Phihilosophicaf Zrivestigations 15:3 July 1992 ISSN 0190-0536 82.50

CRITICAL NOTICE

Value G Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, Edited by Raimond Gaita, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, xiii + 288 pp. Price 240

Anthony Palmer, University of Southampton

‘Essays in honour of’ is not an appealing literary genre. This is particularly true of essays in philosophy, Those invited to write them are tempted to think of the person they are invited to honour as being someone about whom nil nisi bonurn. Yet the only worthwhile tribute to a philosopher is paid by those who take his writing seriously in their own philosophical work. It is this kind of tribute which saves the present volume from being merely honorific.

Value G. Understanding contains essays by Norman Malcolm, R. F. Holland, Frank Cioffi, Karl-Otto Apel, Lars Hertsberg, Raimond Gaita, Cora Diamond, Rush Rhees, Ilham Dilman, D.Z. Phillips, Alasdair MacIntyre and Dan Rashid. The deep influence on most of the contributors is Ludwig Wittgenstein: the mediating influence on many of them is Rush Rhees; and it soon becomes clear on opening the book that we are about to be immersed in the distinctive concerns that we have come to expect from the philosophy department of University College Swansea. Phillips, the present head of the department was a student there when Rhees, Holland and Winch were members of the academic staff and Wittgenstein himself, largely, but not entirely because of Rhees’s presence, opted for Swansea rather than Cambridge as a place to work on the manuscript of his Philosophical Investigations between the Spring and Autumn of 1944. I shall concentrate my remarks on this aspect of the volume under review.

Since the publication in 1958 of his monograph The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy in Roy Holland’s distinguished series under the general title of ‘Studies in Philosoph- ical Psychology’ Peter Winch has occupied a distinctive position in contemporary philosophy. The central thesis of The Idea of a Social

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Science was what Winch took to be the truism that ‘our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. The concepts we have settle for us the form of experience we have of the world.’ (p. 15). From this standpoint he argued that ‘many of the more important theoretical issues which have been raised [in the social sciences] belong to philosophy rather than to science and are, therefore to be settled by a priori conceptual analysis rather than by empirical research. ’ Published at a time when the various social sciences, in particular sociology, were rapidly staking out their claims for empirical investigation, the book became something of a sucds de scandale. In the hullabaloo that followed the central insight of the book was lost sight of. For what it had to say was not so much directed at social scientists as at philosophers.

Winch thought that a wrong conception of philosophical investigations had encouraged the view that certain problems about man and society were outside its province. The distinction between conceptual investigations and empirical investigations had been drawn at the wrong point or in the wrong way. Issues of substance were ipsofacto contrasted with logical issues leaving to philosophy only the task of clearing away the ‘rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge’, which in the twentieth century as in the seventeenth century was thought to be the result of linguistic confusion. But Winch had learned from Wittgenstein that while indeed ‘phdosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ it is not a battle that can be won by any attempt to become clear about language in laboratory conditions, i.e. in an atmosphere uncontaminated by any inkling of the occasions and surroundings in which things are said. ‘Language’ as Rhees insisted ‘is something that is spoken.’ It is not a tool for speaking. So Winch argued both that ‘any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of human society’ but also that ‘any worthwhile study of society must be philosophical in character.’ (p. 3) The latter caused an uproar, the former, almost, but not quite, went unnoticed. It is the former, however, that in a series of penetrating papers since the publication of T h e Idea o f a Social Science, Winch has patiently exemplified. Gaita rightly stresses this point in his short introduction to these essays. ‘Peter Winch’s work’ he writes ‘is marked by his deep awareness of this, the most fundamental aspect of Wittgenstein’s legacy - that we cannot purify our

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concepts of their embeddedness in human life and of their expression in natural languages without being left with only a shadow play of the grammar of serious judgment’ (p. xi-xii).

The first three papers in this collection focus on a challenge to one way of taking this idea of the embeddedness of concepts in human life. They centre around Winch’s lecture to the British Academy in 1982 entitled ‘Ceasing to Exist’ in which a story by the late I‘saac Bashevis Singer is discussed. In the story the following story is related.

