Heidegger / Wittgenstein

 

 

 

 

 

The two greatest and most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1951), both take on the subject of symbols as the central question in philosophy.   

 

Let us investigate this a few steps.  

Being and Time, sec. 17. “Signs, symbols, presentations, indications, all ‘showing itself’ has the same structure: this is a double structure: this is the announcing of something that does not show itself.”  His model seems to be symptomatology in medicine: the disease shows itself in the form of a symptom – what is shown indicates something that does not show itself, but must be read from the evidence.  Signs show and don’t show.  

 

Being-a-sign-for is a universal kind of relation – a sign is not a thing which stands to another thing in the bare relation of indicating – it is a removal to the social world of humans. In the example of the symptom, this is a ‘warning signal’ about ‘what is coming,’ which means that the succession of events is not merely occurring, but ‘what  is coming’ is mentally framed as the sort of thing that ‘we are ready for,’ or which ‘we weren’t ready for’ – meaning that it is formulated inside a world of human purposes.   

 

Signs arise when one ‘takes something as a sign’ – this is how the sign gets established.  His example is a farmer who learns that a south wind is a sign of rain – this is not a    kind of “bonus” in addition to understanding that the air is flowing in a certain direction.  It is because the farmer is alive in a world of purposes that he discovers the south wind – that is to say, entities get ‘discovered’ inside the limits of human purposes; yet, after this point, a thing may be isolated and inspected and studied by experimental science.  

 

Objectivity in this sense is a late development that reshapes a discovery made in the hold of homespun purposes – science evolves from the base of cultural practice.  The ‘double’ in the sign relationship is the ‘announcing’ that also doesn’t show itself – why we can take something as a sign, and why one thing can be a sign for something else.  Heidegger’s way of conceiving the sign relation emphasizes what Augustine called signa naturalia – natural signs – over examples of signa data, merely conventional signs.  This lends the sign relation a kind of mystery never fully rendered into words – reading the wind as a model for reading a text –  which may be one reason why Heidegger is often accused of “word mysticism” – initially by his contemporary, the logician Rudolf Carnap.  

 

In Heidegger’s analysis (BT, H77 f), a sign is something that lives in the world of mere things – it is a mark or a sign – but it is also something that expresses a mode of being;  it is a tool put to use in a world of human goals and, very literally, it is only in front of us because the whole background of human purposes underlies it.  Heidegger emphasizes that signs have a relational meaning with one another – as discerned by Humboldt and Boole and Saussure – an idea which gets redescribed in Heidegger’s works as the “worldhood” of the world – as it were, a world is not merely a collection of things, but an arrangement – not a chaos but a cosmos – thus in each society there is a reigning norm in which the ‘worldhood’ of the world is captured by ideas and cultural practices.  

 

There is a norm of being in the standard of ordinary, everyday practice; we are in a new ontological relationship towards the world when we encounter the world as a mere thing, an object of study.  The ‘worldhood’ of these different worlds is not the same; they are not constructed of the same materials; we get at them via different symbols.  

 

Heidegger’s contrast of the natural vs. merely conventional symbol gives a profundity to the farmer reading the wind and an antiseptic lifelessness to meteorology.  History shows natural things becoming stripped of their purposes – this is how we reach “value free science” – so that they can be defined mathematically and controlled mechanically.  

 

For Heidegger, this jump to “objectivity” is a trap – it leads to denaturalizing the world.  Thus we get from semiology to political advocacy – thus the jump from phenomenology to National Socialism – thus the jump from linguistic analysis to linguistic mysticism -- the subject of much Heideggerian critique, e.g. Wolin’s Seduction of Unreason (2004).  

 

Heidegger’s word mysticism grows over time: “Language is the House of Being” – language, which is a “releasement into nearness” but also a “withdrawing to be held in reserve for an originary event” – language ‘’which belongs in the domain of mystery” –  a “landscape in which poetic saying borders on the fateful source of speech” – “the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in language” – “language withholds its origin and denies its being to our notions” – we do not speak language, instead, language speaks us (The Origin of the Work of Art, 1935; Building Dwelling Thinking, 1951; Discourse on Thinking, 1954; On the Way to Language, 1959)

 

In a way, Heidegger’s earlier work focuses on the staging going on in the sign relation, which we usually don’t see, but his later work is nostalgic about a world not yet self-conscious, not yet at a scientific level of development, where signs still weigh powerfully as in Archaic times – this is respect for mystery, but also arch conservatism and Luddism.  

 

Thus someone who begins his philosophical career as a radical voluntarist, unafraid of upsetting traditional pieties, with a scientific frame of mind, transforms into a radical determinist, an arch conservative and quietist, who concluded “only a god can save us.” He gave up all confidence in human studies – in philosophy itself – arguing that man can understand nothing on his own; nothing is gained in education; nor in science; all that is fit for humans is to wait – to listen for Being to announce itself and come to our rescue.  

 

Arguably this is not (in retrospect) a successful engagement with the problem. Heidegger was very obviously bowled over by symbols. He did not learn to master them.     

