‘Private Language’ and the Second Person: Wittgenstein and Løgstrup ‘Versus’ Levinas?

Abstract

The existence of other people addresses us; their existence is a fundamentally second-person matter. This chapter argues that staying too much in the would-be-utterly spectatorial third person, or stuck within the first person, has been philosophy’s bane. Such ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, far from being opposites, are but two sides of the same coin. The alternative is the living world of the second person: being involved with others. I connect my illustration and elicitation of this ethics to Løgstrup and (much more equivocally) to Levinas. And I triangulate my relational ethic with an apparent problem of ‘individualism’ in the second-person perspective as present in the work of Nykänen and Backström.

1.

‘The great difficulty’, Wittgenstein writes , ‘is not to represent the matter as if there were something one couldn’t do. As if there really were an object, from which I derive its description, but I were unable to shew it to anyone’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, §374, emphasis added). I am interested in a ‘dialectic’ in Wittgenstein, a dialectic of freedom, a dialectic contained in embryo in this opening quotation.¹ This dialectic has been little noted to date (an exception is the later work of Gordon Baker, a key inspiration for my work here and elsewhere).² The present chapter explores that dialectic by first outlining how it features in Wittgenstein’s celebrated trans-‘private-language’ considerations and then by connecting what I argue to be (literally) the moral of those considerations to the work of Løgstrup and (rather more critically) of Levinas.

As my starting quote suggests in fantasising a private language, one fantasises an unfreedom in relation to (fantasised) ‘inner objects’; one rails against one’s ‘inability’ to publicly exhibit such objects, in a way that would ‘justify’ one’s claims about ‘them’. I suspect that one fantasises that, if only one were able to do this ‘impossible’ [non-]thing, then one would be home and dry: if one could only show others the ‘object’ that ‘is’ one’s pain, then it would be impossible any longer for them to withhold sympathy from one (and vice versa).³ One deflects a need for (mutual) sympathy and turns a feared and possible ‘metaphysical’ loneliness into a demand for a hyperbolical philosophical/epistemological justification.

Such a fantasy of unfreedom involves a mood of (faux-)frustration. One feels frustrated by the nature of our bodies or of existence. Freedom from this frustration is a central goal of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in general and of the anti-‘private-language’ sections in particular.

To defuse the grip that the fantasy has upon us, it is helpful to see, even if per impossible it could be realised, that still wouldn’t help. Thus the importance of remarks such as these, from 1949, remarks that, if he had lived, Wittgenstein would probably have integrated or composed into the material that was published as Philosophical Investigations:

Even if I were…to hear everything that he is saying to himself, I would know as little what his words were referring to as if I read one sentence in the middle of a story. Even if I knew everything now going on within him, I still wouldn’t know, for example, to whom the names and images in his thoughts related. … // What goes on within also has meaning only in the stream of life. … // I can know that he is in pain, or that he is pretending, but I do not know it because I ‘look into him’. (1992, pp. 29–31)

There’s no alternative but relationality, commitment (to another, to the relationship). Everything we need is possible, retail not wholesale, if we are ready to seek to understand actual others. And it is hard to see how anything salient further could be gained by some madly fantasised ‘direct acquaintance’ with soul-objects.⁴ But the fantasy reflects a longing: for closeness, for connection. A longing that we can then say justly is good in its source, even if it then becomes distorted—and in that distortion, in the fantasy that I just adumbrated, impossible to satisfy. It can only be satisfied by the hard work of daring to know others (for such processes, to the chagrin of ‘social scientists’, and as psychotherapists learnt somewhat painfully, are always two-way affairs). To understand others, for example, those from unfamiliar cultures, we need first to clear away the prejudice of mutual incomprehendability.

Wittgenstein reminds us that people (seek to) understand each other. They (we) don’t have to show each other their soul-things. We just vision—and act towards—each other as souls. Understanding at its best is unmediated.⁵ Doctrines such as ‘subjectivism’ hide from this and hide this from us. The concept of ‘alterity’, I will suggest, tends to do much the same.

One is actually finding the proper place of pain when one refuses, with Wittgenstein, to give in to the deep attraction to think of pain as an ‘inner object’ (cf. once more 1958, §293, which satirically imagines the imagining of such ‘objects’, ‘beetles’). Wittgenstein considers the attraction, and wonders what it would be like to give in to it (see 1958, §§412, 420). But he does not cave in to it; no, on the contrary, his refusal to do so at least and at last starts to get one clearer on what pain is—and on how easy to deny its reality can be, for one unwilling to acknowledge the full reality of another being and of their suffering. The fragility of our community, of our relationality, is part of what it is for us to need to be ethical, for us to commit to acting in one way rather than another. If one could force another to yield to one’s soul by showing it to them, that would remove the preciousness of having to do the right thing⁶ rather than the wrong.⁷ And it would remove the wonderful necessary freedom in our being open (or otherwise) to the other. Freedom is essential to the ethical meaning of our responsiveness to one another’s suffering. The freedom to break our internal relations with one another is a necessary freedom.