Near Blonia there lived a man, Reb Zelig, the bailiff. He had a store and a shed where he kept kindling wood, flax, potatoes, old ropes. He had a sleigh there too. He got up one morning and the shed was gone. He could not believe his eyes. If during the night there had been a wind, a storm, a flood. But it happened after Pentecost - calm days, quiet nights. At first he thought he had lost his mind. He called his wife, his children. They ran out. ‘Where is the shed?’ There was no shed. Where it had been everything was smooth - high grass, no beams, no shingles, no sign of foundation. Nothing.

Winch argued in his lecture that while this story of a shed simply ceasing to exist is intelligible enough in a story, if someone were to seriously claim that such an event had occurred it would not so much be thought to be obviously false but rather that it presents us with something that was not yet a candidate for truth o r falsity, i.e. something which did not make sense. The proposition ‘The shed existed on Monday and did not exist on Tuesday’ if it is to be intelligible requires an understanding of what a shed is. Part of this understanding is that sheds are not the sort of thing that can cease to exist without something happening which brings this about, something such as a wind, storm or flood which the story rules out. In other words we are presenting something as intelligible while simultaneously cancelling the conditions of intelligibility. Winch cites Wittgenstein’s remark

The stream of life, or stream of the world, flows on and our propositions are so to speak verified only at instants.

Our propositions are only verified by the present. So they must be so constructed that they can be verified by it.

He claimed that to accept ‘that something . . . like a shed could just cease to exist from one moment to the next is to remove both the object in question and one’s contemplating of it from that

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“stream”. But this removal is a cancellation of the conditions under which anything one says or thinks has sense: including the words “It has ceased to exist”’.

The passage from Wittgenstein can be read as one of the numerous ways in which he characterises the background within which what we say makes sense, or, if you like the background that is necessary for us to have anything to say. His most cited expression of the view comes in the Philosophical Investigations where he remarks that ‘what has to be accepted, the given so to speak are forms of life’. It is a way of understanding this phrase which is most characteristic of the group of philosophers, some of whom are represented in this volume, of which Winch is a central figure, often disparagingly referred to as the Swansea Wittgenstein- ians. It has led to the accusation of conservativism bitterly resented particularly by Winch himself. ‘Am I setting the status quo in concrete as is well known to be the sneaky practice of “Wittgen- steinian conservatives”?’ he asks in his recent Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture. And answers with a resounding ‘No’. It is typical of Winch that he brings the problem into focus by means of a captivating example taken from the Singer story. In this volume of essays Roy Holland and Norman Malcolm take issue.

Neither Holland nor Malcolm take issue with the Wittgensteinian principle but they do take issue with Winch’s way of understanding it. That ‘the stream of life’ provides a criterion of intelligibility is not something which either of them deny or indeed that anyone could seriously deny. Holland however, thinks that while it is certainly a criterion it is not the only one, and that there are occasions when it could be overridden by another criterion. ‘One of the most salient aspects of human life’ he argues ‘is that our understanding of what it is for something to exist and be present in our proximity finds expression in primitive reactions of a kind shared by all living creatures’. Moreover, although ‘only some judgments of perception and memory are expressed in animal reactions’ nevertheless ‘it makes good sense to regard all such judgments as extensions of animal awareness’ (pp. 34-35). Now as soon as we provide more than one criterion of intelligibility the possibility of a conflict of criteria arises. In effect the Singer story provides us with just such a case. Reb Zelig ‘got up one morning and the shed was gone. He could not believe his eyes.’ He knew that sheds do not just disappear overnight without any explanation

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i.e. without anything having happened to them, and yet he knew that this one had. Winch thinks that outside the ‘stream of life’ which makes talk of sheds and other things intelligible, which is where the Singer story attempts to place them, the Zelig family could not be certain of anything about the shed. Norman Malcolm, in substantial agreement with Holland on the issue argues that, on the contrary,

they could be certain that the shed had been there for a long time, that suddenly it was no longer there, and there was no intelligible explanation of the change from its being there to its not being there . . . They would be bewildered, but this bewilderment would not necessarily undermine that certainty. Indeed, that bewilderment would arise from that certainty. (p. 11).

