Amen!" from those of us who are deeply concerned over philosophy's continental divide. In Europe, at any rate, both sides have reached out to make contact. Marcel journeyed to England; Hare, Ryle, and others went to Royaumont. French-language journals are now publishing articles in the analytic field; John Austin talked about doing a "phenomenology of language." In our country, however, most analysts are still too engrossed in their personal com- mitment to feel the need for a dialogue with the uncommitted. Conse- quently, talk of reconciliation is heard only on the lips of philosophers educated along traditional lines - men who from time to time question the adequacy of their grasp of the opposing parties to be reconciled. In this paper, we should like to make a modest contribution to our task of medi- ation by focusing on Wittgenstein's philosophical method.

The first part of our study shall be expository. With some insight into Wittengenstein's problem, we should be in a position to understand his views on philosophy in general and why his philosophy is a phenomenology. Although I do not intend to illustrate in any detail his phenomenological method, perhaps our brief discussion of "interior acts" might serve this purpose. In the second part of the paper, I wish to consider what appears to me to be the core issue of this phenomenology.

Three other points must be made before concluding this introduction. First, I do not propose in this paper to compare and/or contrast Wittgen- stein with Husserl.1 Second, the Wittgenstein I am mainly concerned about is "the later," the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. I maintain, however, that despite incidental differences the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and of the PI are cut of the same cloth - an assertion which I cannot attempt to justify here. Wherefore, I shall have recourse to all of his published works - the two already mentioned in addition to The Blue and Brown Books and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathema-

1 The reader's attention is directed to "Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein,"

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XX, no. 2, (December, 1959), 181-197. An article by C. A. Van Peursen.

37


38 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

ties - as sources of equal value.2 Third, it is not in vogue, to say the least, to synthesize Wittgenstein.3 Neither his literary style nor his professional procedure, as Norman Malcolm has presented it,4 is such as to encourage anyone to pinpoint his meaning. Besides, contemporary analysis frowns on generalizations, which it associates with "philosophy in the grand manner.' I offer no excuses for my bold flying in the face of this tradition, for I see no alternate road to understanding for those whose education has not been exclusively analytic.

Let us begin with Wittgenstein's problemss. In the preface to PI he wrote: "After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks: my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination" (ix). The subjects embraced by these not-to-be-synthesized remarks are: "the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundation of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things" (ibid). In spite of this deterrent to our effort, perhaps we can still talk in the singular about "Wittgenstein's problem" as a meditation on the sign in relation to the signified. Sche- matically, we might group his topics thus:

(a) sign signified (b) "says" - "shows" (c) language - logic (d) 'speaking'- 'thinking ('meaning,' 'understanding')

(a) In the Tractatus we study the propositional sign (compared to a musical note or letter) as a medium, the "through which" the world is expressed, not as the sense, the what is said (cf. 3.12-3.14). The situation is analogous to a complex formula in mathematical physics. The formula, we say, expresses, pictures, mirrors the world. This is not to say that the sign

2 The Tractatu8 Logico-Philosophicu8 was published in 1922. The Blue and Brown Books - preliminary studies to PI - were dictated to students between 1933 and 1935. The RFM includes jottings between 1937 and 1944. As Anscombe and Rhees note at the beginning of PI, Part I of this work was complete by 1945; Part II was written between 1947 and 1949.

3 In M. Lazerowitz' collection of essays, The Structure of Metaphysics, John Wisdom writes: "... when people listened to Wittgenstein, they often found it difficult to get a steady light giving an ordered view of what they have wished to see; and ... when they now read him, they still have this difficulty." Undoubtedly some of the difficulty, if not a great deal, stems from Wittgenstein's own declaration of intention (PI, Preface, x): "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."

4' Ludwig Wittgenatein: A Memoir, with a Biographical Sketch by Georg Henrik von Wright, Oxford University Press, 1958.


WITTGENSTEIN'S PHENOMENOLOGY 39

(proposition, formula) "corresponds to" reality qua true or false, but rather that the sign permits us to experience the world. Thus (5.552) logic precedes every experience (e.g., that "x is y"). It is not before the world (the "what"), but before the experience of the world (the "how," i.e. the specification of 'x' and 'y').

