Abstract
This chapter explores Wittgenstein’s contrast between attitudes and opinions in characterizing my relation toward the other as ensouled. I begin with what I call a privileging reading, which accords to the notion of attitude a kind of depth in relation to opinions. On this reading, the attitude Wittgenstein gestures toward provides the backdrop for the kinds of opinions that make sense in my relation to the other. Read with only a slight shift of emphasis, Wittgenstein’s remark allows for a similar sounding, but ultimately quite different, reading, which is exemplified in Daniel Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance. The different ways of construing Wittgenstein’s contrast make a difference in terms of how we understand Wittgenstein’s thought in relation to—and as having some bearing upon—scientific naturalism.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel Dennett’s philosophy of mind, who serves as my principal example of one way of spelling out Wittgenstein’s contrast, is at the very least open to radical revisions in our self-understanding as subjects of experience. See Note 7 below for further discussion.
- 2.
The passage reads:
But what is the difference between an attitude and an opinion?
I would like to say: the attitude comes before the opinion.
(Isn’t belief in God an attitude?)
How would this be: only one who utters it as information believes it.
An opinion can be wrong. But what would an error look like here? (Wittgenstein, 1992, p. 38e)
- 3.
I am indebted to Edmund Dain for this way of putting the difference.
- 4.
The inclusion of the clause ‘just like that’ is significant here, as there certainly can be situations where those words, ‘I believe that he is not an automaton,’ do make sense. Consider: I am at a carnival with my son. Arrayed along the midway are various ‘living statues’, people who have been hired to pose as statues for the day; interspersed among the people are also mechanical figures that closely resemble the living statues. Periodically, various of these statues and figures move so as to startle passersby. Sometimes it’s one of the people, sometimes one of the mechanical figures. My son and I take an interest in the displays and try to determine which among them are the real people, which the mechanical ones. I look closely at one and notice just a hint of strain around the eyes, a slight slip where the ‘statue’ gives himself away. Pointing, I say to my son, ‘I believe that one’s not an automaton.’ In this situation, such words are perfectly in order, as is the notion that I am here expressing a belief.
- 5.
One could also, I believe, forge a very different kind of connection between Wittgenstein’s contrast of attitude and opinion with various strands of the continental tradition in twentieth Century philosophy. For example, Heidegger in Division One, Chapter 4 of Being and Time is especially concerned to deflect any understanding of the phenomenon of being-with that construes it as a kind of theoretical orientation or achievement: ‘Not only is being toward others an autonomous, irreducible relationship of being: this relationship, as being-with, is one which, with Dasein’s being, already is.’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 162/125). For this reason, Heidegger rejects any appeal to ‘empathy’ as somehow founding the relationship toward the other: ‘“Empathy” does not first constitute being-with; only on the basis of being-with does “empathy” become possible.’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 162/125). Although Heidegger does not say so explicitly, I take it that he would agree that the primordiality of being-with is distorted beyond recognition if understood as some collection of opinions.
Another example is Levinas. In an essay critical of Heidegger—‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’—Levinas goes even further in de-epistemologising, so to speak, the relation to the other. He writes at one point:
A human being is the sole being which I am unable to encounter without expressing this very encounter to him. It is precisely in this that the encounter distinguishes itself from knowledge. In every attitude in regard to the human there is a greeting—if only in the refusal of greeting. (Levinas, 1996, p. 7)
The inability Levinas cites here, such that even the refusal of greeting is itself inescapably a form of greeting (I can neither greet nor refuse to greet my plants, my favorite coffee mug, or my new shoes), again marks out the kind of depth I am attributing to Wittgenstein’s refusal of the category of opinion. Simply not greeting another human being is simply not an option, just as the question of whether or not another human being is an automaton so far makes no sense.
Despite their disagreements, for both Heidegger and Levinas, there is nothing in this repudiation of epistemology that moves their conception of the human—and the self-other relation more specifically—in the direction of conceiving of it as something animal.
