The POSSIbIlItY Of PrOgreSS:

The POSSIbIlItY Of PrOgreSS:
A Comparative Study of the Philosophical Development of
Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Paul T. Jessen
Philosophy 399c
Senior Essay
Advisor: Kathleen Wright
Haverford College
April 29, 2002
Weg und Waage,
Steg und Sage
finden sich in einen Gang.
Geh und trage
Fehl und Frage
deinen einen Pfad entlang
Path and balance,
Bridge and myth,
Find themselves ()nt() a walkway.
G() and carry
Be absent and questi()n
Al()ng y()ur ()ne trail.
—Martin Heidegger, “Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens”
1
COntentS
I. Tracing the Denkwege : Motivations, Challenges, and Goals 3
II. Early Wittgenstein: Reaching the Limits of Modern Thought 11
III. Early Heidegger: Towards a Postmodern Sense of Being 19
IV.Late Wittgenstein: The Language of Postmodernism 25
V. Late Heidegger’s Voyage into the Post-Postmodern 35
VI. Philosophical Progress and the Denkweg as a Whole 49
VII. Bibliography 51
2
I.
Tracing the Denkwege: Motivations, Challenges, and Goals
We see that what we call “sentence” and “language” has not the formal unity I
imagined, but is the family of structures more or less related to one another.—But
what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here.—But in that
case doesn’t logic altogether disappear? É The preconceived idea of crystalline purity
can only be removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: the
axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our
real need.)
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1
I abandoned an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange it for another, but rather
because the former position was only a stop on a journey. The lasting element in
thinking is the path. And paths of thought [ Denkwege] hold in themselves the
mysterious property, that we can travel them forwards and backwards, that indeed it is
the way back that first leads us forward.
—Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache 2
In these quotations, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger focus their
philosophically critical focus on an unusual subject: their former selves. Among western
philosophers of the twentieth century, Heidegger and Wittgenstein stand out, not only by
virtue of their undeniably influential philosophical works, but also by virtue of the dramatic
shifts in thought that they both make between their early and later works. Although there is
considerable debate as to how these shifts in thought ought to be viewed—whether they were
sudden or gradual, progressive or regressive, central or peripheral—there can be no doubt
that the later works of both Heidegger and Wittgenstein are significantly different from their
earlier works, since they themselves acknowledge changes in their modes of thought.
Whether one sees these changes as “turning [the] whole examination around,” or rather as
merely traveling from one stop to another on a journey, they demand attention and
explanation. With regard to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I hope to provide both.
1
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2 nd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1999), p. 46. Emphasis in original. Henceforth cited with PI and remark number.
2Martin Heidegger, “Aus einem GesprŠch von der Sprache” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
1959), p. 94. Translation mine. Henceforth cited with US and page number.
3
An investigation into the mysterious Denkwege , or paths of thought to which
Heidegger refers presents a myriad of questions and challenges. First, there is a question of
unity; although we are perfectly comfortable asserting that two different philosophers have
mutually incompatible claims and perspectives, we are not so quick to assert that one
person’s thoughts are mutually incompatible with that person’s earlier ideas. Philosophers
tend to present their ideas from one perspective within one school of thought throughout a
career, and so dramatic shifts in thought seem suspicious. For philosophers whose early
works were as well received as those of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, it is difficult to see why
they would want to change their thinking at all. Once such a shift is acknowledged, there
remains the question of whether it is a complete shift in interest—from one Denkweg to
another—or a fundamental movement along the Denkweg into a different mode of thought.
If the latter is the case, one wonders whether the movement indicates forward progression, or
backward regression. The basic question is this: What is that brought these great thinkers to
challenge and change their own ways of thinking, and how do these changes help us better
understand their works, both early and late?
Wittgenstein and Heidegger present some special difficulties here. Their writing
styles range from the poetic to the cryptic to the conversational, and very rarely is their
meaning indisputably clear. In the preface to Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy ,
Alan Janik expresses the challenge of understanding “the two most influential philosophers of
the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger,” wondering why they
wrote “in such a curious fashion that they confused a whole generation of disciples and
created a cottage industry for a second generation in the interpretation of their works.” 3
Indeed, references to both Heidegger and Wittgenstein abound in contemporary academic
writing, though they are rarely mentioned together or integrated. That integration is partly
3
Alan Janik, Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy (Boston: Kluwer, 1989), p. ix.
