comparative & continental philosophy, Vol. 5 No. 1, May, 2013, 67–80 Psyches Therapeia: Therapeutic Dimensions in Heidegger and Wittgenstein Robert Eli Sanchez, JR. The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA Robert D. Stolorow The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical investigation is a way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either considered in isolation. keywords Heidegger, Wittgenstein, therapy, metaphysics, anxiety, scientism, illusion, metaphilosophy There is nothing which requires such gentle handling as an illusion. —Søren Kierkegaard The idea that philosophy as questioning dialogue has a therapeutic aim and impact goes back at least as far as the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues (1997). It is in the Apology that Socrates spells out most explicitly the therapeutic aim of his philosophical method, the elenchus, as well as the unity of its investigative and therapeutic aims. The divine purpose, he claims, of his practice of philosophy, of ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1757063813Z.0000000006 68 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW his devotion to questioning, examining, and testing the men of Athens, is to persuade them to care ‘‘for the best possible state of [their] soul[s]’’ (30b)—to provide psyches therapeia. In this article we seek to show that an analogous therapeutic aim underlies the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein and, in a certain sense, unifies them. We are not the first to recommend comparing Heidegger and Wittgenstein, nor the first to emphasize the therapeutic dimension of their respective philosophies.1 However, whereas the literature concerning the therapeutic dimension of their philosophies tends to focus on the later Wittgenstein or the relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy for psychoanalytic treatment, we argue that the transformative aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a feature of the development of his thought, from early to later, and that their philosophies are not just instrumentally useful for psychotherapy, but potentially therapeutic in themselves. We do not state here what we consider the most striking parallels between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, except briefly in the conclusion, since doing so threatens to undermine the parallel that we find most striking—namely their common unwillingness to summarize their thought in the form of philosophical theses. Instead, we hope to help the reader ‘‘see what we see,’’ a method of argumentation we attribute to both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and which Wittgenstein recommends in his Lectures in 1930–33: Reasons, [Wittgenstein] said, in Aesthetics, are ‘‘of the nature of further descriptions’’: e.g. You can make a person see what Brahms was driving at by showing him lots of different pieces of Brahms, or by comparing him with a contemporary author; and all that Aesthetics does is ‘‘to draw your attention to a thing,’’ to ‘‘place things side by side’’… if, by giving ‘‘reasons’’ of this sort, you make another person ‘‘see what you see’’ but it still ‘‘does not appeal to him,’’ that is ‘‘an end’’ of the discussion… And he said that the same sort of ‘‘reasons’’ [are] given, not only in Ethics, but also in philosophy. (Wittgenstein 1993)1 Our plan, then, is to place Heidegger and Wittgenstein side by side to draw the reader’s attention to our way of considering them together, and if we are successful, to draw attention to the idea that the method of comparison, indirect though it is, is more faithful to the therapeutic—as opposed to speculative—aim of their philosophies. Heidegger Like Socrates, Heidegger, in his 1929230 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995), emphasizes that philosophy is neither an absolute science nor a worldview, but ‘‘our own human activity’’ (Heidegger 1995, 4). ‘‘Philosophy is philosophizing… It points the direction in which we have to search’’ (Heidegger 1995, 4). More specifically, ‘‘Philosophy… is a homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere,… which awakens us to such questions as… 1 Although not always explicitly, Stanley Cavell (1984) emphasizes the therapeutic aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. See also James Peterman (1992). PSYCHES THERAPEIA 69 what is world, finitude, individuation?’’ (Heidegger 1995, 6), questions by which we must ‘‘have first been gripped’’ (Heidegger 1995, 7). In philosophical questioning, ‘‘we ourselves, the questioners, are… placed into question’’ (Heidegger 1995, 9). Thus philosophizing ‘‘is turbulence, the turbulence into which man is spun, so as in this way alone to comprehend Dasein [the human being] without delusion’’ (Heidegger 1995, emphasis added). In philosophizing, man is ‘‘driven out of [the delusions of] everydayness and driven back into the ground of things’’ (Heidegger 1995, 21). The therapeutic-transformational aim of philosophizing to which Heidegger alludes in the foregoing passages becomes even more explicit in his elucidations of philosophical concepts as being formally indicative rather than being referential in the usual sense.2 ‘‘What philosophy deals with,’’ he claims, ‘‘only discloses itself at all within and from out of a transformation of human Dasein’’ (Heidegger 1995, 292). Philosophical concepts, accordingly, formally indicate the direction in which such transformation is to occur; they point us toward ‘‘how our