At issue in this debate, of course, there is more than just the story of a shed or of the intelligibility of things just ceasing to exist but our understanding of what a criterion of intelligibility is. Winch, correctly suspicious of the line of argument which goes that if we can understand both of two mutually consistent propositions then we can equally understand their conjunction seeks to provide a criterion of intelligibility other than that of consistency or lack of contradiction, and characteristically locates it in the practice, form of life or stream of life in which what we say is embedded: outside that background intelligibility disappears. But if this background itself contains the possibility of conflicting criteria, as both Malcolm and Holland argue, in what way can the purported criteria of intelligibility be just that i.e. criteria of intelligibility? To do the job that Winch wants it to do the form of life or stream of life has to be such as to not permit the kind of conflict in question. And that kind of conflict is, of course just one of inconsistency o r contradiction. Consistency as the criterion of intelligibility is not removed by the invocation of a form of life to play that role if the invocation tacitly supposes that forms of life need to be in the same sense consistent.

Certainly one of the contrasts Wittgenstein wished to draw when he talked about ‘forms of life’ was between situations in which questions of justification can sensibly be raised and those in which such questions make no sense. Holland is well aware of this in his defence of the possibility of what he calls preternatural change. ‘My position on the topic ofjustification’ he says ‘is actually that there can be no justification for anyone’s believing, feeling sure, being in

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no doubt etc. that a preternatural change has occurred or that a miracle has occurred’ (p. 39). This contrast is to the fore in the remarks that Wittgenstein wrote on Frazer’s Colder? Bough which are the topic of Frank Cioffi’s contribution to this volume. He entitles it ‘Wittgenstein on Making Homeopathic Magic Clear’. In it he discusses Wittgenstein’s attitude to the view that magic should be regarded as instrumental in character.

Cioffi seeks to show that ‘the view that Wittgenstein straight- forwardly denied the instrumental character of magic is mistaken. ’ In fact he thinks that, certain of his remarks not withstanding, Wittgenstein did not have a coherent attitude towards the instru- mental conceptions of magic. However that may be Cioffi is well aware that Wittgenstein in considering magical practices and rites was concerned to stress that if we view them as essentially founded on beliefs about the efficacy of certain procedures, i.e. as the outcome of certain ratiocinative procedures we are likely to be unclear about their ritual or magical character. The business, therefore of making magic or ritual clear will have to be a quite different business from that of explaining how people who engage in these practices came to believe that they were instrumentally efficacious even if many do actually think that they are so. The business of making clear might take the form of rearranging what we already know. For example it might take the form of relating seemingly occult practices to aspects of our own behaviour. The practice of burning an effigy, for example, might become more intelligible to us if we ceased to ask ourselves how those who engage in it could have come to the view that it might secure an effect but instead set it alongside behaviour familiar to us all such as (Wittgenstein’s own example) kissing the picture of a loved one about which we would never dream of asking such questions. However, Cioffi concludes, the best evaluation of Wittgenstein’s remarks about making homeopathic magic clear is not the light that they shed on actual ritual practices ‘since perspicuity bears so tenuous a relation to historicity’, but rather the illumination they provide about our relations to those practices. Whether such illumination is worth seeking might seem dubious and I think does seem dubious to Cioffi himself, since he thinks that the whole endeavour is confronted with the difficulty that

those who do respond with perplexity to accounts of certain practices and who are in search of the satisfaction of which

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Wittgenstein speaks and which can only come about by being related to an inclination of their own, will often respond diversely to the parallels and analogies which are intended to produce such satisfaction.

If the diversity of response is indeed ineliminable it might be wondered what clarity can be produced by the business of ‘making clear’.

The contrast between seeking an explanation for beliefs in terms of their justification, or the reasoning that lies behind them and the kind of explanation which consists in making things clear is reflected in moral philosophy in the debate about the universalizab- ility of moral judgments. Several of the papers in this volume centre on this issue. Karl-Otto Ape1 writes directly on it under the title of ‘Universal Principles and Particular Decisions and Forms of Life’; much of what Lars Hertzberg has to say in his paper ‘Moral Necessity’ hinges on it and it is central to Raimond Gaita’s contribution entitled ‘Ethical Individuality’. Nor is it far behind the scene in Cora Diamond’s powerful critique of utilitarian ethics in her paper ‘How Many Legs’. Fundamental to the contrast is what we appeal to when we seek to explain by putting into order what we already know. Wittgenstein would say that what we appeal to are those agreements in judgments which are necessary if language is to be a means of communication. It was this that he described as ‘not agreement in opinion but in form of life’.