4
what this paper sets out to achieve, though there is little precedent for this kind of study.
Attempts at relating the thoughts of Wittgenstein and Heidegger to one another are few and
far between, in large part due to a historical division in schools of thought. Because he
carried out nearly his entire academic life at Cambridge, first studying as a student of
Bertrand Russell and later returning as a professor there, Wittgenstein is to this day classified
with the Anglo-American analytic tradition in philosophy, however antithetical his later ideas
may be to the principles of that tradition. Conversely, Heidegger carried out his academic
life mysteriously parallel 4 to Wittgenstein in his native southwestern Germany, studying at
the University of Freiburg and later lecturing there alongside his mentor Edmund Husserl,
and has been firmly classed as Existentialist and Phenomenologist in the tradition of
continental philosophy. The academic world in the early twentieth century was not yet
properly international, and when Wittgenstein crossed the English Channel, his ideas were
caught on the other side of what James Edie calls “the deep fissure which divides continental
European philosophy from British American philosophy.” He continues:
British philosophers have nearly unanimously washed their hands of continental
thought as simply impossible, at best some kind of metaphysical poetry, at worst pure
nonsense. The continental philosophers repay this tribute by dismissing the entire
enterprise of analytical philosophy (which, after all, like Logical Positivism, owes
something to Vienna) as trivial, philistine, and infra-philosophical. 5
4
Upon closer investigation, the parallels in the early lives of Heidegger and Wittgenstein are rather striking.
First of all, the two were born exactly five months apart, Wittgenstein on April 29 th , 1889 in Vienna and
Heidegger on September 29 th of the same year in Messkirch. Wittgenstein began his university studies at
Manchester University in 1908 in the field of aeronautics, and Heidegger began the following year at Freiburg
University studying theology. Remarkably, in the fall of 1911, Wittgenstein gave up engineering and began
studying philosophy under Russell at Cambridge after having read Principia Mathematica , while in the very
same semester Heidegger changed his major from theology to philosophy, in large part because of the influence
that reading the Austrian HusserlÕs Logical Investigations had on him. Finally, with the outbreak of the war,
Heidegger and Wittgenstein both enlisted in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies respectively in the year
1914 (though very briefly in HeideggerÕs case). There are likely more parallels to be found (One must admit:
the names Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl are oddly similar...), but though certainly intriguing, sadly
they do not add much to the philosophical thrust of this essay.
5 James M. Edie, Introduction to Pierre Th6venaz, What is Phenomenology? Trans. James M. Edie (Chicago:
Quadrangle, 1962), p. 19.
5
This division is an unfortunate one, and Wittgenstein and Heidegger are among its most
unfortunate victims.
It may be true that the two never directly influenced one another—there is record of
only one brief mention of Heidegger’s concept of Angst in Sein und Zeit in Wittgenstein’s
diaries, and Heidegger first made reference to Wittgenstein in 1970—but there is still much
room for a comparative study of their philosophical approaches, searching for what George
Sefler calls “a philosophical space wherein both men dwell.” 6 Sefler bases his work on the
premise that, while Wittgenstein and Heidegger differ in their primary
concerns—Wittgenstein being focused on language and Heidegger on Being—there are
“significant coincidences of technique” that can be seen when viewing from a broader
philosophical scope. 7 Sefler’s analysis does not pit the terms and theories of the two thinkers
against one another, or look for specific philosophical problems that both Wittgenstein and
Heidegger addressed; it is rather an analysis of philosophical approach that illuminates
similarities in basic modes of thought that shape and underlie the very different philosophical
writings that they produced. While I do not entirely agree with Sefler’s comparative reading,
I do see that there is a great deal to be gained from this type of comparative study. In taking
on the unusually broad project of bringing the Denkwege of Heidegger and Wittgenstein into
view, only this type of broad comparative philosophy will suffice.