understanding must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings and properly transform itself into the Da-sein [the there-being] in us… They point into Dasein itself’’ (Heidegger 1995, 296). A philosophical concept ‘‘only gives an indication, a pointer to the fact that anyone who seeks to understand is called upon by this conceptual context to undertake a transformation of themselves into their Dasein’’ (Heidegger 1995, 297). As is the case for Socrates, for Heidegger in these passages philosophical questioning and therapeutic change, understanding and transformation of our existing, are one and the same process. For Socrates, this process entails the exposure of inconsistencies in our moral beliefs; for Heidegger, it entails a stripping away of everyday delusions and an unveiling of the concealed ground of our Being. The investigative method through which Heidegger pursues such transformation is spelled out in great detail in Being and Time (1962), and it is to this that we now turn. Being and Time is an investigation of ‘‘the question of the meaning of Being’’ (Heidegger 1962, 19). By the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) Heidegger denotes their intelligibility or understandability as the beings they are for Dasein. The being that Heidegger chooses to interrogate as to its Being is the human being (Dasein), the same being that inquires about its Being. Heidegger explains this choice by claiming famously: ‘‘Dasein… is… distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it… And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being’’ (Heidegger 1962, 32). Heidegger designates this human kind of Being, which ‘‘comports itself understandingly toward that Being’’ (Heidegger 1962, 78), by the term existence, and its not-yet-thematized structures are called its existentiality or existentiales. Importantly, because an unarticulated understanding of our Being is constitutive of our kind of Being (existence), we humans can investigate our own kind of Being by investigating our understanding (and lack of understanding) of that Being. Accordingly, Heidegger’s investigative method is phenomenological, in that it is 2 Although not always explicitly, Stanley Cavell (1984) emphasizes the therapeutic aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. See also James Peterman (1992). 70 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW aimed at illuminating the fundamental structures of our understanding of our Being. Heidegger’s phenomenological method seeks to bring our unarticulated understanding of how we are intelligible to ourselves into the light of thematic explicitness. This phenomenological act of bringing the structures of our Being into light is no easy task, however, because, for the most part, our Being ‘‘lies hidden’’ (Heidegger 1962, 59) from us in our understanding of it. Both in our traditional metaphysical and in our average everyday understanding of Being, our intelligibility to ourselves ‘‘can be covered up so extensively that it becomes forgotten’’ (Heidegger 1962, 59). Most frequently and most dangerously, the covering up of Being may take the form of disguising its basic structures. Thus, our Being, which is covered up and disguised in our understanding of it, must be ‘‘laid bare,’’ ‘‘unconcealed,’’ by means of interpretation of that understanding. Through interpretation, phenomenology penetrates to our Being, which is hidden within our understanding of it. Because it relies on interpretation, Heidegger’s investigative method is a hermeneutic phenomenology—one aimed at disclosing or unconcealing the basic structures of our kind of Being, its existentiality, which lie hidden within our understanding of it. The two divisions of Being and Time can be grasped as two steps in this process of unconcealing. Division I is devoted to unveiling the holistic structure of average everyday existence, covered up by traditional metaphysics, especially Descartes’ dualism (1986), which has been transformed by history into Western common sense. Descartes’ metaphysics divided the finite world into two distinct basic substances—res cogitans and res extensa, thinking substances (minds) with no extension in space and extended substances (bodies and other material things) that do not think. This metaphysical dualism concretized the possibility of a complete separation between mind and world, between subject and object—a radical decontextualization of both mind and world with respect to each another as they are beheld in their bare thinghood. In his hermeneutic of Dasein, Heidegger (1962) seeks interpretively to illumine the unity of our Being, split asunder by the Cartesian bifurcation. Thus, what he calls the ‘‘destruction’’ of traditional metaphysics is a clearing away of its concealments and disguises, in order to unveil the primordial contextual whole that it has been covering up. The unity of our Being and its context is formally indicated early in Division I, in Heidegger’s designation of the human being as Dasein, to-be-there or to-besituated. This early appearing contextualization is then fleshed out in his interpretation of the constitutive structure of our everyday existing as ‘‘Being-inthe-world’’ (Heidegger 1962, 78). With the hyphens unifying the expression Beingin-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), Heidegger formally indicates that in his interpretation of Dasein the traditional ontological gap between our Being and our world is to be definitively closed and that, in their