A deed Without a Name
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| ing’ in innumerable possible situations) which gets coded, not an ‘entity’, a fixed (even ‘Platonic’) object.
‘Private-language’ Thinking that meaning is the ‘concept in the head’ may also lead to the position that since everybody’s concept (meaning) is in his or her head, and since that concept might be different with respect to everybody and there is no other way to ‘compare’ our respective concepts in our head than through the meanings themselves, all meanings are private. A good example could be the following. Somebody keeps a diary and whenever he has a certain feeling, e.g. the feeling of pain, he puts a certain sign, e.g. S into this diary. Nobody else knows what S stands for, so it is his private sign and thus, the meaning of S is private, referring here to the person’s pain. But Wittgenstein points out that while of course we can always use any sign for any purposes (so we can put, privately, all signs to the most idiosyncratic uses), our very ability to use a sign (any sign, including S) is not private: the person using sign S is able to use thousands and thousands of other signs and he has learnt this from his speaking-community; he used S by analogy, ‘on the basis’ of other signs, so his very ability to use any sign, even the most idiosyncratic one, remains, willy-nilly participating in a communal activity. So the reference of S may be idiosyncratic, it can remain a ‘secret’ (private) forever but the use of the sign (the ability to use a sign, whichever, at all) will remain a non-private, communal (shared) activity, a participation in a form of life. So, in this sense, there is no ‘private language’. Is Philosophical Investigations itself philosophical? The title of Wittgenstein’s book: Philosophical Investigations of course indicates that he, in one way or another, did subscribe to a mode of thinking he was willing to call ‘philosophical’, yet even as his, by now legendary attitude to his Cambridge professorship and to the whole tradition of philosophy, as well as to his teaching practice, indicate, ‘philosophical’ here means anything but a customary or canonical academic discipline. Rather, the adjective might be interpreted as an undertaking which raises doubts about its philosophical nature not only from the ‘outside’ but from the ‘inside’ as well. A famous piece of criticism from the ‘outside’ is by Bertrand Russell, who was as much baf fled and disappointed by the work of the “later” Wittgenstein as he admired and thought the early piece, the Tractatus to be extremely promising and challenging. Russell found Philo sophical Investigations “completely unintelligible. Its positive doctrines” – Russell wrote – seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded. I have not found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations anything that seems to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages. (Russell 1972: 132) Another very well-known philosopher of our century, Sir Karl Popper joins Russell in this unsympathetic assessment; my quotation comes from a discussion Bryan Magee initiated on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy between Popper, Geoffrey Warnock and Peter Strawson. Popper says: Should you force me at gun-point to say what it is I disagree in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations I would have to say: ‘Oh – nothing...’. Indeed, I only disagree with the enterprise. I cannot disagree with anything he says, because there is nothing one can disagree with. But I confess that I am bored by it – bored to tears. [...] How can you disagree with things which are so vague and so trivial? I do think the possibility of disagreeing with what a writer writes is of decisive importance. One could regard it almost as a criterion of whether it’s worth reading. If a man writes only signs with which one cannot possibly quarrel, and to which one can only say, ‘Well-maybe-perhaps-well-maybe-maybe, maybe yes, maybe no’, then I should be inclined to say there isn’t much point in the enterprise of this kind. This is how I see the issue. (Magee 1971: 45) As far as the ‘inside’ (internal) criticism of the Investigations is concerned, it is, indeed, a work in which it is the very possibility of philosophy which is constantly at stake, a piece which questions its own philosophical nature exactly by the philosophy it produces. One of the best-known cruces to bring this point home is the following: The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. (PI, §133, empha sis original). Wittgenstein’s investigations are, of course, “philosophical” if by the adjective one means, first and foremost, intensive and original thinking, or an incessant and obsessive energy to return to certain questions, or, even further, the humbleness to start from scratch again and again: this is what I characterised as ‘metaphysical’ in the Introduction. They are also “philosophical” if one is willing to agree, as Cavell pointed out a long time ago (Cavell 1976: 70-72), that the Investigations fits well into the tradition of confessional philosophy. This is an insight which puts the later Wittgenstein alongside with the philosophical note-, essay-, diary-, and (sham)autobiography-writers, rather than with the system-builders: with Augustine rather than with Aquinas, with Pascal rather than with Descartes, with Montaigne rather than the Bacon of the Novum Organum, with Rousseau rather than with Leibnitz, with Emerson rather than with Kant, and with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rather than with Hegel or Marx. It is, of course, another question how one conceives of the relationship between the “confessional” and the “systematic”, especially from the “canonical” point of view—yet that is not my main concern here. Karl Popper is certainly right in claiming that the Investigations is not ‘philosophy’ in the sense that it would contain doctrines, final conclusions or over-arching solutions: its thought-paths invite us to a kind of communal thinking and an urge for increasing the demand to clear up “muddles” of thinking for ourselves, while it declines a claim to a system, to a closed or even disciplined theory. The Investigations does as much for the remission and the deployment of a new way of looking at philosophical problems, at one another as human beings, at ourselves and at the world (these ‘looks’ heavily intertwined) as it does for the dismissal and the unemployment of a tradition in Western philosophy. Wittgenstein gives instances of ‘thinking demeanours’ and a reflective mien rather than a ‘cash-and-carry’ body of knowledge. In simpler terms: the later Wittgenstein may teach us how to think but he will not tell us what to think. Thus it is the peculiar nature or ‘status’ of the philosophy my study will call to its aid which prevents me from drawing a straightforward borderline between philosophy and literature and from relying on that borderline. I will return to this problem several times, especially at the end of Chapter 6 and in Chapter 7. Now I turn to the interpretation of Macbeth in five “metaphysical blocks”: source, space, time, the identity of objects and self-identity.
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