In PI: We are still meditating the problem of how a sign "means" its

signified, but against a different background. We lose sight of the metaphysical Weltanschauung of Logical Positivism, which might be represented as follows:

(pictures ) Proposition (represents) (the form of) reality

(mirrors )

simple simple

atomic atomic

! 6.13 1 assertion of isomorphism: a one-to-one correspondence

(b.c.d.)- In her book on the Tractatus,5 Miss Anscombe cites a reply of Wittgenstein to Russell relative to the latter's comments on the Tractatus.

Now I'm afraid you haven't really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical propositions is only corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions - i.e., by language (and, what comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy.

Wittgenstein's point, as I understand it, can likewise be found in 4.121 of the Tractatus. It is that logical form is nothing behind propositions, behind language. It is not a set of rules pre-existing in a vacuum. (cf. 6.124). We can only deal with the signified - 'logic,' 'thinking,' 'understanding,'- through signs. The P1 are shot through with this idea.

In thinking of the sign in relation to the signified, several questions might occur to us. We ought to mention some of these, for they are indicative of the way in which Wittgenstein's thought moves. First, there is the Hegelian question of how a sign like a word, which is universal, can signify something particular (cf. PI, 139ff.). In the Tractatus, where the unit was the proposition, this kind of reference-question did not arise. There, if it was a question of a propositional sign - 'p' - which I had never

5 An Introduction to Wittgendtein's Tractatu8, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hutchinson's University Library, London, 1959, 161.



seen before, I could know what state of affairs 'p' referred to (and hence 'vp') because I was provided with the logic of the language, that is, with rules of description or rules of projection. By the time we come to PI ,Wittgenstein is more acutely aware of the problems of a conventional system, and his talk about rules is far more sophisticated. As a system of communication, a language has rules, binding on those who wish to play the "game." Yet language is not an exact calculus; we are not forced to follow its prescriptions But if this is the case, can we retain the hardness of the "logical must" ?

A second question implicit in the Hegelian one calls attention to the epistemological problem: How do the signs by which we know (express) states of affairs ("the world," "reality") relate to the signified? In the Tractatus the talk was of "representing," "picturing," "mirroring" the world, but certainly not in any literal sense. Wittgenstein was not thinking of images. I would suggest a Kantian perspective as a possible key to the situation. These signs are what permit the world (reality, states of affairs) to be for us. The Kantian categories are, after all, logical forms, structures of the transcendental which permit the world to be an object of knowledge for a subject. In the last analysis Kant also, like Wittgenstein, asserts an isomorphism: the world is intelligible because it embodies logical forms. 5.61 would seem to offer some grounds for this interpretation of Wittgen- stein. However, by the time we come to the PI, the echoes are faint indeed, though still perceptible.

We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the 'possibilities' of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena. (PI, 90.)

Up to this point I have dwelt on "Wittgenstein's problem" principally in the light of the Tractatus for several reasons. First, as a partial indi- cation of my contention that, different emphases and alterations notwithstanding, there is a continuous unity in Wittgenstein's preoccupation. Second, as the necessary background for the ensuing discussion of the sign- signified relation as the problem of "meaning," which is the form it assumes in PI. As we know, the first ninety paragraphs of PI are devoted to a refutation of his one-to-one correspondence view of the Tractatus. And third, as the key to interpreting Wittgenstein's remarks on philosophy, especially 4.111 and 4.112. We shall return to this topic subsequently. For the moment, the reader should recall that in the Tractatus philosophical propositions are no different from other propositions. All picture the world because they manifest its logical form. Nothing deeper, more penetrating, "noumenal," need be sought.