Despite its good intentions of comparative philosophy, the main problem with Sefler’s
account is that it does not sufficiently allow for the dramatic changes that both Heidegger and
Wittgenstein underwent from their early to late works. In the interest of philosophical unity
and coherence, Sefler wants to argue that the late writings of Wittgenstein and Heidegger are
6 George F. Sefler, Language and the World: A Methodological Synthesis Within the Writings of Martin
Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1974), p. 197-99. Henceforth
cited with Sefler and page number.
7
Ibid ., p.17.
6
merely an extension of, and thus in complete agreement with, their early work. Sefler comes
up with a list of thirteen universal points of agreement among all of Wittgenstein and all of
Heidegger, but his strife for conceptual unity seem somewhat naïve, stemming more from a
predetermined expectation of unity than from unbiased investigation.
Richard Rorty provides a more nuanced and convincing view of possible integration
of Wittgenstein and Heidegger in these postmodern times. In his essay, “Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” Rorty fully acknowledges a distinction between
early and late Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and that distinction becomes the basis for his
comparative claim:
[T]hese two great philosophers passed each other in mid-career, going in opposite
directions. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus , started from a point which, to a pragmatist
like myself, seems much less enlightened than that of Being and Time . But, as
Wittgenstein advanced in the direction of pragmatism, he met Heidegger coming the
other way—retreating from pragmatism into the same escapist mood in which the
Tractatus had been written, attempting to regain in “Thought” the sort of sublimity
which the young Wittgenstein had found in logic. 8
In RortyÕs view, Wittgenstein made real philosophical progress in developing from his
“younger, more Schopenhauerian self” that wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the
mature pragmatist and natural language philosopher that wrote the Philosophical
Investigations . 9 Heidegger, on the other hand, is said to have begun with Being and Time
where the Investigations left off, only to subsequently fall victim to what Rorty calls a
“failure of nerve” in making his famed turn to his later thought. 10 Rorty has no qualms about
making value judgments here. A staunch Pragmatist, Rorty takes issue with any philosophy
which posits ideal, higher-level entities such as the “Platonic forms, the Kantian categories,
and the Russellian logical objects” which give meaning to relations between the lower-level
8
Richard Rorty, “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Heidegger , ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 339. Henceforth cited with Rorty and
page number.
9
Ibid ., p. 338.
10 Ibid ., p. 350.
7
entities of the everyday. 11 Rorty equates early Wittgenstein’s struggle to find the logical
forms and atomic facts that underlie language and make it possible with late Heidegger’s
project of looking to “language as a quasi-divinity in which we live and move and have our
being.” 12 For Rorty, any such attempt at finding a meaning that goes beyond natural language
demands to be naturalized and brought down to the pragmatics of everyday speech and life.
Due to a prevalent Platonic bias against poetry, Pragmatists treat poetic thought as at best
insipid, and at worst, anathema.
Rorty does his best constructive work in the essay at the intersection of late
Wittgenstein and early Heidegger, for it is at that stop on the Denkweg that Rorty finds
himself. He resonates with Heidegger’s “insistence on the priority of the ready-to-hand, the
Zuhanden , over the present-at-hand, the Vorhanden , and on the inseparability of Dasein from
its projects and its language” that surfaces in the first Division of Being and Time . This
emphasis on the practical, contextual, and natural carries through into Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations , where Wittgenstein makes the point that meaning in language,
like the being of Dasein, can only be approached and understood within the practical context
of natural life. Rorty is keenly aware of Wittgenstein’s harsh critique of his earlier Idealism
that appears in the Tractatus , and so characterizes Wittgenstein’s transformation as coming
too see the pragmatic light. Heidegger seems to drift away from the pragmatic vision in his
later works, and so effectively loses Rorty’s respect.
The object of this paper is to give Rorty’s strangely circular story a new ending and to
give the late Heidegger the respect that Rorty rescinded. Rather than viewing Heidegger’s
later works as regression in philosophical integrity, I want to show that they represent real
progress. Admittedly, the motivation of pursuing this kind of study stems in part from an
11
Ibid p. 342.
Ibid p. 340.