The existence of other people addresses us. This is a fundamentally second-person matter. Staying too much in the would-be-utterly spectatorial third person, or stuck within the first person, has been philosophy’s bane. Such ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, far from being opposites, are but two sides of the same coin. Stuff in the world, ‘stuff’ in the head/the ‘private’: these are, at root, the same.⁸ The alternative is the living world of the second person⁹: being involved with others. Being open to them and committed (to them). Including being what the ‘school’ of Wittgensteinians that I belong to calls ‘resolute’.

One might risk putting it this way: that others’ pain and suffering itself addresses us is a relation between us. To place ‘it’ as an object hidden out of reach ruptures that relation, a relation which is ordinarily direct/unmediated, though never entirely unfragile.¹⁰ When pain is sequestered within a special first-person realm, efforts to objectify it will always fail. The first-person perspective and the third-person perspective are mutually complementary, but are never enough. Only a (broadly second-personal) relational perspective (or ethic) will adequately capture pain and its meaning for us.

For one can see better now how the first-person ‘privilege’ and the third-person standpoint (the standpoint of scientific naturalism, as dissected in other chapters in this collection) feed off each other. The third-person perspective, so influential in our society now, is there for a reason. It is attractive because it is an ‘objective’ (and thus allegedly ‘scientific’, the highest accolade our society can bestow) way of trying to ‘correct’ for an excess subjectivism, a subjectivism that resulted from an excess of introspection (probably partly consequent upon being exposed to constant propaganda for individualism) and a failure to be with others. But so long as one is within the third-person perspective, it is by definition impossible for one to be with others. Scientific naturalism is necessarily in this sense spectatorial, inheriting exactly the way in which the Western philosophical tradition is dissected by Dewey.¹¹

Taking the second-person perspective seriously opens up a route that could free us from all of that. And puts us rather in relation to one another, with each other, responsible for taking care of each other, free to do what mostly comes naturally—moving to comfort the other and so on—and (inevitably) free also not to.

The vital ethical consequence is an ancient and (in its mode of presentation) partly-novel way of seeing how we are not—or at least, need not be—split off from one another. Philosophy’s dominant methodology, most strikingly in Cartesianism, has dangerously tended to imply otherwise. (Is this in part the result of the deformation professionelle of philosophy? Of philosophers as tending to be relatively asocial, private, even ‘autistic’ beings? I suspect so—though the general problematique is far wider. Philosophers’ individualism is an extreme case of a general cultural phenomenon in the West and especially in modernity.) In this perspective, a key goal of Wittgenstein’s considerations upon ‘private language’ is to contest that implication, and to enable a process of ethical re-orientation towards each other. Epistemology and metaphysics give way—to ethics.

One’s freedom not to acknowledge others’ pain is directly tied to the ethical demand¹² to do so. As one might perspicuously put it: ought implies the possibility of not. (Though it should be noted that there’s an asymmetry between opening oneself to the other and rejecting them; the latter is possible only as a repressive response to the former, and this means that the rejected possibility leaves traces; e.g., a bad conscience and bad dreams, absurdities in one’s attempted justifications for it, the very need to find justifications, etc.)¹³

A second-person relational ethic is very different from a traditional third-personal (as in all the great ethical systems) ethic. Wittgenstein starts to situate us in our inter-being. No longer emphasising ‘the inner’, but emphasising our mutual internal-relatedness, as basic, as of the utmost importance and as vulnerable.

2.

That, in very brief,¹⁴ is how I conceive of Wittgenstein’s considerations against the fantasy of a ‘private language’ as initiating an ethic. I will continue this chapter now by exploring the claims above a little more in connection with the care ethic, the thoroughly relational ethics, of Knud Løgstrup, for he is the thinker, I believe, whose thought runs most parallel to Wittgenstein’s, in this connection.¹⁵ But let me start by making a more obvious connection (and contrast), to a more well-known figure: Emmanuel Levinas.