The theory of meaning which is presented in the beginning of the PI as St. Augustine's is this: "... the individual words in language name objects -



sentences are combinations of such names. In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands" (PI 1).6 Undoubtedly, much could be said in behalf of this theory. It could be argued that St. Augustine was presenting the common sense view, which in the course of centuries matured into the time-honored problem of universals. The theory offers us a trim, tidy, bandbox world, where everything has the blessed rigor of mathematical precision. Such, of course, was the world of the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein's moment of disillusion came, and in its train a host of difficulties which struck at the very foundations of logic. He tell us in PI:

We see that what we call "sentence," "language" has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is this family of structures more or less related to one another. - But what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here. But in that case doesn't logic altogether disappear? - For how can it lose its rigour? Of course not by our bargaining any of its rigour out of it. - The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around.7

The PI offer us this reversed examination in terms of language-games. "Language," we are told, "is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments" (PI, #569). The example of the "slab" game in the early part of the Investigations is to bring home to us that words are tools of action. By giving orders to B, A makes use of instruments to get B to act in a certain way. Their meaning depends on how B is supposed to act in the situations in which they are uttered. In like manner, the meaning of a descriptive sentence depends upon its role in a given situation (within a given culture- frame). Meaning, then, is not some ethereal entity; rather: "Let the use of words teach you their meaning" (PI, p. 220). Significantly, he adds to this sentence: "(Similarly one can often say in mathematics: let the proof teach you what was being proved.)" From this it is apparent, I think, why some have referred to Wittgenstein's theory of meaning as constructivist.

Like any good theoretician, Wittgenstein sets himself to answer possible objections to his theory.

But isn't it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (And here, of course, belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless series of words.) And 'meaning it' is something in the sphere of mind. But it is also something private! It is the intangible something; only comparable with consciousness itself (PI, #358).

A common sense objection, and Wittgenstein treats it as another

6 Professor Paul Feyerabend has elaborated this theory in five theses in "Wittgen- stein's Philosophical Investigations," The Philosophical Review, LXIV, 1955, 449-483. In this study I am indebted to Prof. Feyerabend for a number of important points.

7 PI, #108. Cf. G. E. M. Anscombe in Mind, 1953, 522, for emendations of her English text.



version of the Augustinian common sense, one-to-one correspondence theory of meaning. He is at pains to show that 'meaning it," understanding, 'intending' in a word, any so-called interior act is not an object or entity which can be sufficiently determined to permit a one-to-one correspondence. Not that he is denying the psychological; at least I don't believe that he is. His point seems to be that such processes have their place but are irrelevant to logic; that is, they do not elucidate the problem of meaning.

An example might clarify the point. What is the meaning of 'red'? If 'red' means some image or red patch or object of something else "in the mind" which can serve as a paradigm for a correspondence theory, then really we have not answered the difficulty but only pushed it back a stage. Foi how does one know that that image or what have you is "red" (what we mean by 'red')? At one time Wittgenstein jocosely suggested the electrical bell theory: that something interiorly sounded on the approach of 'red' which enabled one to distinguish it from, say, 'yellow.' And even if we were to grant, per impossible, such a naive theory, we are still faced with the problem of communication. Many of Wittgenstein's analyses are calculated to undercut this difficulty, for we encounter apparently insuperable obstacles when we try to teach someone our internal criteria. Besides, to tell another to consult his experience is not particularly helpful when he is ignorant of the goal of his search.

"Meaning is as little an experience as intending. ... If God had looked into our minds, he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.... Mere explanation of a word does not refer to an occurrence at the moment of speaking" (PI, p. 217). In all of these statements, and the PI contain countless more, Wittgenstein is putting his finger on the sore spot of his old theory of meaning. "When we do philosophy, we should like to hypostatize our feelings where there are none. They serve to explain our thoughts to us. 'Here explanation of our thinking demands a feeling!' [Interior process, sensation, experience, etc.] It is as if our conviction were simply consequent upon this requirement" (PI, #598). It is with difficulty that we rid ourselves of the idea that words are meaningful because we mean something when we utter them, and that quite independently of the way in which those words are used. Consequently, Wittgenstein's analysis of chess or "understanding a formula" as "understanding the principle of a series of numbers," that is, knowing how to proceed, is aimed at showing that for us to decide whether or not somebody really means something when he utters a sentence, we are thrown back on an observation of the way he uses certain elements of speech. "It may now be said: 'The way the formula is meant determines which steps are to be taken.' What is the criterion for the way the formula is meant? It is, for example, the kind of way we always use it, the way we are taught to use it" (PI, #190). Meaning, therefore, cannot be considered apart from the


WITTGENSTEIN' S PHENOMENOLOGY 43

description of the way certain expressions are used by the speaker or by other people with whom he is trying to communicate.