.,
12
.,
8
expectation of unity, though it is a more viable unity than what Sefler envisions. The unity is
one of direction, and is based on the simple intuition that philosophical development tends
toward progress, by which I generally mean movement toward philosophical models that can
better describe and account for the world. In Heidegger’s epigrammatic quotation from
Unterwegs zur Sprache , Heidegger characterizes his own shift in thinking as not a mere
exchange of one position for another, but rather as a movement forward to the next stop on
the Denkweg. 13 The Denkweg may be circuitous, but not circular; to suggest the latter would
deny the notion of progress altogether. It is all well and good to suggest that Heidegger
moves backward while Wittgenstein moves forward, but this suggests a circular model of the
Denkweg as soon as one views Heidegger and Wittgenstein as being on the same path :
Tractatus—Early Wittgenstein
Late Heidegger
Investigations —Late Wittgenstein
Sein und Zeit—Early Heidegger
Rorty suggests that Heidegger’s thought follows the lower trajectory, but he would not likely
suggest that a similar movement would have been possible for Wittgenstein, has he only lived
longer. The notion that Wittgenstein could have returned to the analytic point of view of the
Tractatus after having expanded his view to include the vast world of natural language seems
counterintuitive, and I think it is just as counterintuitive to view Heidegger’s development as
a regression. I propose the following model of the Denkweg to replace the one above:
Early Wittgenstein
13
Early Heidegger
Late Wittgenstein
Late Heidegger
US, p. 94.
9
In this paper I will refer to this movement as a progression from modern, to postmodern, to
post-postmodern thought.
It may be dangerous to make claims using such academic buzzwords as modern and
postmodern; there exist already so many varied and often contradictory associations that have
been made with the terms that a substantial amount of literature is dedicated to the sole
purpose of pinning down their meanings. It is clear that in academic discourse, the term
modernism has been used to mean many different things, and postmodernism is constantly
being re-defined. And I can almost guarantee that any reference to post-postmodern thought
that might appear in academic discourse will be very different from my own conception of
it. 14 Nevertheless, I believe there is value in using those words since, at least in the case of
the first two, they have developed a network of family resemblances that provide at least a
secure basis for the meanings I intend. I shall make something of a Wittgensteinian move in
attempting to convey the meanings of the terms in the context of this paper through use,
rather than definition.
The transition from modern to postmodern to post-postmodern that I want to explore
can be viewed from many angles, but in general consists in a broadening of perspective that
not so much replaces an earlier viewpoint as places it in a new light. Problems and
limitations at one stage are resolved (or often dissolved) in the next, and the progress from
the previous stage is not thrown away, but integrated in the new. Most accounts of the
development of early and late Heidegger and Wittgenstein either naively assume that there is
14 The term post-postmodern is of my own invention, though I am sure I am not the first person to use the word.
The problem is that the kind of thought to which I refer is still not part of mainstream academic dialogue.
Although much has been written about the later writings of Heidegger, they are usually interpreted from a
postmodern point of view, and thus are designated as merely poetic or mystical. Since I want to suggest a mode
of thought that can stand on its own two feet as a successor to postmodern thought, I have selected the
intentionally vague (but sadly somewhat awkward) term post-postmodern. I hope the reader will excuse this
kind of Heideggerian word invention, accepting the term, and letting its meaning gradually come clear.
10
no fundamental change in philosophical stance between early and late works, or just as
naively assume that the change is so fundamental that there can be no continuity between the
two. My position is somewhere in between. The key to understanding transitions of thought
is understanding the Denkweg along which they lie, and I hope to show that for Heidegger
and Wittgenstein, the Denkwege are remarkably similar, and mutually illuminating. It may
seem somewhat arbitrary to select Heidegger and Wittgenstein for this study—countless
other thinkers could be used to represent the various modes of thought—but their pairing is
uniquely enlightening, in that they carried out contemporaneous academic lives in a time of
great change and tumult for Europe, and so were changed themselves. Independently, their
careers evidence important shifts in thought, but it is only together that a convincing picture
of development along the Denkweg becomes possible. Depth and detail must be sacrificed to
some degree in such a broad study—evidence will come in bits and pieces and much will be
put aside—but the value of the study is in its breadth. 15 In telling a story of the philosophical
development of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger from modern to postmodern to
post-postmodern, the works of both philosophers will be put in proper perspective, and the
greater Denkweg they traverse will come into view.
I.Early Wittgenstein: Reaching the Limits of Modern Thought
I therefore believe myself to have found, on all the essential points, the final solution
of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in
which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these
problems are solved.