- 6.
Wittgenstein’s scenario of the soulless tribe, discussed below, might be understood as an attempt to fill out this kind of limiting case. It is not clear to me that Wittgenstein actually deploys the scenario in this way.
- 7.
After discussing the way in which ‘a serious psychology’ takes the risk of aspychism, as ‘it can no more tolerate the idea of another (little) man inside, in here, than a serious theology can tolerate the idea of another (large) man up there,’ he goes on to note that Wittgenstein too runs this risk: ‘Wittgenstein takes the risk of apsychism, the risk that his understanding of the human body (as, for example, a picture) is unnecessary, or insincere, or dead.’
Daniel Dennett’s views, which I discuss immediately below, strike me as fully open to this kind of risk. For example, in Consciousness Explained, he writes of ‘threaten[ing] with extinction whatever phenomena of consciousness depend’ upon concepts his investigation may ‘overthrow’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 24). See also Content and Consciousness, where he allows for the possibility that our concept of a person may become ‘obsolete’ (Dennett, 1969).
- 8.
See, for example, Dennett’s ‘True Believers’ in Dennett (1987, pp. 13–42).
- 9.
I say more below about Dennett’s notion of vindication.
- 10.
Elsewhere, Wittgenstein questions the idea that in conducting a psychological investigation or experiment, researchers must assume that the behaviour they observe is ‘backed’ by genuine psychological states:
Suppose I describe a psychological experiment: the apparatus, the questions of the experimenter, the answers and actions of the subject. And then I say: all that is a scene in such-and-such a play. Now all is altered. So it will be said: If this experiment were described in the same way in a book on psychology, in that case the description of the behaviour of the subject would be understood as expression of the state of mind, because one presupposes that the subject is speaking the truth, is not pulling our legs, has not learnt the answers by heart.—So we make an assumption? (Wittgenstein, 1980a, § 290)
- 11.
- 12.
As Benardete notes, it is difficult to reflect coolly on these scenarios devised in the 1940s, given the very real mass enslavement and extermination carried out by the Nazis in that era upon those they regarded as sub-human. His worries are well taken, though it is worth noting that as far as I have been able to gather, the Nazis never denied that Jews and their other various victims actually felt pain. Indeed, given the many accounts of the sadism and cruelty of camp officers and other workers, their victims’ really feeling pain figured centrally in how they were treated. (And that alcohol rations were maximised for soldiers carrying out the exterminations provides further indication of such awareness.) The scenario also invites comparison to antebellum slavery in America, where the practices were largely underwritten by beliefs about the inferior status of those who were enslaved. The instability in these beliefs has been noted by Cavell (see Cavell, 1979, pp. 375–8) among others. It is not clear to me whether the same kind of instabilities can be discerned in Wittgenstein’s scenario, precisely because of the extremity of the attitude of Wittgenstein’s slaveowners. Part of the pleasure and power of owning slaves stemmed, I take it, from the slave owners’ confidence that they could make the slaves feel the force of their dominion. Slaves who really lacked all feeling would be less desirable slaves.
- 13.
But consider Wittgenstein’s leading question at § 283 of the Investigations: ‘What gives us so much as the idea that beings, things, can feel?’ Nothing about a stone, he suggests, gives us such an idea, and the most he will say by way of an answer is: ‘Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.’ (Wittgenstein, 2009a). Stones and the like give us nothing to latch onto, but the ‘wriggling fly’ in the subsequent remark does give us a ‘foothold.’ But if that is the case, surely these slaves give us as firm a grip as we could want. It is thus not entirely clear to me how to square Wittgenstein’s willingness to explore this scenario of the soulless tribe at length—to take it seriously—with what he says in these sections of the Investigations.
- 14.
Reprinted in Pitcher (1966, pp. 65–103).
- 15.
