Abstract
In “Time And Place For Philosophy”, Cavell (2008) discusses the “political reading” of Wittgenstein (attributed to Kripke) illustrated by the so-called scene of instruction in the Investigations, at §217 and “moments in Wittgenstein’s biography that can seem to substantiate such a reading”. Cavell refers to “a well-known story of his striking a pupil ” where power resides purely on the side of the teacher. Wittgenstein attended teacher training in Vienna in 1919 and taught in Austrian rural village schools until 1926 when he abruptly resigned after an incident involving hitting a pupil that led to a court trial held in Gloggnitz beginning on 17 May 1926 and lasted several over several months. The court judge called for a psychiatric examination of Wittgenstein , a report that has gone missing. The so-called Haibauer incident constitutes a central and smouldering episode in Wittgenstein’s own psychological make-up and ethical self-development—one that he returns to many years later as the basis for his “confession”. In contra distinction to Cavell’s romantic reading of the figure of the child and Matthews’ (2006) philosophy of the child, I embrace an historicist reading of Wittgenstein on the figure of the child arguing for a position that attempts to avoid both essentializing the child and forms of “adultism” by historicizing child subjectivity (Peters and Johansson 2012). This argument is advanced by focusing on and exploring the biographical incident to which Cavell refers in more detail for the light it casts on Wittgenstein’s teaching sensibilities and his state of mind (especially his suicide ideation) in the period he was a teacher, including his relationships with the Austrian children he taught. The effect of this historicist approach is to relativise Wittgenstein’s teaching and his “discipline” to the cultural context of his time—1920s Austria dominated by the Glöckel educational reforms that introduced pedagogy based on social democratic principles. This paper also imagines what the psychiatric report contained entertaining the diagnosis of Wittgenstein’s childhood autism and adult Aspergers as a means to understand Wittgenstein’s early language difficulties during his “solipsistic” phase, his lifelong struggle in sustaining reciprocal social interactions and his philosophical interests in language learning.
Am I doing child psychology? I am making a connexion between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Z §412)
I have said the idea of the child keeps coming back in what I do.
Stanley Cavell (2008, p. 55)
Presented at Education and the Figure of the Child in Wittgenstein and Cavell, University of Lausanne (Switzerland; March, 2016). Workshop organized by: Cours de vacances (UNIL) and EXeCO (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein’s (PI) p. for Part II.
- 2.
Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (PI = Philosophical Investigations, N = Notebooks (pre-Tratactus), Z = Zettel, OC = On Certainty, LRKM = Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, CV = Culture and Value), with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials in the References.
- 3.
As Laugier (2011: 322) claims “in working out a general model of ancient philosophy as an ethics , a praxis of discourse and an activity of self-perfection, Hadot opened Wittgenstein interpretation to new, original readings for example those of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond ”. This ethics of self-transformation also applies in some measure to not only Wittgenstein but also his references to St Augustine , and to Tolstoy. It is precisely this aspect of spiritual practices that Michel Foucault picks up on from Hadot in his later work on bios and the aesthetics of self.
- 4.
Here, I differ from Cavell in that I want to draw connections between Wittgenstein’s confessional style—his confessions—and his life or bios. Wittgenstein’s quest for spiritual purity was a lifelong preoccupation as adduced by his comments to Russell during the course of their discussions on logic in 1913 (LRKM): “My life is full of the most hateful and petty thoughts and acts (this is no exaggeration)”. “Perhaps you think it is a waste of time for me to think about myself; but how can I be a logician if I am not yet a man! Before everything else I must become pure”. See also Shields (1993).
- 5.
See Tomasello’s videoed lecture to 5th Annual Conference of the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) Wittgenstein, Enactivism and Animal Minds, University of Hertfordshire, 7–8 July 2012 at https://vimeo.com/49186447.
- 6.
Infantilization of indigenous peoples was a common aspect of imperial power that often resulted in statements of cognitive superiority on the part of colonizers and attacks on indigenous soveriegnty or autonomy, on the other—indigenous peoples as “big kids” who were too politically immature to govern. In this regard see the global movement Idle No More, at http://www.idlenomore.ca/. My thanks to Jeff Stickney for the expansion of this point and reference.
- 7.