 

He did not have the prescience to understand their danger, and did not have the moral fiber or even the honesty to acknowledge that he had been hoodwinked by them. He lacked exactly the quality that Milan Kundera conceptualized in his study The Art of the Novel  (1986). Kundera reaches the ultimate conclusion that intellectual maturity lies in the capacity to resist symbols.  

 

Wittgenstein also takes the sign relation as the central problem in philosophical analysis but has Heidegger’s example to look back on.  In a way, he charts an opposite course – from an idealistic position and even a kind of mysticism, to a fierce anti-escapist theme.  

 

Early Wittgenstein says that not saying is more important than saying – what a person says is one thing, but what they don’t say is more important – a theme that we also see in Heidegger.  Heidegger thinks this theme has to do with some occult property in language.  What Wittgenstein is thinking is something very different.  At this stage he is a logical positivist – a way of thinking that identifies meaning with truth and truth with scientific verification.  What cannot be put into science cannot – literally – be said.  It just comes out as nonsense.  Thus the famous last statement of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (1921) (¶ 7) “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

 

Gradually he got out of this way of looking at the world and opened up to the different ways that language can work, creating concepts like “language games” and “forms of life.”  There is a broader approach than the “picture theory” he offered in the Tractatus.  

 

He begins his Philosophical Examinations with a quote from St. Augustine that purports to lay out the basic outline of the sign relation – Augustine is recounting his childhood:

 

“Eventually I realized where I was, and I decided to display my wishes to those who might fulfill them, but I could not, because my wishes were inside me, and these people were outside, powerless to get inside my mind by any of their senses. So I shook my limbs, and varied my voice, making the few sounds like my wishes that I could manage, as well as I could, but they were really not very similar …

 

“When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movements of the other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something.  Thus as I heard words repeatedly used in the proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to grasp what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my desires …” (Confessions, Book I, Chapter 8).  

 

Reflecting on this passage helped Wittgenstein take some steps to an anthropological outlook on language, rather than staying trapped in the strictures of first-order logic.  

 

“The simile of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the mind is pernicious. It is derived from ‘in the head’ when we think of ourselves as looking out from our heads and thinking of something going on ‘in our head.’ But then we forget the picture and go on using the language derived from it. Similarly, man’s spirit was pictured as his breath, then the picture was forgotten.  But the language derived from it remained. We can only safely use such language if we consciously remember the picture it derives from.”  (Cambridge Lectures 1930, p. 25).  The inclination to think of meaning, or any other mental or spiritual activity, as something that is going on ‘in our head,’ reaches back to an archaic past.  Wittgenstein attacks ideas of ‘private meaning,’ ‘private language,’ ‘mental event’ because he is now paying much closer attention to language and he sees that these are actually metaphors so old that we have we have become blind to them – instead conforming our thought to them.  He imagines ‘reading someone’s mind’:  

 

“Perhaps it is possible to communicate more directly by a process of ‘thought-reading’? What would we mean by ‘reading thought’? Language is not an indirect method of communication, to be contrasted with direct ‘thought-reading’. Thought-reading could only take place through the interpretation of symbols and so would be on the same level as language itself. It would not get rid of the symbolic process. The idea of ‘reading  thought’ more directly is derived from the idea that thought is a hidden process which is the aim of the philosopher to penetrate. But there is no more direct way of reading thought than through language. Thought is not something hidden; it lays open to us” (Philosophical Investigations, 426).

 

His attitude towards the perennial question of how to think about the arbitrariness of  the sign – the use of a proxy to get at a thing; the use of an estimate to get at a thing – was pragmatic: “It doesn’t really matter that we have to resort to a lengthy series of dodges to get out some approximation, and then to a result; this is only because we are finite creatures -- the difficulty is purely psychological” – “We make detours, we go by side roads.  We see the straight highway before us, but of course we can’t take it – it’s permanently closed” – the knowledge that is accessible to us is offered only in the materiality of signs (Cambridge Lectures, 1932, p. 196; Philosophical Investigations, 426).

 

“We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts: an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding the signs, meaning them, interpreting them, or thinking” (Blue and Brown Books, p. 3).  This way of putting the problem makes it more likely that we will conceive of the mind as a kind of ghostly presence in the head; if we get back to the materiality of the sign, we begin to see it as a social practice.  Wittgenstein imagines a number of different kinds of language – a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle – a language consisting only of questions and expressing for answering yes and no – a language in which there existed no common expression for light blue or dark blue – he says that imagining a language is imagining a culture – imagining a “form of life.”  The point is to contextualize ‘language’ into social practices from which it arises and to which it refers.

 

This analysis is meant to dismiss mythologizing about language and see it for what it is.  “Let’s stick to the simple demand that we should at all times and in all places say no more than what we really know” – Kant offered a critique of reason because he saw in it an overreaching instinct to say what we do not know – Wittgenstein takes the step to the critique of language, to check its too-overwrought pretension about itself.