I heart Wittgenstein

So I've been teaching the Philosophical Investigations this term, which gives me an excuse to re-read the book from cover to cover for the first time in a few years, as well as a chance to read for the first time the new translation that came out last year (which is really just an update and improvement on the original Anscombe translation). It's been great fun, and naturally I keep discovering new things, either things I hadn't noticed before, or connections I notice for the first time in passages that were already familiar.

One of the things I’ve found striking--and the thing I wanted to comment on--is how much I can see Wittgenstein's influence on the plays and other forms of make-believe that I create. There's a wonderful sense of absurdity in Wittgenstein that I think you'd love (have you ever read him?). Not so much outright jokes (though there are a few, depending on your sense of humour) as a pervasive sense of the world looked at askew, so that everything seems bizarre, out of place, ridiculous. And that's married with a very patient attitude toward the absurdities: Wittgenstein wants to nurse them gently rather than push any of them too hard.

There's a fair amount of debate about how to read Wittgenstein, ranging from people who think the best we can do with him is treat him like he was an analytic philosopher with a penchant for obscurity and try to tease tidy philosophical theses out of him to people who think his unique literary form serves a unique philosophical method that we ignore at our peril. As you can imagine, I fall more toward the latter end of that spectrum. My reading tries to take seriously his claim that if we were to advance theses in philosophy it would be impossible to debate them because everyone would agree to them, and so tries to find ways of reading Wittgenstein as not advancing theses.

To a large extent, I think the way to read Wittgenstein is as offering what he calls "objects of comparison." At §144 of the Philosophical Investigations he writes: "I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this sequence of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things." For instance, Wittgenstein encourages us to imagine a pupil who constantly gets things wrong in following out mathematical rules and can't be induced to do it "right." Wittgenstein doesn't tell us "the rules we normally take to be grounded in necessity are grounded in nothing stronger than our tendency to teach and learn in similar ways, so that, for the most part, we can teach people by getting them to see what we mean, but there's no way we can compel understanding." Rather, he finds the right absurdities to help us toward this view. (This claim obviously needs to be complicated: if all he's trying to do is get us to see the thing I wrote explicitly above, why didn't he just say so?). He sets the world we know against a world that's thrown weirdly askew, and the comparison leads us to see the world we know in a different light, in a way that dispels our philosophical confusions (or tries to do so).

It struck me that, though I don't do philosophy this way, it does reflect the way I approach my plays to a large extent. The well-chosen scenario is one that presents a fictional world that casts a jarring light on the real world. I'm not looking for the scenario that tells us what the real world is like so much as the one that gives us a point of comparison, or a perspective, on the real world such that we see it differently. And, in fact, this seems a not-bad sketch of what literature aims to do generally. Or one thing that literature does.

In this respect, it occurs to me that Wittgenstein interestingly blurs the old distinction between philosophy and literature. If philosophy is supposed to state claims directly and literature is supposed to cast light on matters obliquely by way of comparison, what Wittgenstein writes is more like literature than philosophy. This might explain why he's often greeted with such confusion and irritation within the halls of professional philosophy. What would Plato think?