There is a semi-Levinasian aspect to the ethic that I locate in Wittgenstein’s anti-‘private-language’ considerations. It is most plainly visible in this Investigations-remark: ‘if someone has a pain in his hand … one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face’ (1958, §286). And we might expand on that wonderful remark by noticing their—Wittgenstein’s and Levinas’—shared commitment to something along the lines of what Levinas (1969, p. 304) calls our ‘primary sociality’, the primariness of our relation to one another. There are also however very important differences between Wittgenstein and Levinas. For starters, the very idea of something as opposed to something else being ‘First Philosophy’ is perhaps rather inimical to Wittgenstein’s thinking. Moreover, one crucial difference between him and Levinas that emerges from the passages in Wittgenstein that I have referred to above is this: for Wittgenstein, it need not be impossible to really or even fully understand another. Real meeting, real togetherness, real community is attainable and indeed its possibility is fundamental for Wittgenstein (in a way that it is not, if/as I understand him, for Levinas); it need not be ‘deferred’. Levinas’ vision of the infinite ‘alterity’ of ‘the Other’ repeats the very gesture of the alleged unknowability of others critiqued so deeply by Wittgenstein in Investigations §§243–428. Levinas thinks the other (as) an absolute other, with whom I cannot share a quality or even a number (cf. Christensen, 2015, p. 22 and fn 13); this is in direct tension with what I have suggested is present in the anti-‘private-language’ considerations: our being internally related to each other, even (and, in a way, especially) in what we are most tempted to think of as dividing us from each other; namely, our sensations, especially those which are extreme, aversive, terrible. What Levinas gives with his splendid emphasis on our being-for each other, and on our fundamental ‘solidarity’, he takes away with alterity, the ‘radical incomprehensibility’ of the other.

A humorous way of understanding the point here would be as follows. Consider the chorus of the well-known song by ‘Simply Red’: ‘If you don’t know me by now, you will never never never know me’. This line is a question to a long-time lover: do you know me yet? If you still don’t, after all that we’ve been through and shared, then it ain’t ever gonna happen. But Levinas would have to shorten the line, to simply this: ‘You will never never never know me’. But that misses a vital possibility; that there is something that we call coming to know each other, no longer being alteritous, as God forever is (at least, on the Judaic conception).

You don’t have to know everything about me, to know me; and a good thing too, given that knowing everything about me is probably an absurd goal (even for me!). (In fact, knowing about me is in the end besides the point; the point is to actually know me. Knowing another person in a second-personal sense always transcends knowing facts about them.) Nor does your knowing me, if you really do, take away my freedom. But it is revisionistic to dogmatically insist that you will never ever know me. A suitable Wittgensteinian emphasis on ‘ordinary language’ resists such would-be revisionism, whether inspired by Levinas or by Descartes.¹⁶

This point is of deep import, especially but not only when we are thinking of Investigations §§243–428. What Wittgenstein is about is: taking the other seriously, without a dogmatic commitment to alterity, without an assumption of an ‘infinity’ that places the other at an impossible remove from us. We are in relationship with the other (the Other) person , not, as Levinas would perhaps tacitly have it, with their otherness. Why do I say that that would be an accurate way of characterising what Levinas is tacitly committed to? Because, as Fredrik Westerlund puts it, for Levinas, human beings are ultimately an indirect means of approaching ‘the totally other’: that is, God. Thus the more other the human, the closer (they are, in your relationship with them) to God, the infinite.¹⁷ Rather than take up a dogmatic stance that says that actually getting into full contact with another person is impossible (as philosophy tends to do, whether in Descartes or in Derrida/Levinas), Wittgenstein prefers to leave the matter open. Being in caring contact with others is an endless task, an endless love. One shouldn’t make the mistake of saying that it can never happen (which is attractive, because it relieves one of the responsibility of trying), nor for that matter that it always happens without difficulty (which is a possible misreading that the present chapter might be vulnerable to). The craving for generality hereabouts is a crudification that is attractive precisely because it provides one with a reprieve from the messy, detailed, morally demanding work of understanding others and giving them their due.¹⁸

This kind of thing, Løgstrup’s work also enables one to see more clearly, and thus it directly complements Wittgenstein’s. For Løgstrup, the concrete reality of the other person, whenever they are in a position of vulnerability to one,¹⁹ or one needs to care for them in some way, or at least ceteris paribus to trust them, imposes an ethical demand upon one. This ‘ethical demand’ is imposing, difficult to live up to but not necessarily (as it often appears to be, in Levinas), in-principle-impossible (to live up to).²⁰

Where Løgstrup, Levinas and Wittgenstein are at one is in refusing to equate freedom, as so much of Western philosophy does, with an escape from relationality-to-others. As Levinas remarks, ‘instead of offending my freedom, [the face of the other] calls it to responsibility and founds it’ (1969, p. 203, emphasis added). The way I would put this point, as it emerges in Wittgenstein’s later work, is this: ultimately, autonomy is relationality. Philosophical liberation in its true sense need not in any way be in tension with our (internal!) relations with others, or with at least the potential for such relations. On the contrary, the former is nothing without the latter. Free thought is coincident with a free embrace of others. When one succeeds in not being caught in heteronomy, in ideas or ways of seeing that have one rather than one having them, then one is freed to actually see and be with others.