We encounter this same difficulty in another form in Wittgenstein's discussion of obeying or following a rule. "For it will then also become clear what can lead us (and did lead me) to think that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules" (P1, #81). The calculus, of course, is the one-to-one correspondence of sign to signified. It is governed by a rigid system of rules, conceived as some kind of interior phenomenon (and hence can only be shown, not said), which, when followed rigorously, delivers a "meaning" to us. And - "Once you know what the word stands for, you understand it, you know its whole use" (PI #264). I would direct your attention to this last phrase: "you know its whole use." For it is precisely this aspect of the one-to-one-correspondence theory which has significance for the rest of our discussion.

Do we want to say that once we understand the meaning of a word (an "interior object," image, picture, etc.) we know its whole use? How do we propose to square such a claim with the obvious ambiguity of words like 'dog,' 'cat,' 'tree'? Does understanding a meaning entail an insight into an essence such that "... the answer ... is to be given once for all; and inde-

pendently of any future experience?" (PI #92). If so, no wonder Wittgen- stein could write in the preface to the Tractatus: "On the other hand, the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in es- sentials been finally solved." We know, of course, that he dropped this exaggerated claim as he discarded the Tractatus theory of meaning. And with it went also the effort to grasp the essence of a thing - that essence which was to explain the varieties of a sign's use. Instead, the task is simply to describe the language-game of which the sign is a part. "We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place" (PI #109). "Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happened as a 'proto-phenomenon.' That is, where we ought to have said: this language-game is played" (PI #654). "Look on the language-game as the primary thing. And look on the feelings, etc., as you look on a way of regarding the language-game, as interpretation" (PI #656).

At this point we run head on into an objection which threatens to vitiate our exposition of Wittgenstein's problem. So far, we have tried to show that Wittgenstein's works gravitate around the core problem of "meaning," and that the evolution of his thought from the Tractatus to the PI can only be understood in terms of a rejection of a one-to-one-correspondence theory for a polymorphic, use-in-a-language-game explanation. And now we are told that we must do away with all explanation. Does this mean



that Wittgenstein pretends to demolish a theory of meaning without offering a counterproposal? Precisely. "If it is asked: 'How do sentences manage to represent?' - the answer might be: 'Don't you know? You

certainly see it, when you use them.' For nothing is concealed" (PI #435). Everything, he tells us, lies open to view (PI #92, #126). Therefore, "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. ... It leaves everything as it is" (P1

#124). Before attempting to satisfy our curiosity about this view of philosophy,

we ought to make very explicit the all-important point of reference which we have now reached. It was, in a word, our consideration of Wittgen- stein's problem - i.e., meaning - which brought us to this idea of philosophy. And, if one is to assign the proper label to this concept on the basis of the texts just cited, the correct word is phenomenology. Given Wittgen- stein's premise that "meaning" is not to be found by looking for some entity or formalized relation of sign to signified but by seeing how a word is used in a given language-game, can there by any room for theory? Can we ever come to that generality or universality which seems to constitute the explanatory force of a theory? And is it not the case that a theory (a second-order vocabulary of some kind) takes us out of the given language- game? How, then, can we say that we are describing the original phenomenon - that our explanation is really of the explicandum? Wittgenstein quite consistently concludes that the task of philosophy is not explanation. "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us" (PI

#126). The view of the Tractatus was: "Language disguises the thought .." (4.002). Now his view would seem to be: language is already the thought; nothing is concealed.

