Abstract
Here, we examine two caricatures of Wittgenstein in order to show in relief a more accurate portrait of his later philosophy and its significance for education. Curry’s attempt to appropriate Wittgenstein to Philosophy of Geography backfires but gives occasion to explore his geographic metaphors in relation to his ambling method of philosophical investigation. Learning is shown to be the gradual absorption of rich cultural surroundings or background for going on as others do, knowing one’s way about but also sharing in the genius loci of one’s place. Friesen’s attempt to portray Wittgenstein as a ‘tragic Philosopher of Education’ based on a ‘German-first reading’ of his use of the word Abrichtung (training) also dissembles under closer scrutiny. Friesen’s apparent tribunal of Wittgenstein makes it seem like philosophers drawing on him for progressive purposes in education are somehow naïve or duped in overlooking the dictionary definition of Abrichtung. Exonerating colleagues from disparagement, we show how closer reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks on training, teaching and learning take us not into pedagogy but into deeper aspects of post-foundational epistemology, where meaning no longer hinges on correspondence with an external reality.
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Notes
- 1.
Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (PI = Philosophical Investigations, RFM = Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, OC = On Certainty, WL = Wittgenstein’s Lectures, CV = Culture Value, PO = Philosophical Occasions), with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials (e.g. RFM) in the References. See Abbreviation list, p. ii?
- 2.
Compare Wittgenstein (RFGB 119, above) to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship:
Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups – that is the wisdom of teachers. Whoever merely tastes of his error will keep house with it a long time…but whoever drains it completely will have to get to know it unless he be insane. (von Goethe 2001, VII. 9; Kaufmann 1966, 156)
- 3.
Reacting to someone exhibiting pain behaviour is similar: we have grown accustomed to readings these gestures and sounds, and recognize them instantly without making elaborate inferences, because we have been surrounded by these patterns and rituals of reaction all of our lives.
Only surrounded by certain normal manifestations of life is there such a thing as an expression of pain. Only surrounded by an even more far-reaching particular manifestation of life, such a thing as the expression of sorrow or affection. And so on. (Z §534)
- 4.
- 5.
The concept of ‘seeing’ makes a tangled impression. Well, it is tangled—I look at the landscape, my gaze ranges over it, I see all sorts of distinct and indistinct movement; this impresses itself sharply on me, that [it] is quite hazy. After all, how completely ragged what we see can appear! And now look at all that can be meant by ‘description of what is seen’—But this just is what is called description of what is seen. There is not one genuine proper case of such description—the rest being just vague, something which awaits clarification, or which must be swept aside as rubbish (PI, pg. 200; Cf. PI 291, 292).
- 6.
‘Here I am inclined to fight windmills, because I cannot yet say the thing I really want to say.’ (OC §400)
- 7.
In PI, p. 225 Wittgenstein demonstrates mastery of techniques through gradual training as follows, discussing how one is able to judge the length of rod (for allusion to Einstein’s relativity, see Stickney 2008): ‘What “determining the length” means is not learned by learning what length and determining are; the meaning not the word “length” is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length.
(For this reason the word “methodology” has a double meaning. Not only a physical investigation, but also a conceptual one, can be called “methodical investigation”.)’
- 8.
‘The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty—We have go onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!’ (PI §107).
- 9.
OC §95; ‘It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.’ OC §96; ‘The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of one from then other.’ OC §97; ‘And the bank of that river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited.’ (OC §99)
- 10.
Would it be correct to say that our concepts reflect our life? They stand in the middle of it. (RC III, §302)
You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You interpret a grammatical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical phenomenon which you are observing. …What you primarily discovered was a new way of looking at things. (OC §401)
- 11.
Gadamer (1977, 176), says of this sentence: “And what would be nearer to the later Husserl and his interest in the life-world or to Heidegger’s analytic of everyday Dasein than this sentence …”) (citing PI §129 above).
- 12.
“There’s some behaviour and some conversation taking place. A few sentences back and forth; and a few actions. That might be all. (Words only have meaning in the river [Flux] of life.) (LW, I §913)
- 13.
In OC §286: What we believe depends on what we learn. (See OC §§310–15, cited below.)
- 14.
- 15.
Instead of Nietzsche’s (1965, 129) and Emerson’s (1965, 294, 300, 305–6) familiar trope of a singular tutelary spirit or ‘daimon’.
There can be no more detestable and empty creature in nature than the man who runs away from his daimon, and then casts furtive glances right, left, backwards and all around. One can no longer seize hold of such a man, for he is all exterior without any core, a decrepit, painted, puffed up garment, an ornate ghost which can inspire no fear and certainly no sympathy. (Nietzsche 1965, 2–3)
- 16.