Elsewhere in his discussion, Brenner also says that ‘it is a fact that the slaves sometimes suffer pain,’ and even ‘that the masters know this.’ (Brenner, 1999, p. 115). It is not at all clear to me how to square this with the idea that the masters’ ‘insistence’ that the slaves are really automata is not a mistake. See also Brenner (1995).
- 16.
We could also imagine that Dennett’s kind of heterophenomenological investigation reveals a striking divergence between the two populations in the sense that the investigators do not find the same kind of ‘real-life correlates’ to the slaves’ reports as those found in the case of the masters. Suppose that a particular region of the masters’ brains ‘lights up’ in a particular way when they report feeling pain, while only half that region lights up in the case of the slaves. The common half is involved in the motor responses typically associated with pain. The investigators can tell this by careful use of curare, which freezes the muscles but does not diminish the feeling of pain. In the case of the slave owners, when they are administered curare so that the muscles are frozen, they still report feeling pain (and the half of the region that does not overlap with the slaves still lights up). With the slaves, when they receive curare, they neither report feeling pain nor does the relevant region of the brain light up. Reports of pain, for the slaves, just are reports of how their bodies move and the like. Of course, none of these imagined heterophenomenological findings serve to justify the idea that the slave owners are thereby entitled to enslave this tribe. For a fascinating discussion of the complexities of pain, see Dennett’s ‘Why You Can’t Make a Computer that Feels Pain’ in Dennett (1978, pp. 190–229).
- 17.
In Zettel, the soulless tribe is introduced explicitly as an ‘auxiliary construction.’ See Wittgenstein (1970, § 528).
- 18.
Suppose, though, that the brains don’t ‘light up’ in the same way and that these differences are consistent across the two populations. Does that show that the sinister-sounding scientists Wittgenstein appeals to at outset of the scenario are not so bad after all? Would it then be all right to beat and whip the slaves to get more work out of them because their cries of pain are really just ‘cries’?
- 19.
One might here wonder what the slaves would make of such belated recognition. How relieved would they be to have their pain and suffering firmly established by such investigations? Practically speaking, they may end up better off, but they would nonetheless likely resent having their acknowledgement await these sorts of tests.
- 20.
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty appeals to a similar danger of repression or forgetfulness in the study of perceptual experience:
[The] philosopher describes sensations and their substratum—as one might describe the fauna of a distant land—without noticing that he himself also perceives, that he is a perceiving subject, and that perception such as he lives it denies everything he says about perception in general. For, seen from within, perception owes nothing to what we otherwise know about the world, about stimuli such as described by physics, and about the sense organs as described by biology. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 215)
- 21.
The remark cited here continues: ‘Our disease is one of wanting to explain.’ (Wittgenstein, 1978, VI, § 31).
- 22.
This paper has gone through a number of revisions and transformations. It began life as a discussion primarily of Dennett and heterophenomenology for a 2010 workshop in London on the philosophy of psychiatry sponsored by the University of Essex. I am grateful to Wayne Martin for the invitation and to the audience for questions and criticism. A similar version was subsequently presented at a Wittgenstein workshop in the Fall of 2013. But the paper was significantly expanded, then cut down, and then expanded again through a series of workshops and a conference connected with the research project, ‘A Science of the Soul?’ sponsored by the Academy of Finland. I am grateful to the entire ‘ASS gang’—Thomas Wallgren, Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen, Niklas Toivakainen, and Fredrik Westerlund—for inviting me to participate and for the many hours of stimulating conversation. I would also like to thank the other workshop participants, especially Edmund Dain and Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christiansen, as well as the audience at the final Helsinki conference associated with the project. Special thanks to Niklas Toivakainen for detailed written comments, a great many of which I feel I have only begun to address.
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Cerbone, D.R. (2019). All Souls: Wittgenstein and ‘eine Einstellung zur Seele’. In: Backström, J., Nykänen, H., Toivakainen, N., Wallgren, T. (eds) Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_5
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