In the light of this conception, we are hard pressed to account for the existence of philosophical systems or theories. Wittgenstein has suggested that failures in understanding can be attributed to a lack of clarity concerning the use of our words (PI #122). True enough. Still, how can we fail to command a clear view where nothing is hidden? "But given this answer: 'But you know how sentences do it, for nothing is concealed' one would like to retort 'Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I should like to see it as it were laid open to view' " (PI #435). The note sounded here rings strangely akin to a very familiar one in the history of philosophy, "attention." There would really be no problem, the assurance runs, if we took a good look. But due to haste or preoccupation "language goes on

holiday" (PI #38), and "We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike" (PI p. 224). Here Wittgenstein has in


WITTGENSTEIN 'S PHENOMENOLOGY 45

mind our expressions of the form "x is y." Frequently enough we say: "Houses exist," "Redness exists," "Number two exists," etc. This similarity of sentence-structure, he maintains, leads us to assume that houses, redness, and number two are alike in their qualities as objects (existences). "Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of

words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly. Especially not when we

are doing philosophy!" (PI #11). Ironical as the situation may be, what is ultimately responsible for our confusions is "doing philosophy," that is to

say, we are led to hypostatize abstractions precisely because we are beguiled by the illusion of an essence, a reified universal valid for all instances. The urge to theorize (to unify, to order) is, in this view, funda- mentally wrong-headed: "... it is clear that every sentence in our language 'is in order as it is.' That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable

sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us" (PI #98). By way of conclusion to this exposition of Wittgenstein's problem of

meaning and his view of philosophy as a phenomenology, we might bring together a number of texts to counteract the impression we might have created in the last paragraph that all philosophy, and not just the theoretical variety, is misguided. It is true that Wittgenstein aims at "complete clarity," which "simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear" (PI #188). This is to be achieved by means of the "philosophy of logic" (PI #108) - which he describes as follows: "What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical [theoretical] to their everyday use" (PI #116). "What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand" (PI #118). "The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has

got by running its head up against the limits of language ..." (PI #119). In plain terms he announces his intention of demonstrating a method by examples. Not that we should suppose that there is a philosophical method, "though there are indeed methods, like different therapies" (PI #188). Hence, the proper work of the philosopher consists "in assembling re-

minders for a particular purpose [i.e., examples]" (PI #127), in "seeing connections," (PI #122), in putting questions (rather than in answering them) (RFM p. 68), in comparing things which it has never seriously occurred to anyone to compare .(RFM p. 170.) Thus it is that "Philo- sophical dissatisfaction disappears by our seeing more" (RFM p. 109). The emphasis here is on the seeing, for "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give, it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is" (PI

#124).


46 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGiCAL RESEARCH

Another motive has guided me in assembling these texts. They bring home in a striking way how I am using the word phenomenology in relation to Wittgenstein's philosophical method. And thus they serve to show how far we are from the Wesenschau of Husserl's phenomenology, or from Hei- degger's "Ontologie ist nur als Phanomenologie m6glich," 8 or even from the physicist's talk about the phenomenology of a problem as preliminary to theory or explanation. This distinctive character of Wittgenstein's phenomenology - "And -we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place" (PI *109) - is the core issue which I wish to discuss in the following section of this paper.

Anyone who has been trained in the physical sciences or in mathematics has no particular difficulty sympathizing with Wittgenstein's rejection of explanation. He will readily understand the climate of opposition to Bradley's version of Hegel which was prevalent in England at the time when Wittgenstein arrived there to further his studies in engineering and mathematics. The same passion for decisive proofs and once-for-all solutions which echoes in the preface to the Tractatus - "On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive" - can be found in Descartes and Kant. Philosophy, it would seem, is forever beginning anew; always a new foundation - this time solid, enduring. But it is one thing to reject previous explanations, another to rule out explanation as a bogus term. "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and

language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably" (PI #115). It is rather hard to believe that all great minds of the past have been trapped by words, guilty of hypostatizing abstractions and universals, and thereby led to formulate theories as unsubstantial as gossamer. Could they have failed to see if everything really lies open to view?

