Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

Wittgenstein, sometimes by Bernd Frohmann Wittgenstein and His Times. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1982. £8.50. US$15.00. Pp. vi, 122. Wittgenstein and His Times collects five previously published papers that "attempt to tease out Wittgenstein's central or characteristic attitude, his Weltanschauung" by showing "the agreement and difference between Wittgenstein's thought and the thought of some who were in a broad sense his contemporaries" (p. v). The enterprise remains speculative even after the publication of Vermischte Bemerkungen, I because Wittgenstein's silence on topics he considered remote from fundamental questions in philosophy often seems to present a greater interpretive challenge than his few cryptic offerings. Furthermore, placing Wittgenstein in intellectual history is difficult because it demands a critical and philosophical evaluation of his view that his own philosophy is radically different from that of his predecessors. (Not the least of the benefits of the exercise would be a contribution toward ~ssessing Russell 's well-known dismissal of Wittgenstein's later thought.2) The contributors to this volume try to elucidate the Weltanschauung of Wittgenstein's later thought by offering their speculations on his political attitude, his understanding of myth and ritual, and his relation to philosophy and psychoanalysis. The topic of Anthony Kenny's lead article, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", is too often ignored by attention to Wittgenstein 's contributions to more technical subjects. Kenny's subject is the role ofphilosophy in everyday life. Wittgenstein says that philosophy has a practical use as a tool against the philosopher in us. For Kenny, this means that philosophy can be used to qualify people for scientific inquiry and to provide a defence against theological mystifications and pseudoscientific explanations. Kenny's interpretation ignores Wittgenstein's well-documented antiscientism . Although Wittgenstein undoubtedly felt, as Kenny points out, that mathematics and psychology would be transformed by the kind I Ludwig Wirtgenstein, Vennischte Bemerkungen, edited by Georg Henrik von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977). Translated by Peter Winch as Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). ! My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959). See pp. 216-17. 71 72 Russell summer 1983 of analysis he teaches, it is doubtful that benefit to science accurately represents the advantage to the ordinary person that Wittgenstein might have intended for his philosophy. Wittgenstein's later writings are dominated by a very powerful sense of both the debilitating force of conceptual confusion and the correspondingly powerful liberation from grammatical illusion. Kenny's interpretation does justice to neither, because he limits philosophy's benefits to a social class sufficiently privileged by educational and economic advantage to concern themselves with theological and pseudo-scientific mythologies. A fallacy of equivocation infects the argument. Although he sees that for Wittgenstein, confusion comes when language idles but not when imbedded in what Wittgenstein calls practice, Kenny is led to the false conclusion that philosophy has little effect on daily practical life. Then there appears the problem of how freedom from illusions created by idling language can be of any practical help to people, with the inevitable answer that philosophy can help only idling people. But illusion-free linguistic practice is not the same as confusion-free practical life. The practical life of human beings includes the thousands of activities making up their daily round. It includes much more than what Wittgenstein understands by practice. Ifphilosophy has the practical use that Wittgenstein contends, then an analysis is required of how the metaphysical pictures, or grammatical fictions, endemic to idling language have effects on how people live. Idling language may throw a spanner in the work and play of daily practical life. The force that one feels in Wittgenstein's thought is understood by seeing how the metaphysical pictures imbedded in our language foul up our relationships with our neighbours, friends, family, lovers, and ourselves. Not the least of the advantages of Kenny's otherwise clear and admirable essay is to point toward a neglected but fertile area of Wittgensteinian interpretation. In "Freud and Wittgenstein", Brian McGuinness tries to clarify Wittgenstein's puzzling remark that he considered himself a follower of Freud. For Wittgenstein, Freudian analysis offers the patient a...