Wittgenstein criticized Fraser for crudely interpreting as sinister rites like Beltane fire festivals where effigies are thrown onto the fire and drawing lots (initially for human sacrifice). We are uncertain of (cannot verify) historical hypotheses, he says, and so must look for something sinister in the present enactment of rituals—‘the surroundings of a way of acting’—and ascribe this sense from inner experience (PO: RFGB 147).
- 17.
- 18.
Friesen’s fixation on abrichtung finds some affinity in the writing of Michael Luntley (2007, 2008, 2012, Luntley 2017, 442), stemming from Huemer’s (2006) paper, but Luntley perseveres in seeing in Wittgenstein a source of inspiration for what he calls an aesthetic sensibility attuned to our innate conditions or capacities for learning. The Luntley-Stickney debate of 2008 did not go entirely unnoticed in the field of academic Philosophy in which Luntley resides, making a footnote in Andrea Kern’s Sources of Knowledge (Kern 2017, 666). (See index entries for abrichtung, in Peters and Stickney 2017.)
- 19.
Preceded by the concession (emphasis added, 71), though aimed at sidestepping the reading of Wittgenstein’s use of abrichtung as a rhetorical device: ‘This paper argues that it is neither necessary nor helpful to see Wittgenstein’s language—despite its unyielding harshness—simply as ‘inappropriate’ or an ‘assault’ on his readers.’ What harshness is he pointing to PI §§207–8, as an example?
- 20.
Lost in Translation: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Education and the Question of Abrichtung (Training). Posted on 5 August 2015 by friesenn
Any cautious, constructive interpretive response to Wittgenstein’s startling affirmation of Abrichtung in education—of commanding children as animals, perhaps even to break their will—would have to consider unflinchingly why Wittgenstein deliberately chose such a forceful term in the first place. It would have to ask why Wittgenstein insisted on arbitrary brutality as being necessary in teaching and learning and induction into forms of life. It would also have to acknowledge the close connection of many influential Wittgenstinian terms and conceptions—from ostensive definition, rule-following and forms of life to language-games—with this apparently necessary, arbitrary brutality. Finally, it would have to reflect further on Wittgenstein’s familiar claims; for example, that explanations come to an end somewhere’’ (1953, p. 5) in the light of Abrichtung. In many important cases, one could only conclude, explanation is forcefully brought to an end before it can even begin.
- 21.
As a thought-experiment, imagine someone discovers that the Greek word for ‘virtue’, aretai, is derived from Ares—the god of war, and thus that virtue was modelled in antiquity on a Spartan form as ‘virulence’ or athletic and martial prowess. One would not do well to substitute this meaning into Plato’s Socratic dialogues or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics!
- 22.
Bakhurst (2015) was defending the very idea of initiation into humanity through acquisition of our second nature, as well as the educational goal of autonomy, from a critique delivered by Rödl (2016). (Both papers originate with papers delivered at a conference in 2013.) Rödl’s argument against abrichten and second nature stems from his metaphysical argument, based on Aristotle’s De Anima, that reason is already a part of human nature. Listening to Rödl deliver a brilliant but perplexing lecture on this topic (Queens University, Kingston, 2017), in which he further denied that teaching is not an art, brings to mind Wittgenstein’s jest about the apparent silliness of metaphysical discourse:
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy. (OC §467)
Bakhurst (2017) also suggests following Williams’ (1984/1999) account of this problem around training.
- 23.
It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit. (CV 8e)
- 24.
In self-affirming his abrichung reading, and now reaching out to the culture in which Wittgenstein wrote (supposedly after Janik and Toulmin (1973) but seemingly unaware of Burbules’ work on this earlier; see Ch 9 in Peters and Marshall 1999), Friesen writes (75): ‘Freud and Wittgenstein, of course, view these processes of “humanization” as necessarily entailing renunciation and brutality.’
- 25.
In Z §383, he imagines a tribe where such severe training has occurred, that people do not respond to pain as we do: never speaking of feelings of pain or using interjections to express hurt. Not sharing in their extreme regime of training, we cannot find our feet with such people. (Z §390)
- 26.
Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly. (CV 57e)
I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.) (CV 68e)
- 27.
Ravel’s ‘Concerto for one hand’, as Paul lost an arm in World War I.
- 28.
McGuiness (1988, 32) notes, alluding to religion and the humanities: ‘It seems that Ludwig preferred subjects that he could teach himself, as he later taught himself the clarinet….’
- 29.
Don’t imagine a description which you have never heard, which describes an attitude in unheard of detail. …An attitude is pretty well described by the position of the body. This is a good description. But accurate? (CV 35e).
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Peters, M.A., Stickney, J. (2018). Judging Portraits of Wittgenstein. In: Wittgenstein’s Education: 'A Picture Held Us Captive’. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8411-9_2
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