It might have seemed as if one has to choose between privileging the autonomous self in philosophy—between making philosophy quintessentially an exercise in self-liberation—or privileging the general enterprise of objective philosophising. But now we can see the falseness of this opposition. Does philosophy liberate self or others/all? We can now see how the question misses the point of the trans-‘private-language’ considerations. There are crucial differences between the first- and third-person perspectives, differences that philosophy has often overplayed (as Wittgenstein’s philosophy makes obvious) and at times underplayed, and these latter are brought out marvellously in these considerations (e.g. at 1958, §339, and also in Wittgenstein’s Blue Book [1969]). But a—or perhaps even the—fundamental human phenomenon, as we might put it, is the second-person relation, and in this, the gulf between subject and object that has plagued philosophy, and that appears indissolubly to sever first and third persons, is dissolved. As Hannes Nykänen puts it, ‘the fact that I understand that you are in pain is not based on a representation; it is about my understanding you’ (2014, second emphasis added).²¹ The yawning gulf between first and third persons, between subjective and objective, cannot be dissolved by a piece of over-arching philosophical theory. It has to be dissolved in actual cases. Which means: it has to be dissolved in our relations with other beings. These are the kinds of cases visible in the references I have offered in passing from Wittgenstein’s critique of the ‘private-language’ conception. And they are made visible also in Løgstrup’s work. They manifest (or at least recall, or at least stage) our profound (though vertiginously vulnerable) relationality, that Wittgenstein implicated in Investigations §§240–2, and then ethically explores in the famous anti-‘private-language’ considerations that follow.

From very early in the Investigations, possibly as early as §1, and sequentially ever more strongly (and it is thus that one should read the progress from the opening of the book through to the anti-‘private-language’ considerations²²), Wittgenstein paves the way for the fundamentality of such relationality.

Now, is this a ‘thesis’? I think not, for this relationality is not a fact, not even a super-fact. It is, in the way I have sought to indicate above, something at once profound (fundamental) and vulnerable. It is, as we might put it, a project. It has continually to be made and remade. We might think of this in a slightly ‘Malebranchian’ way, transposed from the activity of God to the activity of everyday life, to our activity: we have to do this relationality (together), over and over, on every available occasion (call such an idea neo-occasionalism?).

Relationality is the thread by which we all hang.

And it is here—despite my philosophical debt to later Baker being greater, I hope, than my debt to anyone else—that I part most deeply from Baker²³ (and from Waismann²⁴). For they are surprisingly close to the basically ego-centred individualist ‘mainstream’ of the Western philosophical tradition, in this regard. For Wittgenstein and for Løgstrup, though not for most of the tradition, it is the relation between self and other that is primary. One can only ‘distil’ ‘subject’ and ‘object’ out from that relation. The freedom that later Baker and Waismann celebrate leads one too far away from relationality. It comes to grief in the anti-‘private-language’ considerations. Thus what I mean by the ‘liberatory philosophy’ that I see Wittgenstein as championing, though so clearly having the stamp of Baker’s thought upon it, moves beyond Baker to a new terrain where freedom and inter-being are inextricable, themselves ‘internally related’. Where it is obvious that freedom is not what Berlin called ‘negative freedom’. Where we will be able to see how philosophical autonomy—an overcoming of dogmatism, a true freedom of thought—coincides with the deepest possible inter-relation with others.²⁵