indissoluble unity, our Being and our world always contextualize one another: ‘‘The compound expression ‘Beingin-the-world’ indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole’’ (Heidegger 1962, 78). When we understand ourselves unveiledly, we grasp ourselves as a rich contextual whole, Being-in-the-world, in which our Being is saturated with the PSYCHES THERAPEIA 71 world in which we dwell, and the world we inhabit is drenched in human meanings and significance. In our average everyday understanding of ourselves as Being-in-the-world, however, a constitutive feature of our existence still remains hidden, and in Division II Heidegger devotes himself to a second step in his interpretive unconcealing of our existential structure. Heidegger’s distinction between two basic modes of existence—authentic (owned) existing and inauthentic (unowned or disowned) existing—provides the organizing structure of Being and Time. Division I is devoted primarily to an elucidation of the inauthentic mode of Being-in-the-world, which, according to Heidegger, dominates our average everyday understanding of our existence. Such average everyday understanding, claims Heidegger, is characterized by what he calls falling—the unreflective adoption of the public interpretedness of the ‘‘they’’ (das Man). The ‘‘they’’ is Heidegger’s term for the impersonal normative system that governs what ‘‘one’’ understands and what ‘‘one’’ does in one’s everyday activity as a member of a society and an occupant of social roles. The ‘‘they’’ is a normative authority external to one’s own selfhood. Falling into identification with the conventional interpretedness of the ‘‘they’’ is thus an inauthentic mode of understanding existence, whereby Dasein, for the most part, is not itself. In Division I, falling into the ‘‘they’’ is regarded ‘‘as an essential existentiale’’ (Heidegger 1962, 168), ‘‘an essential ontological structure of Dasein’’ (Heidegger 1962, 224) that pertains to our inescapable embeddedness in a context of social customs, practices, and normativity with which we identify. It is in this sense that we are ‘‘always already’’ falling. In Division II, by contrast, falling is characterized as a motivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight into the inauthentic illusions of the ‘‘they,’’ in order to evade the anxiety inherent in authentic existing. For Heidegger, authentic existing is grounded in nonevasively owned ‘‘Beingtoward-death’’ (Heidegger 1962, 279). One who exists authentically apprehends death, not as a distant event that has not yet occurred or that happens to others (as the ‘‘idle talk’’ governed by the ‘‘they’’ would have it), but as a ‘‘distinctive possibility’’ (Heidegger 1962, 305) that is constitutive of his or her very existence in its futurity and finitude, as his or her ‘‘ownmost’’ (Heidegger 1962, 307) and ‘‘uttermost’’ (Heidegger 1962, 308) possibility, as a possibility that is both ‘‘certain’’ and ‘‘indefinite’’ as to its ‘‘when’’ (Heidegger 1962, 310) and that therefore always impends as a constant threat. Authentic existing is disclosed in the mood of anxiety, in which conventional interpretedness loses its defensive purpose and thus its significance, and one feels ‘‘uncanny’’ (unheimlich)—that is, no longer safely at home in an everyday world that now fails to evade Beingtoward-death.3 In Heidegger’s view, it is authentic Being-toward-death as our ownmost, unsharable possibility (‘‘death is in every case mine’’ [Heidegger 1962, 284]), along with a readiness for the anxiety that discloses it, that radically individualizes and singularizes us. Torn from the sheltering illusions of the ‘‘they’’ and 3 One of us (Stolorow 2007, 2011) has shown that Heidegger’s characterization of existential anxiety bears a remarkable resemblance to the phenomenology of traumatized states and that emotional trauma plunges one into a form of Being-toward-death. 72 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW understanding ourselves ‘‘right under the eyes of Death’’ (Heidegger 1962, 434), we become able resolutely to seize ownership of and responsibility for our own existence. To summarize, in Being and Time the ‘‘therapeutic process’’ of Heidegger’s philosophizing proceeds in two phases. In Division I, he clears away the isolating illusions of traditional metaphysics and lays bare our everyday existing as a contextual whole, a Being-in-the-world, governed by the matrix of conventional interpretedness in which we are always already embedded. In Division II, he unconceals the Being-toward-death that is covered up by this veil of conventional interpretedness and that is constitutive of authentic or owned existing. In understanding and helping us to understand the anxiety that discloses Beingtoward-death, he helps us to live in that anxiety and thereby open a path toward a more authentic way of existing. Wittgenstein Like Socrates and Heidegger, Wittgenstein thought of philosophy primarily as a human activity, not an absolute science. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he says, ‘‘Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity’’ and ‘‘Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions’’ (Wittgenstein 2001b, 4.112, emphasis added). The aim of philosophy, he suggests, is not reflected in the form of conclusions or results; it is expressed in philosophical ‘‘clarity.’’ If philosophy is successful, we do not learn something new about ourselves or the world, but come to ‘‘see the world aright’’ (6.54). And in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reiterates that the aim of philosophy is ‘‘complete clarity,’’ adding that ‘‘the philosophical problems should completely disappear’’ (Wittgenstein 2001a, 1133, emphasis in the original). For Wittgenstein, the term ‘‘clarity’’ is not equivalent to ‘‘transparency,’’ as though the main difficulty of philosophy were a matter of saying what one means in clearer terms. Rather, Wittgenstein sought the clarity of resolution, the kind of ‘‘clearing away’’ that we attributed to Heidegger above. The solution to the problems of philosophy, then, is structurally similar to the solution to the problems of life: it ‘‘is seen in the vanishing of the problem.’’ And, again, this is not solely a matter of becoming a better writer, so to speak: as Wittgenstein says, ‘‘Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?’’ (TLP 6.521; emphasis added) What these remarks illustrate, in part, is that for Wittgenstein the solution to the problems of philosophy and life are both liberating. Philosophy has the potential to relieve the constraining, and sometimes paralyzing, sense that something is missing, unfamiliar, or just not right. In his own case, Wittgenstein thought philosophy could alleviate—‘‘get rid of’’—what he called his Sorge, as he explained in a letter to his teacher and confidant Bertrand Russell: Whenever I have time I now read James’s ‘‘Varieties of Religious Experience.’’ This book does me a lot of good. I don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not PSYCHES THERAPEIA 73 sure that it does not improve me a little in the way in which I would like to improve very much: namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the Second Part of Faust). (Quoted in McGuinness 1988, 129) What exactly Wittgenstein meant by Sorge, we can only speculate.4 What’s important here is that Wittgenstein thought that William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience could assist him in his effort to remove something constraining and that the result was a matter of improving spiritually. One obstacle to interpreting Wittgenstein’s philosophy as therapeutic or transformative is that Wittgenstein says almost nothing about ‘‘the problems of life’’ or ‘‘therapy,’’ and he certainly doesn’t specify what he means by these terms.5 Nor is he typically thought of as a moral philosopher.6 However, though the problems of moral philosophy and its therapeutic aims are not the subject of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, they nevertheless inform how Wittgenstein philosophizes. So we believe that this obstacle might be overcome if we zoom out enough to discern from the development of his thought that, as with Socrates and Heidegger, understanding what Wittgenstein believed is tantamount to understanding his struggle for existential ‘‘clarity.’’ In what follows, we discuss three ‘‘stages’’ of Wittgenstein’s philosophical development in order to draw attention to the therapeutic point of his philosophy. The first stage of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought, as we characterize it here, is represented in the Tractatus, whose ‘‘fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts’’ (TLP 4.0312). Logical propositions such as ‘‘p v :p’’ are not meaningful, as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell had believed. They are tautologies which ‘‘say nothing’’ about the world (TLP 6.11). That is, although ‘‘p’’ might represent some fact about the world (e.g., that it is raining), ‘‘:p’’ the opposite fact, the proposition ‘‘p v :p’’ does not represent anything. It is merely a possible but meaningless combination of signs permitted by the logical structure of language— what Wittgenstein calls an ‘‘extreme case’’ (TLP 4.466). By calling this his fundamental idea, Wittgenstein suggests that the fundamental aim of the Tractatus is to resolve the semantic issues that plagued Frege’s and Russell’s effort to reduce mathematics to logic (the project known as logicism). Wittgenstein’s ‘‘solution,’’ however, was not the type of solution either Frege or Russell had hoped for. Wittgenstein did not study the foundations of mathematics or logic in order to present a theory which solved Russell’s paradox, for example. Rather, he offered a ‘‘critique of language’’ (TLP 4.0031) to show that if the logic of language is clarified fully, we’ll see that the aim of logicism is fundamentally misguided and that its problems simply disappear. Consider Wittgenstein’s word choice. About Russell’s own theoretical solution to the paradox, the ‘‘theory of 4 The reference to Faust suggests that Wittgenstein was referring to the kind of worry that is particular and a response to anxiety generated by an awareness of human finitude (i.e. the kind of metaphysical brooding or ruminating that attempts to evade existential anxiety connected to transience, decay, vulnerability, limitedness, uncertainty, etc.). 5 He mentions the problems of life and therapy in passing (TLP 6.522) and (PI 1133), respectively, but only in passing. 6 A new wave of commentators have begun to challenge this view, arguing that there is, in fact, a significant moral dimension of Wittgenstein’s thought. For an overview of this line of interpretation, which is now called ‘‘The New Wittgenstein,’’ see (Crary and Read 2000, especially the "Introduction"). 