It is not my intention to argue this point, nor to do any more than to indicate another facet of Wittgenstein's presentation of a method which supposedly is divorced from theory. I refer to his therapeutic criterion: "What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (PI #116). It has often been suggested in the past - quite reasonably, I think, - that "everyday use" is every bit as muddled, naive, misleading as metaphysical use. Moreover, we have all been puzzled by the avowal that the Oxford dictionary is not the analyst's vademecum, and by the annoyance manifested at the implication that this study is a purely linguistic feat. And we have gone round and round - the motion induces a

8 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tfibingen, seventh edition, 1953, 35.



dizziness in every respect equal to that which some claim they experience in the transcendental or in a dialectic - trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious "we" as it is used by analysts.9 At times in our frustration we can only heartily agree with Bertrand Russell:

What in fact they believe in is not common usage, as determined by mass observation, statistics, medians, standard deviations, and the rest of the apparatus. What they believe in is the usage of persons who have their amount of education, neither more nor less - less is illiteracy, more is pedantry - so we are given to understand.10

More seriously, is not this stand on "everyday use" a philosophical stance, a Weltanschauung, a theory (Omptoc), that is, a way of looking at things? Certainly if it can be utilized as a redoubt from which to demolish other theories, it would seem to be a definite position, notwithstanding the refusal to offer theses (PI #128). We need not gainsay the value of Witt- genstein's method. As a technique, it undoubtedly has proved to be a contribution. But I, for one, find the pretence of offering a technique without any ' xvn (art, set of rules, system) meaningless, so that here I am merely calling for an honest explication. Hence, I am happy to find at least one analyst who, even though he expresses himself in a provocative way on the subject of existentialism, appears to recognize some analytic lacunae.

But many of us may be unwilling to take their little finger, let alone the whole hand. Satisfied with the progressive subtlety of our analytic methods, we will not stand the logical barbarisms of existentialism. Comfortably housed in our clean, func- tional, bright analysis, we ignore, with the glib snobbishness that believes itself unassailable, the dirty, impractical, dark slums of existentialism. Yet can we really believe that a philosophy which has spread over the free world so far and so fast, has not some good things to say, even though how they are said may repel us? Moreover, have we not an uneasy feeling that the experiences which thrive in these dark slums have perhaps been suppressed in us at the price of philosophical frustration? 11

What I am suggesting, then, as the core issue of Wittgenstein's phenomenology is his espousal of description divorced from explanation. Further, I would maintain that what lies behind this position, even in the PI, is that

9 The reader's attention is directed to " 'We' in Modern Philosophy," by M. B. Foster - chapter viii in Faith and Logic, edited by Basil Mitchell. Starr King Press, 1957. Mr. Foster notes two other articles on this subject: Professor G. E. Moore's "The Philosophy of Common Sense," in Contemporary British Philosophy, second series, 1925, and the epilogue of R. G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics, 1940.

10 "The Cult of Common Usage," in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Feb. 1953, cited by Foster in a note on p. 195.

11 Walter Cerf, in a review of the Eleventh International Congress of Philosophy, The Philosophical Review, LXIV, 1955, 298. In a footnote he adds: "Even in Sidney Hook's brilliant attack on Being there seems to be a certain uneasiness, as if he sus- pected that he is missing something. Cf. also S. Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics, Cambridge, 1950, p. 209ff, where one finds a grudging admission of 'limiting questions."'



positivistic mentality which would seem to be his precious legacy from David Hume. The phenomenalism of Hume, as we know, is a logical consequence of his view of the mind. He tells us in the Treatise: "Now the nature and effects of experience have been already sufficiently examined and explained. It never gives us any insight into the internal structure or operating principle of objects, but only accustoms the mind to pass from one to another." 12 For the moment we are not interested in the question of whether or not what we are being offered by Hume in this passage, specifically in the word 'never,' is an insight into the nature of the mind. Rather, our concern is that the reader should recognize the theme in Wittgenstein's variation.