‘The ethical demand’ arises not as something external to the individual, not as something in any way heteronomous (although it may sometimes feel heteronomous: it may sometimes feel to us as if it is an unwelcome demand imposed upon us from outside: ‘Why me?: Why couldn’t someone else have been put in this place at this time, having to be a Samaritan?’ and so on, but when we breathe deeply or emerge from an ego-driven short-termism, this kind of thought is overcome, as shameful, making way perhaps even for a gratitude that we were ‘chosen’ by fate to be in this place at this time of need). We come to be subjects through the demand, that is, through the trusting relationship. And this, once more, is where we can interpret Løgstrup as going a step further than Levinas along the track towards a successfully realised second-personal ethic: ‘That a person is more or less in the power of another person is a fact we cannot alter; it is a fact of life. We do not deliberately choose to trust, and thereby deliver ourselves over to another. We constantly live in a state of being already delivered’ (1997, p. 54). And again; ‘it is not within our power to determine whether we wish to live in responsible relationships or not; we find ourselves in them simply because we exist’ (1997, p. 107). These thoughts of Løgstrup’s are profoundly in alignment with what I have sought to excavate in Wittgenstein. One can see this theme of Wittgenstein’s expanding further, from its ‘basis’ in the anti-private-language considerations: I would argue in fact that a central thrust of ‘Part II’ of the Investigations, of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Part II (1992) and of On Certainty (1975) is the contesting of the philosophical canon’s placing of us as fundamentally in suspicion of one another. This suspicion may even be derived from our self-satisfaction with ourselves (the first-person) and a spectatorial relationship to others (‘third persons!’). Though all these phenomena are, as Hannes Nykänen (2002) and Joel Backström (2007) suggest, likely to be derived more basically from a reactivity against the (‘too’-)wonderful, ‘threatening’ possibility of love, of openness.

Wittgenstein increasingly emphasises instead the second person, which is a relation —an ‘internal’ relation, ideally. Here is a striking example of Wittgenstein’s contestation of the bias of the philosophical tradition, and of his pointing up instead that there are some cases (actually, very many—though not all) where the prejudice that ‘no-one can really know anyone else’ is all-too-convenient, a way of avoiding love, avoiding mutuality:

If I lie to him and he guesses it from my face and tells me so—do I still have the feeling that what is in me is in no way accessible to him and hidden? Don’t I feel rather that he sees right through me? // It is only in particular cases that the inner is hidden from me, and in those cases it is not hidden because it is the inner. (1992, p. 33)

In one reminder, one may be thus freed from capture by the prejudice of separateness. But one is likely to need reminding again and again and again: because the prejudice, as I’ve intimated, is literally a self-serving one. It helps to maintain one in ‘safety’, invulnerable to the profound vulnerability (to being called upon to act aright—and, if one does not, to criticism) that comes from recognising the call that the very existence of vulnerable others makes upon one.

And I’ve suggested that the philosophical tradition, even to some extent including Levinas (whose very project was to set himself against this face of the philosophical tradition), is culpable here. It is a consequential, dangerous philosophical fantasy to suppose that we cannot be radically involved with each other unless we have ‘direct access’ to one another’s pains. In fact, the desire for such ‘direct access’, for the possibility of inspecting each other’s ‘beetles’, already shows that you are radically involved with the other. For the desire is a mark of our wanting confirmation for something we already suppose: that we are not, will not, must not be sundered radically from one another. The desire to be able to know another ‘directly’ misfires, but expresses, as through a glass darkly, that we already see each other, feel each other, want each other, face to face. (Why does this misfiring occur? Typically because we are afraid of the possibility of success; we pre-emptively stall the true meeting with the other because such a meeting will make us profoundly vulnerable—including, to our conscience.)

Another way of expressing this of course would be (that we are free, helpfully) to say: we do directly encounter each other. We do see each other’s pain. It is only a philosophical prejudice that would insist upon inspection of a ‘beetle’—rather than us looking into another’s eyes (compare Wittgenstein, 1958, §286: ‘man sight ihm in die Augen’)—as involving a direct encounter. But this prejudice is not the product of a specific intellectual tradition alone; it is the product of a much deeper cultural malaise and hegemony. Philosophy in this sense is (as Cavell has seen most clearly, across his career) necessarily deep cultural criticism against philosophical and ideological prejudices that are occurrent far beyond the academy.

We are radically (i.e. at the roots) involved with each other,²⁶ contra any hypothesis to the effect that that involvement is somehow hypothetical.²⁷ Philosophical normalcy tends to produce an attitude of inhumanity, or at minimum to provide a tacit apologia for it. Wittgenstein suggests as much here:

What would it look like if everyone were always uncertain about everyone else’s feelings? Seemingly when they were expressing sympathy, etc. … for someone, they would always be a little doubtful, would always put on a doubtful expression or make a doubtful gesture.—But if we now leave off this constant gesture because it is constant, what behaviour then remains? Perhaps a behaviour that is cool, only superficially interested? But then we in turn don’t have to interpret their behaviour as an expression of doubting. (1992, p. 87)