In this context , it is interesting to remember Foucault’s (1975) Discipline and Punish that provides an account of a new disciplinary technology focusing on the body that emerges with the birth of the prison and a humanitarian concept of consistent punishment used in schools and other institutions. The abolition of corporeal punishment in most Western schools only took place very recently starting in the 1980s with a shift away from disciplinary policy to “detention,” “positive reinforcement,” “school counselling,” “suspension,” “classroom management,” “parenting styles” and in the US “zero tolerance” (Reagan anti-drug policy). One of the core issues to emerge recently concerns punishing students whose misbehaviour is a manifestation of their disabilities. The psychopathology of school “disorders” (mentioned in the DSM) has occasioned drug treatment of children with behavioural and emotional disorders, especially stimulant medications (e.g. ritalin) for ADHD, that lend itself to a Foucaultian “biopolitics” analysis.
- 8.
Translated by Robert Wesley Angelo at http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/.
- 9.
All quotations have their source in Wittgenstein (LRKM), Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore. On the last remark see Norm Friesen’s “Lost in Translation: Ludwig Wittgenstein , Education and the Question of Abrichtung” (presented at the Philosophy of Education Society annual meeting, Toronto, 2016) at http://blogs.ubc.ca/nfriesen/files/2015/08/wittgenstein-training.pdf. Friesen examines Wittgenstein’s insistence on “training ”and what he calls the apologetics of Monk and others and advances a more troubling analysis that follows Luntley’s (2008: 696) allegation of “the brutal tone” of the term and of children as animals.
- 10.
See the picture of Wittgenstein with his pupils in Puchberg am Schneeberg, circa 1922: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidbauer_incident.
- 11.
See Schwarzschild (1979), Levi (1978–79), Szabados (1999), Stern (2001); Chatterjee (2005) and Abramovitc (2006). And even more controversially Cornish (1998). Stern writes: “There is reason to think that Wittgenstein’s uneasy relationship to his own racial identity , a relationship framed in terms of the prevalent anti-Semitic discourse of his times, also figures in his relationship to his sexuality” (p. 262).
- 12.
See Levi (1978–79) who sees Wittgenstein’s ethics as a reflection of his guilty homosexuality .
- 13.
It is interesting to compare Wittgenstein to both Shcopenhauer and Camus who both take suicide very seriously. For Schopenahauer, suicide is the supreme assertion of the will and one’s ultimate right to take one’s own life. For Camus, suicide is the only philosophical question and is a deep recognition of the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane habitual routine of everyday life and the uselessness of suffering.
- 14.
I owe this point to Jeff Stickney .
- 15.
Anan (2007: ix) in the Foreword to The Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders writes: “Autism spectrum disorders are pervasive developmental disabilities in which the core impairments have a profound influence on children’s development. A relative or total absence of reciprocal social interactive skills is the primary symptom seen in young children with autism spectrum disorders”. Autistic children “make less frequent eye contact and direct fewer facial expressions toward their parents. They also fail to share their interest in things they see through pointing and holding up objects for their parents to see”. By comparison the “autistic child has trouble initiating a shared focus of attention”. Communication is another core problem: “Preschoolers diagnosed with autism may demonstrate delays in spoken language or may be completely nonverbal. They may simply echo what is said to them without meaning . Some children may be able to speak but demonstrate a lack of pragmatic communication skills . In other words, they may be able to respond to direct questions but cannot engage in back-and-forth conversations.
- 16.
See Clapham’s (2011) response to Fitzgerald by emphasizing Wittgenstein’s critique of “inner world” built into the theoretical formulations of psychiatry and psychology at http://www.philadelphia-association.org.uk/documents/WittgensteinandAspergers.pdf. See also Ishisaka (2003) who concludes that Wittgenstein had AS classification ICD-10 with the following characteristics: egocentric; lack of empathy for others; lack of sense of social interaction , detached; daily life was obsessive, stereotypic, persistent; clumsiness; strange accent and intonation.
- 17.
In this regard hear the Motet Op. 27 (PI) for choir by Elizabeth Lutyens (“Excerota Tractati Logico-Philosophici”) an English composer who based her twelve tone motet on the Tractatus, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tVjyYY4hRg. See Parson (1999).
- 18.
Most Western countries have abolished corporal punishment in schools (Poland was first in 1783) except for a few states in Australia and the USA. The abolition is incomplete and very recent—New Zealand only legislatively abolished corporal punishment in 1990. In states that still practice corporal punishment black children are twice as likely as white children to be subject to corporal punishment. Clearly, the cultural practices have changed and are changing further as are the concepts governing these changes.
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Peters, M.A. (2017). Wittgenstein’s Trials, Teaching and Cavell’s Romantic “Figure of the Child”. In: Peters, M., Stickney, J. (eds) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3136-6_14
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