"But then doesn't our understanding reach beyond all the examples"? - A very queer expression, and a quite natural one! - But is that all? Isn't there a deeper explanation; or mustn't at least the unnder- standing of the explanation be deeper? -Well, have I myself a deeper understanding ? Have I got more than I give in the explanation? - But then, whence the feeling that I have got more? Is it like the case where I interpret what is not limited as a length that reaches beyond every length? (PI #209.)

What we might call "everyday experience" seems to offer some support to this Humean-Wittgensteinian view of the mind. Suddenly, for example, we hear a crash outside.

"What happened?" you ask. "A car ran into a tree." "How come?" "Take a look out there. Road is pretty slick today. Besides, it's an old

jalopy; the threads on the tires are probably shot." From a certain standpoint it might be conceded that what is here being

offered as an explanation is only "another level" of description. "Road is pretty slick today" describes a state of affairs which very likely suffices as an explanation for a youngster. "The treads on the tires are probably shot" is a description which may count as an explanation for the"man-on- the-street." Both of these "explanations" by description undoubtedly would prove inadequate to the theoretical physicist. Obviously theproblem is not to be solved even by a "scientific" explanation, for what further reason have we for accepting this kind of description as the explanation? Granted a thoroughgoing Humean view of the mind, we never arrive at the noumenon - that totally adequate knowledge of "the internal structure or operating principle of objects" which presumably only a creative intelli- gence would have.

12 A Treati8e of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955, 169.


WITTGENSTEIN 'S PHENOMENOLOGY 49

Do I wish to suggest that Wittgenstein would buy Hume's theory lock, stock, and barrel? Not at all. I am inclined to believe that he would go along with the common sense analysis of the situation which classifies description under the category of the information-seeking question, "What?" and explanation as belonging under "Why?" or "How come?" The fact that Wittgenstein rules-explanation out of philosophy constitutes no objection to my contention. Rather, it points out all the more clearly what seems to me to be his fundamental stance, namely, that the task of philosophy is solely descriptive precisely because anything that is to count as a genuine explanation is to be sought for in the other sciences, or simply speaking, in "science." We find no explicit statement of this position in PI. Nevertheless, it appears to be the grounds for his dissatisfaction with the kind of explanation philosophers are wont to give, and his consequent limitation of the philosophical problem to the linguistic, one of sign in relation to signified.

Wittgenstein, we should recall, was educated along scientific lines. And to me he appears too much the scientist ever to subscribe to the outmoded Lockean heritage that infra-microscopic particles are "purely theoretical" in the naive sense. My guess is that he would agree with the claim of the scientists to ultimate explanations, in so far as these are possible for human beings. His strictures, due to a half-hearted Humean view, are reserved for the mind when it philosophizes. I must confess that I am as disappointed over his anomalous position as he was over Norman Mal- colm's choice of philosophy as a profession.

In the course of this paper I have tried to show that the relationship of sign to signified is the unifying concern of Wittgenstein's philosophical problems. In addition, we have seen that this basic issue of "meaning"

accounts for his view of philosophy as a phenomenology, as exercising a descriptive function. Without arguing the point, I asserted my belief in the continuous unity of the Tractatus and the PI. It is to this point that I wish to return once more as a fitting conclusion to my discussion of what I have called the core issue of Wittgenstein's phenomenology, the description- explanation distinction.

Basing myself primarily on the P1, I have suggested that Wittgenstein's mature view is that philosophy is to be limited to description, leaving all explanation to "science." At the end of the Tractatus (6.53) we find the astonishing admission:

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method.



Today we view the Tractatus as a relic of Wittgenstein's logical positivism. It is replete with the logical atomism which we associate with Vienna. It draws its breath from the verification theory which Mr. Ayer made so much of in his early days. I suggest that it is too much a part of Wittgenstein's mentality ever to have been discarded by some kind of ecdysis. A fruitful topic for further discussion might be the polymorphism of the PI - meaning is to be discerned in use - as a verificationist theory of meaning.

THOMAS N. MUNSON, S.J. LOYOLA UNIVERSITY, CHICAGO.


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