What would it look like if we did as epistemology tends to tell us we ‘ought’ to do —because of the (scientistic) horror at false positives (whereas actually we should worry more about false negatives: about the dire results of our insisting upon evidence for humanity where such evidence may not be decisive, and where we may lose our contact with others or treat them inhumanely, in the meantime²⁸). It would look much as our culture, sadly, quite often does: as though the most important thing were to be largely indifferent to others, and to look ‘cool’. (It is extremely telling that this term is among the greatest terms of approbation among the young, and thus among us all, because our culture venerates youth: how much happier the world might be, if instead we were all striving to be ‘warm’.) This should no longer be interpreted as an expression of doubting: it would rather be an attitude to life, to others. That is: it would no longer be an epistemological stance, but a moral-existential attitude. An attitude towards souls, of being somewhat less concerned with them than we ought to be. It means nothing to say that everyone is always uncertain about everyone else’s feelings. But it would mean something to be indifferent about others’ feelings. And this, the philosophical tradition runs the risk of encouraging. For the epistemological stance is, we can now see, a moral stance (or rather: typically a problematically amoral or immoral stance).

Contra the epistemologically focused philosophical tradition, trust comes first. This Løgstrup expresses in his later work²⁹ through the lovely notion of ‘sovereign expressions of life’, of which trust is, as I read him, the paradigm. Løgstrup gives here a lovely case of a Danish woman visited by a polite Nazi during World War II; the Nazi seeks to inquire as to the location of a man who is wanted. Even though the woman is completely clear in herself that the right thing to do is not to give this man away, nevertheless she has to struggle a little not to struggle in breaking trust with the Nazi. The attitude of trust is primary; it has a normative character enduring through everything.

Wittgenstein, as I read him, suggests something similar:

Are we perhaps over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence?—And on what experience is our assumption based? // (Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one.) // Why can’t a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing. (1958, §§249–50)

Simulation, pretence, distrust are complex phenomena that can overlay and will not precede simpler ones. Roughly: a sovereign, unquestioned and unquestioning trust. On what experience is our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence based? On no experience at all; it is a fundamental attitude, emerging from attunement to and acceptance of the fundamental attitude that we might naturally term trust.³⁰ It is a ‘one-sided’ trust³¹: trust that has no equal opposite, for it could make no sense for a distrust that is fundamentally opposed it to be fundamental. Thus this use of the word ‘trust’ is ‘transitional’, ladder-like. It serves as a reminder of something too basic to be meaningfully stated, though nevertheless fragile.

The vulnerability of children, who have in a fundamental sense no alternative but to trust, even as they seek to discriminate those who they should not trust (i.e. even as they seek, rationally and needfully, to avoid being completely open), is in the end but a special, extreme, telling, most deeply moving case of the vulnerability of each and all of us in the hands of all our fellows. We are all (like) children, in the sense that we are all placed in the care of the myriad of others who are in our care. In Løgstrup’s resonant words, ‘we belong to one another’s world. Others are a part of the life we have received; they constitute its content. Any other life, a life in isolation, is humanly speaking unthinkable’ (1997, p. 117).

In this mutual likeness, how could we be unknowable to each other (as Levinas risks supposing)? In our common predicament of pain, vulnerability to pain, dependence—and capacity to care.³²

3.

The kind of truly relational ethic sketched above is advocated, among Wittgensteinians, chiefly by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Hannes Nykänen and Joel Backström (and myself). We all stress a second-person approach.

I have already touched on Christensen’s approach, which I find very conducive. Nykänen and Backström too have been a significant influence upon me, and I believe their work in this area to be nothing less than the most significant since Buber’s and Løgstrup’s. But I have nevertheless some differences with them worth I think elaborating here, as we think together, in this volume and elsewhere, how one might develop a relational ethic further.

A first difference is terminological. Nykänen and Backström call the problem inhibiting such an ethic ‘collectivity’.³³ But why not ‘conformism’? Wouldn’t ‘conformism’ more accurately describe the problematical character of collectives that are problematical (for I do not wish to assume dogmatically that all collectives are problematical)?

If the term ‘collectivity’ is to be used, then it would be well if it were recognised that the choice of (that) term is in an important sense arbitrary; the term ‘individuality’ could just as well be used to name the problem! For groups that oppress their members are no more a fundamental marker of what is wrong with our time, what it is in us that resists real relationship, than are individuals that insist endlessly upon their separateness. In fact, I would suggest that individualism is a more dominant ideology in our time than collectivism. (Though it is true that such individualism is mostly faux: the kind of freedom of thought prized by Wittgenstein is but rarely accomplished, and most actually existing individualism, as mercilessly mocked in a famous scene in ‘The life of Brian’, is actually just a veiled form of conformism.) My worry is that Backström and Nykänen risk tacitly buying into that hegemonic ideology. That they may even be more a product of their time, conformistically, than they appreciate.