74 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW types,’’ Wittgenstein says, ‘‘The theory of classes is completely superfluous in mathematics’’ (TLP 6.031; emphasis added).7 And about the paradox itself, he says, as with a wave of the hand, ‘‘That disposes of Russell’s paradox’’ (TLP 3.333; emphasis added). In saying that logical propositions don’t represent anything in the world, that they are ‘‘senseless [sinnlos],’’ and that the attempts to validate logicism or justify the laws of inference are ‘‘superfluous,’’ Wittgenstein rejects out of hand the view that logic is a science of maximally general truths, a fundamental tenet of Frege and Russell’s universalist conception of logic.8 On Wittgenstein’s view, the universality of logic can be accounted for by showing that it is necessary for the possibility of language and thought. That is, what a critique of language shows is that logic does not add anything to (our understanding of) language, thought, or the world, but characterizes what they must share in common if representation is possible at all. So, what the Tractatus aims to show is that the problems of logic— and, more generally, the view that meta- or mathematical logic promises to teach us something new about language, thought, and the world—arise from a misunderstanding of the nature of logic, not from a missing puzzle piece. Put another way, by clarifying the nature of logic and language, Wittgenstein thought that he had caused Frege’s and Russell’s problems simply to disappear. Although Wittgenstein abandons the claim that logic is a science, he continues to speak of it in the Tractatus as maximally general. Logic does not tell us anything substantive about the world, but it is essential to the possibility of representing anything, or as Wittgenstein says, it is ‘‘the essence of the world’’: A particular mode of signifying may be unimportant but it is always important that it is a possible mode of signifying. And that is generally so in philosophy: again and again the individual case turns out to be unimportant, but the possibility of each individual case discloses something about the essence of the world. (TLP 3.3421; emphasis in the original) And it is precisely the lingering craving for generality, the view that the particular case is unimportant, which provides the target of Wittgenstein’s criticism in the second stage of his development, as it is represented in The Blue and Brown Books (1958). If the first stage of development in Wittgenstein’s thought can be characterized as a rejection of logicism, specifically a rejection of the view that logic is a science, the second stage can be characterized as a rejection of scientism. In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein says, for example: Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is ‘purely descriptive.’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 18) 7 Similarly, Wittgenstein says, ‘‘Laws of inference,’’ which Russell and Frege thought justified ordinary inferences, ‘‘have no sense and would be superfluous’’ (TLP 5.132). Emphasis has been added in all three remarks. 8 For a helpful introduction to the ‘‘universalist conception of logic,’’ see Goldfarb (2010). PSYCHES THERAPEIA 75 That is, by focusing on the logic of our language in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had reduced language to the possibility of representation, and he thought that the clarification of propositions demonstrated that logic explains the possibility of representation. And it was this need to reduce and explain the possibility of representation or language that Wittgenstein sought to alleviate.9 It is wrong to say, however, that the older Wittgenstein ‘‘rejected’’ his earlier view of language. In The Blue Book he says, ‘‘Whenever we make up ‘ideal languages’ it is not in order to replace our ordinary language by them; but just to remove some trouble caused in someone’s mind by thinking that he has got hold of the exact use of a common word’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 28), a statement which is reminiscent of his earlier view that ‘‘all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order’’ (TLP 5.5563). So, if there is a criticism of his earlier view of language implicit in the claim that philosophy has no business trying to reduce or explain, it is not that the Tractatus had made up an ideal language, but that Wittgenstein did not clarify (or fully understand) the purpose of making up ideal languages and perhaps that he had suggested that there is only one ideal language. Notice how Wittgenstein describes the purpose of constructing ideal languages in The Blue Book. It is not to teach us something about language or the world, but ‘‘to remove some trouble caused in someone’s mind.’’ And he adds, speaking of his preoccupation with the philosophy of mind, ‘‘I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there ‘must be’ what is called a mental process of thinking… independent of the process of expressing a thought’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 41). What is striking here is that Wittgenstein characterizes a certain view in the philosophy of mind as a kind of temptation. Consider also: ‘‘Now we are tempted to imagine this calculus… as a permanent background of every sentence’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 42); ‘‘What causes most trouble in philosophy is that we are tempted to describe the use of important ‘odd-job’ words’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 44); ‘‘There is a temptation for me to say that only my own experience is real’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 