This idea of agreement in judgments is, however, easy to misunderstand. It is certainly misunderstood if it is thought to be equivalent to ‘a postulate of universal consensus as being an implication of the very notion of serious, argumentative discourse. ’ This is Karl-Otto Apel’s phrase. Consensus, universal or otherwise, operates at the level of opinions whereas Wittgenstein’s ‘agreement in judgments’ operates at quite a different level. It is partially a recognition of this different level that enabled Winch, in his paper which prompted Apel’s discussion, to question the idea that moral judgments are necessarily universalizable. When someone seriously is in the position of trying to make up his mind what he ought to do and finally does make it up, others can find that decision intelligible even though they themselves would not come to that decision in those circumstances. Moreover the person making the decision is not bound to think that others in the same situation ought to make the same decision or the same judgment. This belongs to the idea of

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making a decision about what one ought to do. If I am in the business of forming an opinion about something then it is my responsibility to make my opinion a reasonable opinion and it does indeed belong to this idea that on the basis of the same information people should end up with the same opinion. But making up your mind what you ought to do is not like seeking to form an opinion and to treat it as though it were is to turn the deliberation that leads to action into a form of fanaticism. The idea of integrity in human behaviour is not exhausted by a narrowly logical notion of consistency. In many of his papers Winch has drawn attention to a kind of modality which is important for understanding moral concerns and yet is one which is not exhausted by the laws of logic nor by the laws, if there are any, of psychology. Captain Vere of Melville’s Billy Bud, Foretopman could not allow his conscience to override his responsibility for implementing the King’s Regulations. We can understand this even though we, like Winch, cannot conceive that in his position we would have done the same: and it would be idiotic to suggest (i.e. you would not be getting much out of the novel) that our understanding is in this case merely an understanding of how Vere understandably went wrong.

Turning agreement in judgements into consensus in opinions will invariably devalue the importance of individuals. In weighing the reasonableness of opinions the person whose opinions they are is of no importance. It is this point which is central to Cora Diamonds Essay entitled ‘How Many Legs’. In it she discusses, among other things, the virtue of benevolence. The benevolent person on any account will be concerned with the avoidance of suffering. But how should concern about the avoidance of suffering be understood?

It might seem at first sight that there is no difficulty with this. We know what suffering is and we know what avoidance is so we know what avoidance of suffering is. Moreover, if we had world enough and time we would be able to work out for any situation in which we found ourselves the thing to do which to the maximal extent possible would minimize the suffering in the world. We would be able to work out what to do which would produce maximal welfare. It is this way of thinking that leads moral philosophers to invent a person who has world enough and time: an ‘ideally impartial observer whose benevolence extends to everyone’; someone, unlike any of us, who embodies Sidgwick’s

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intuition that ‘the good of any one individual is of no more importance from the point of view of the universe, than the good of any other.’ The trouble is, as Diamond points out, that the judgements we are obliged to ascribe to such an ideal observer bear scant resemblance to anything we would be inclined to call benevolence. In this sense, she argues, utilitarian benevolence is not benevolence a t all.

If ‘avoidence of suffering’ is explained in terms which tie it to maximum welfare then benevolent people are concerned with something else. If ‘avoidance of suffering’ is explained in terms of a welfare sum, then suffering is avoided if one chooses to rescue an able-bodied person rather than an otherwise similar disabled person, if one has to make the choice. But the ordinary benevolent person, with hic understanding of ‘avoiding suffering’, would not think that benevolence urged him to rescue the able bodied person. Benevolence in such a case does not aim a t maximum welfare (p. 160)

What the notion of maximum welfare leaves out is the individual who is making the judgment. The ideal impartial observer is, of course, no individual. He is given the characteristics he has precisely to prevent any individual characteristics from making a difference to the judgments he makes. But just for that reason what he takes into account in making his judgments can have no significance for him. ‘The utilitarians’ Diamond concludes ‘should be a warning of how the desire for systematized impartiality can denature moral thought.’ Like the character in Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’ with which she opens her contribution to this volume, ‘they may be quick and alert in the things of life . . . but not in the significances.’ ‘Peter Winch’s work’ she adds ‘has always been directed towards the significances.’

Value and Understanding is a worthwhile collection of Essays in honour of a philosopher who has made, and I have no doubt will continue to make a distinctive contribution to philosophy. Sadly two of the contributors to the volume, Rush Rhees and Norman Malcolm, are no longer with us. They are missed.

Dept . of Philosophy, University of Southampton