I think that our time’s prejudice in favour of individualism needs a corrective to help us take more seriously the aspect of our nature that is essentially collective. I am thinking in the first instance of how we are mammals, primates, born (unlike reptiles) into a love that is plural and not only dyadic, born into community. Most strikingly, in the profound mother-child bond of care. Now, does this make me a ‘naturalist’? Perhaps. But not, I think, a scientific naturalist. I am committed to no dogma of science being the only respectable method of inquiry or reflection—on the contrary³⁴—nor to any recherché scientific knowledge being required for the point. The contrast between mammals and reptiles is one broadly informed by biological knowledge but actually of a very basic and very long-standing, and largely more or less non-scientific character, if by science we mean to index (as the scientific naturalist typically does) the institutions and forms of science proper, science in the sense of what scientific experts research. It is, in short, the kind of thing we all know, but that, as Wittgenstein reminds us, we need reminding of. And of course he himself had a name for this kind of basic or very general knowledge of nature:

What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes. (Wittgenstein, 1958, §415, emphasis added)³⁵

In this (limited) sense, I’m with Wittgenstein in being a ‘naturalist’. But this sense of the word ‘naturalist’ means only that we are reminding ourselves of fundamental features of the anthropic and so on. It is not a scientific naturalism.³⁶

The point I made above about terminology regarding ‘conformism’ or ‘collectivity’ (or ‘individualism’) might nevertheless of course turn out to be merely terminological. I suspect that the issue around naturalism that I’ve just touched on signals a deeper difference between myself and Nykänen and Backström, but I will let the reader judge that, based on what is in this volume. Let me turn instead to the most substantive way I’m aware of making a contrast between myself and the Nykänen-Backström approach.

It is this. If we are all serious about believing, as we (and Christensen) claim to be, that it is the relation that is primary, not the relata, then the assumption that what are related must be individual persons will turn out to be just that: an assumption, a tacit dogma. My worry is that Nykänen and Backström at times fall into that dogma. They tend to assume that a relational ethic is an I-you [singular] matter always. But taking seriously that relationality is primary leaves it an open question what the relata are, so long as they are beings or being-like.³⁷ In particular, I would submit that the relata can be made up of more than one person.³⁸ That a relational ethic can sometimes involve I-You [plural] relations, or We-You relations. At either end of a relation can be persons or unified collectives. Examples of the latter might be some activist ‘affinity groups’,³⁹ couples, families, tribes; the collective could sometimes include animals (most obviously, pack animals such as dogs⁴⁰ or wolves). The impression sometimes given by Backström/Nykänen that ‘we’s cannot be a good thing is one that a determined anti-dogmatic attitude should overcome.

It is a prejudice—a Modern Western prejudice (and here, Nykänen and Backström risk showing a cultural narrowness, comparable in abstract form to the cultural narrowness found in contemporary scientific naturalism)—to think that it is only ever individual persons who relate authentically to one another. The danger of making the meeting of eyes into a ‘paradigm case’ of relating, as Nykänen and Backström tend to do,⁴¹ is that it begs the question against meetings between larger units, first-person plurals (‘wes’) or second-person plurals (‘yous’). This tacit bias in favour of individualism becomes especially invidious when one considers the profound importance today of our relating to our descendants (unborn future generations) on pain of otherwise (as we are on course to do) destroying them pre-emptively. Such relating looks impossible, if one has to relate to individual persons: because future people are not yet formed as individuals. Their gaze can’t meet ours (see Read, 2014).

The fundamental human unit can be ‘larger than self’. Or, better still, more radically put: the self can be a larger unit than individual persons. At minimum, we should leave it open that one may be able to felicitously identify one’s self with something larger than one’s organism. We may even want to call that larger self, an achieved community, in-dividual. And such a we can then form a second-personal relation to other Is or wes, as I will shortly explicate.

Such an achievement may be fragile; it will likely continually dissolve and re-form; in its dissolvements, one will see again the I-You relations that formed it. But it is dogmatism to insist that such a community can never exist. (Just as what the communitarians typically got wrong is assuming dogmatically that once it is formed it should always exist.)