46); ‘‘One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 58259). In describing the puzzles, problems, and methods of philosophy as temptations, Wittgenstein is suggesting not only that they are obstructive but also that the solutions to the problems of philosophy test what we are willing to do—and, importantly, willing not to do— not what we do or don’t know. One important difference between the early and middle Wittgenstein, then, is his growing insistence that ‘‘[t]he thing to do in such cases is always to look how the words in question are actually used in our language’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 56; emphasis in the original). That is, as Wittgenstein’s thought developed, he turned his attention away from language (singular) or ideal languages and toward the use of particular words, which accrue significance in what he dubbed 9 We do not want to suggest that Wittgenstein’s aim in the Tractatus wasn’t to alleviate the need to reduce and explain the possibility of representation. Rather, we are merely claiming that Wittgenstein was more explicit about this aim in The Blue Book. 76 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW ‘‘language-games’’ or ‘‘systems of signs to which a sign or word belongs’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 5). So, if Wittgenstein had thought that the temptations of logic and metaphysics arose from a misunderstanding of the logic of our language, he came to believe that they arose in particular from failing to recognize the multiplicity of systems in which words are used and gain significance. In ordinary language we speak of colors (one system), measurements (another system), pain behavior, expectations, commands, wishes, and so on. And we do so as part of ordinary activities: coloring, building, looking for sympathy, discouraging, learning. In Wittgenstein’s new vocabulary, the temptation of metaphysics is the desire to subsume language-games under a single game or system and thus to not look at how words are actually used. However, as there is nothing metaphysical underlying the correct use of a word, there is nothing metaphysical to keep us from inventing a new game which we can call ‘‘metaphysics.’’ In other words, by asking us to look at how language is actually used, and by describing the problems of philosophy as temptations, Wittgenstein does not rule out the possibility of metaphysics. (And, since metaphysicians as a matter of fact use language as they do, he can’t or shouldn’t.) What he does say, however, is that certain uses of language are capable of creating a ‘‘muddle’’ that is ‘‘felt as a problem’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 6), suggesting that the problem is artificial and our own. So, one way we generate philosophical problems is by failing to recognize the multiplicity of language-games and instead insisting on a single all-encompassing game. For instance, we problematize familiar words or concepts, such ‘‘red’’ or ‘‘freedom,’’ by rendering them unfamiliar or uncanny, as we do when we try to determine their meaning outside the games in which they accrue significance. We speak of political freedom, or of free-falling bodies, or of finally being free, or even of having free will, but we do so in rich contexts that are grounded in familiar and important activities. But when we speak of freedom per se and try to determine what all our uses of ‘‘freedom’’ have in common, we either ignore the particular activities and contexts that give the word or concept meaning in the first place, in which case the word or concept ceases to do any work at all and our language begins to spin idly,10 or we put ourselves in the impossible position of trying to summarize the infinitude of actual and possible activities and contexts. In either case, the metaphysician invents a game that, so to speak, is impossible to win, and unless the new activity (metaphysics) generates new significance on its own, a use particular to that game, and unless that new significance and activity are important, they will remain mere temptations. In the Philosophical Investigations, which represents the third stage in the development of his thought, Wittgenstein deepens his campaign against scientism by responding to a potential objection to his early use of ‘‘language-games’’: For someone might object against me: ‘‘You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, 10 In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that it is perfectly possible to look for order(s) in language as a way of reforming language ‘‘for a particular purpose’’ and in order to prevent misunderstandings ‘‘in practice.’’ ‘‘But these are not the cases we have to do with [in philosophy]. The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work’’ (PI 1132). PSYCHES THERAPEIA 77 and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself the greatest headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language.’’ (PI 165; emphasis in the original) Although the author of The Blue Book believed that he was in the process of alleviating ‘‘mental cramps’’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 1, 59) caused by a certain view of language, Wittgenstein came to see that speaking of language-games as ‘‘systems’’ of signs still suggested the possibility of an all-encompassing system, order, or essence of language, one which tempts us to reduce and explain. In response to this objection, Wittgenstein introduced the notion of ‘‘family resemblances’’ to capture the idea that what language-games have in common cannot be captured in the form of necessary and sufficient conditions, just as we wouldn’t (because we can’t) say what it is that makes us confident that everyone in the photograph is a member of the same family. To be sure, everyone in the photograph may actually exhibit some discernable resemblance to someone else in the picture: three share a smile or have the same distinctive nose or perhaps all the men are unusually tall. But there is no set of features that all and only members of the family share; and none of the features which a subset of the family do share determines criteria for belonging to a family. Similarly, on Wittgenstein’s later view, it is a mistake to look for essential characteristics that apply to all languagegames, some one thing that connects the language of political life to that of building; the language of coloring to that of comforting; the language of doubting to that of war; and so on. So, if the aim in The Blue Book was to reject scientism in philosophy, the aim of the Investigations was, in part, to reject all forms of essentialism. That is, Wittgenstein had come to believe that it is not only the craving for generality or the method of science that leads a philosopher into darkness, but also, and more perniciously, the feeling that ‘‘we had to penetrate phenomena’’ (PI 190). Again, what’s problematic about the metaphysician’s temptation is not that one can’t imagine an ideal language or a system of signs, but that one feels the need to determine or penetrate the essence of things. It is the feeling that ordinary language and participating in a multiplicity of related activities is somehow inadequate to the task of understanding or knowing, or the feeling that something is hidden beneath everyday understanding. The most influential essentialist was Plato. And perhaps the most famous expression of his essentialism occurs in the Euthyphro, a dialogue in which Euthyphro offers to teach Socrates ‘‘many things’’ of which ‘‘the majority has no knowledge’’ (Euthyphro 6b). Eager to learn as always, Socrates encourages Euthyphro to define piety but makes it clear that he is not looking for examples: Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but the form itself that makes all pious actions pious, for you agreed that all impious actions are impious and all pious actions pious through one form, or don’t you remember? (Euthyphro 6d) The trouble with examples, as the passage suggests, is not that we don’t have enough of them, but that they are the wrong kind of thing. Even if we had every 78 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW example of piety before us, we still wouldn’t know what piety is because we wouldn’t know how to decide whether a new person or action was pious or not. Examples, in other words, are not explanatory; they do not tell us what ‘‘makes’’ all and only pious things pious. For Plato, the essence of piety—that which applies to all and only pious things and which explains what makes something pious—is other-worldly. But it need not be, for we can also attribute essentialism to Aristotle, who located the essence or form of a thing in the physical world. Essentialism, then, is simply a name for the meta-philosophical position that attempts to explain meaning, the possibility of knowledge, the nature of causality, the shape of things, etc., in terms of an underlying (and hidden) metaphysical account of essences. It considers philosophical puzzles the consequence of incomplete understanding, as though their solutions required knowing something more—namely, the essence of things—and it considers the job of philosophy as a kind of excavating. To say that Wittgenstein was an anti-essentialist, for us, is to say that the aim of his later philosophy was to revive the method of examples, to show that there is nothing hidden, and that the solution to our philosophical problems consists in realizing that nothing needs digging up. But Wittgenstein was not insensitive to the power of the temptation to uncover something mysterious and hidden. He says that the problems of philosophy have ‘‘the character of depth,’’ that ‘‘they are deep disquietudes’’ (PI 1111), which compel us to search for something beneath or beyond actual language-use. The challenge of philosophy as therapy, then, is not simply to dismiss one’s attraction to metaphysics, but to expose it as a temptation, to diagnose the origin of one’s deep disquietudes. We have to, in Søren Kierkegaard’s language, take one’s illusion as good money, lest we set the philosopher’s will in opposition and deepen his insistence that the source of his disquietude is a ‘‘genuine intellectual problem.’’11 Like Heidegger, Wittgenstein thought of philosophy both as a departure from ordinary language and existence, and as the effort to find one’s way home. The temptation to philosophize, in other words, indicates a kind of homesickness. We don’t need explanatory accounts that unify or summarize language or life; we need methods for marking ‘‘wrong turnings’’ that cause us to feel that we do need such accounts. Wittgenstein says: [Language] is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turning, etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points. (Wittgenstein 1980, 18e, emphasis added) The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose. (PI 1127) 11 In The Point of View of My Work As An Author (1962), Kierkegaard claims that to try to attack an illusory point of view directly is counterproductive: ‘‘A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion. . . . There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost.’’ PSYCHES THERAPEIA 79 A philosophical problem has the form: ‘‘I don’t know my way about.’’ (PI 1123) In short, as with Heidegger’s use of formal indicators, Wittgenstein’s use of ‘‘signposts’’ and ‘‘reminders’’ suggests that philosophy is a matter of re-orientating ourselves with the familiar—not explaining, reducing, or excavating something hidden. To students of Wittgenstein, our brief overview—indeed, any brief summary— of Wittgenstein’s corpus will no doubt appear highly selective and inadequate. However, our aim was not to introduce the reader to Wittgenstein’s thought or to compete with lengthier interpretations of his corpus. We aimed to describe the development of his philosophy as a series of stages which clarifies and deepens his objection to logicism, scientism, and essentialism in philosophy. We have somewhat artificially divided Wittgenstein’s thought into stages in order to compare it to our reading of Being and Time as also working in stages. Our hope is that by hazarding an overview of Wittgenstein’s thought, however incomplete or unoriginal it may be, we have brought into focus the recurrence and centrality of terms like ‘‘obstacles’’ and ‘‘obstructions,’’ ‘‘temptations’’ and ‘‘disquietudes,’’ ‘‘confusions’’ and ‘‘muddles’’ in Wittgenstein’s effort to describe the problems of philosophy. What they, along with even a cursory glance at Wittgenstein’s biography, suggest is that Wittgenstein’s theoretical meanderings were anchored in a desire, perhaps a need, to cope with the existential difficulty of getting rid of what Wittgenstein called his Sorge—which is, suggestively, Heidegger’s word for ‘‘care’’ or ‘‘concern.’’ Ultimately we hope to have drawn the reader’s attention to one direction that future discussion of Wittgenstein and Heidegger may take. Conclusion We have turned to the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate our claim that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts, as formal indicators (Heidegger) or as signposts or reminders (Wittgenstein), is to point us toward the path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of illusions spawned by conventional interpretedness (Heidegger) or scientistic evasiveness (Wittgenstein). For both, such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, in the ‘‘idle talk’’ of das Man (Heidegger) or the ‘‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language’’ (Wittgenstein, PI 1109). For both, philosophical investigation is a way of bringing what we already prereflectively understand into the light of thematic explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of our context-embeddedness and of our finitude. Heidegger helps us understand and bear the anxiety that comes with authentic Being-toward-death, and Wittgenstein helps us to bear the irresoluble complexity of an indeterminate multiplicity of language-games and perspectives, each serving particular human purposes, of which the scientific perspective is only one. Through our therapeutic encounters with the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, we are able to recognize ourselves as ever more distinctively human. 80 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW References Cavell, Stanley. 1984. ‘‘Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy.’’ In Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press. Crary, Alice and Rupert Read, ed. 2000. The New Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Descartes, René. 1986. Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Originally published in 1641.) Goldfarb, Warren. 2010. ‘‘Frege’s Conception of Logic.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Frege. Edited by M. Potter and T. Ricketts. New York: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. (Originally published in 1927.) ———. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, and Solitude Studies in Continental Thought. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (Originally published in 1983.) Kierkegaard, Søren. 1962. The Point of View of My Work as an Author: A Report to History. Translated by Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper & Row. (Originally published in 1859.) McGuinness, Brian. 1988. Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig 1889-1921. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Peterman, James F. 1992. Philosophy as Therapy: An Interpretation and Defense of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophical Project. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Plato. 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Edited and translated by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Stolorow, Robert D. 2007. Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: Routledge. Stolorow, Robert D. 2011. World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1980. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Originally published in 1977.) ———. 1993. Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951. Edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. ———. 2001a. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (Originally published in 1953.) ———. 2001b. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge Classics. (Originally published in 1922.) Notes on contributor Correspondence to: Robert Eli Sanchez, sanchezjr.robert@gmail.com; Robert D. Stolorow, robertdstolorow@gmail.com.