Think of understanding a feature film (the most influential art-form of our time) or seeking to do so. We sometimes attribute the authorship of a film solely to an individual author, an ‘auteur’ (usually the director). But a moment’s reflection tells us that this is a crude over-simplification (albeit a revealing one: it reveals our knee-jerk individualism, as well as our cult of celebrity). A film is a thoroughgoingly trans-individual enterprise, involving writers, actors, cameramen and so on. When we use the name of an auteur, we are typically referring in reality to an ensemble. If we seek to put film-making into an I-You frame, then quite clearly the ‘I’ in question is a ‘We’ (a well-made film will have involved realised internal relations between those making it, leading towards a unified work). Or, alternatively, if we view things from the perspective of the viewer, then the You that I am understanding when I understand a film is clearly plural in the sense of involving multiple persons. It is an achieved community that I am seeking to understand, when I understand a good film.

An I-you relation, if achieved, forms a ‘we’ as Saint-Exupery famously recognised, when he said that ‘Love does not consist in gazing at each other. But in looking outward together in the same direction’, a remark that I think ill-fits the conception of Nykänen and Backström, who seem committed to having to take such looking outward together as a form of ‘collectivity’ and thus as necessarily problematic.

Similarly, a we-you relation, if achieved, forms a new larger-still ‘we’.

This is, roughly, a dialectical process. The synthesis becomes the basis of a potential further synthesis. And so onward.

Because of this dialectic, when we take seriously the existence of ‘internal’ relations between beings, we open ourselves to the possibility that the fundamental ‘unit’ of existence is not the individual human person, but the unities formed/existent where there are internal relations between beings, that is, roughly, (small) communities.

I want to be open to the possibility that it is larger-than-individual-person units that may have fundamental (including internal) relations to others. That seems to me the spirit of Wittgenstein: struggling always to overcome dogmatism.

Consider again the example made famous by Saint-Exupery. Sometimes, what I have described above seems to me the way that one functions as part of a couple. That is, sometimes, we gaze into each other’s eyes, but other times we turn as one towards others. We feel as one towards some friend who is in need, for instance.

Similarly: sometimes, in the anti-nuclear direct-action affinity group that I used to belong to (part of ‘Trident Ploughshares’, seeking to turn nuclear weapons into ploughshares), pairs of us or a trio or occasionally the whole group would turn as one towards another unit/entity. Sometimes challengingly, though (we tried to be) loving.

That is the kind of phenomenon that I want to leave space for. It seems to me that Nykänen and Backström don’t leave any space for it, and that is why I suspect the presence in their work of a residual dogmatic individualism. Not in relation to their main claims (e.g. concerning conscience, and the mechanisms of what I call conformism) which I endorse and celebrate. But in relation to a way in which they seem, because of their antipathy to ‘collectivity’, to limit their main positive claims so that they are allowed to apply only to individual human persons. Which seems to me an unwarranted limitation, and furthermore one that illustrates a cultural-historical bias. (For I would claim that my ‘broader’ way of seeing things would make much more sense to most humans across the entirety of human history, including to most Christians, until relatively recently; seeing oneself fundamentally as part of a dyad is an extremely recent and geographically specific phenomenon. And not only because most human communities have had fundamental limitations or problems!)

If we are really serious in making relationality the focal phenomenon, and thinking of beings as formed out of relationality, then we ought to be open to the kind of possibility I am seeking to clear space for. Nykänen is inclined to insist that ‘If a relation involves more than two persons it simply isn’t second personal’.⁴² I counter that what we call the first-person plural can be second personal in terms of philosophical grammar, if it is truly ‘unified’ as outlined above (noting, please, that I make explicit that such unification is rarely if ever permanent), and if it is appropriately related to others. Thus, the second person is not necessarily dyadic.

This line of thinking hopes to be a case-study in what I call ‘liberatory philosophy’ in action (busting the prejudice that the second person is necessarily a relation between two people only), and it establishes the implications of conceiving of autonomy as relationality. It’s a prejudice to take it as obvious that autonomy has essentially to do with ‘individual’ persons’ autonomy. What matters are real relationships, and those are not always based in Is or singular Yous.

4.

In conclusion then, I have sought to illustrate the ethical aspect—which I claim to be actually central—to Wittgenstein’s critique of our desire for a ‘private language’. Which is a desire to retreat from our utter relatedness to one another. I have connected that illustration to Løgstrup and (much more equivocally) to Levinas. And I have briefly sought to triangulate the relational ethic that this chapter hopes to have evinced with the related but more ‘individualistic’ such ethic present in Nykänen and Backström (and visible in their—excellent—contributions to this volume).

My hope would be that the twenty-first century might see a deeper awareness of the problems inherent in (third-personal) scientific naturalism, and further research into and development instead of our (second-personal) alternative. But in the darkness of these times, it would be wise not yet to over-invest in such a hope.⁴³