15 I must ask for the reader’s patience and trust here. It may seem that the comparison and integration of both
early and late Heidegger and Wittgenstein presents, at least for an undergraduate philosophy thesis, an
impossibly broad scope for illuminating philosophical work. I believe the work I am doing in this paper is of a
special kind, however. By concentrating on thought paths more than particular thoughts, there opens up a
certain freedom of selection. The textual references I use are carefully selected and, though they represent a
very, very small portion of the thoughts that occur along the Denkweg, they nevertheless reflect the nature of the
mode of thought from which they originated, similar to the way the entire mathematical structure of a large
fractal diagram can be derived from any infinitesimally small section therein. Of course, one must also step back
from several such points before one can get a sense of the larger picture as a whole.
11
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 16
Whatever influences Cambridge may have had on Wittgenstein, it is undeniable that
his roots are in turn of the century Vienna, a time and place where modernism of all kinds
was at its height. Wittgenstein was born into a wealthy and prestigious family of the Vienna
nouveau riche , and was exposed to all forms of art and culture in the stimulating climate of
fin-de-siecle Vienna. As Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin point out in their penetrating
study of Wittgenstein’s Vienna , that Wittgenstein grew up in a highly concentrated and
integrated intellectual environment in which the functional architecture of Adolf Loos, the
psychoanalytic psychology of Sigmund Freud, the atonal music of Arnold Schšnberg, the
controversial journalism of Karl Kraus, the logically-based mechanics of Heinrich Hertz, and
the audacious artwork of Gustav Klimt were all simultaneously breaking the boundaries of
the conventional to define the new forms of modernism, and this “interdependence of the
different Viennese arts and sciences” is not to be overlooked. 17 Turn of the century Vienna
was unique in that its intellectual and artistic communities had not yet fallen victim to the
twentieth century notion of the need for professional specialization; the cafés and salons of
downtown Vienna were themselves hotbeds of cross-disciplinary integration and
communication. Modernism thrived in this peculiar climate, and its basic principles stretched
out onto all branches of the Viennese intellectual tree, eventually making its way to what Ray
Monk calls the “Palais Wittgenstein.” 18
The reasons for this revolution are many and varied. As the inevitability of the
Industrial Age was looming over the aging aristocracy of late Hapsburg Vienna, and as the
ideas of modern science were dismantling ancient structures of belief, a certain
16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuiness (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 4. Henceforth cited with TLP and remark number.
17 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 18.
Henceforth cited with Janik and page number.
18
Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 8. Henceforth cited
with Monk and page number.
12
disenchantment brewed among the Viennese intellectuals who saw the need for new forms on
which to base human understanding. Contrary to whatever preconceptions people might have
about “modern art,” these pioneering modernists were not throwing away tradition to replace
it with jumbled anti-art, but were rather seeking to find the basic principles and forms
underlying the tradition, in hopes of constructing new forms of thought and expression that
better reflected and involved these new forms. Michael Peters and James Marshall provide
insight into these new forms:
One of the most seductive ideas of aesthetic modernity... is the idea that something
lies hidden from us, yet guides our thought and behavior. The various experimental
analytical methods developed by Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx were expressions of this
deep desire to uncover that which remains hidden in language, self, culture, and
economy. Wittgenstein’s early thought is also an expression of this desire: to lay bare
the limits of the sayable and thus, in romantic fashion, to protect and make room for
ethics and aesthetics. 19
This desire to find the truth behind the imperfections and irregularities of the everyday is one
of the key aspects of modern thought. In many ways this kind of thought had been present in
western art, science, and philosophy since the days of Descartes (whom many consider to be
the father of modernity), but in Vienna of the fin-de-siecle , the consequences of
modernity—urbanization, industrialization, and democratization, to name a few—challenged
modern thought to rethink itself. Thus Schšnberg was led to question and redefine the terms
of music theory just as Freud was led to research the inner aspects of the psyche. After
evolutionary biology and empirical psychology had naturalized the notions of experience and
mind, the project of modern philosophy became Sprachkritik, or the critique of language.
Language seemed, in Rorty’s words, to be somehow “immune to the naturalizing process;”
20
if there were underlying forms of thought and meaning to be found, language was the place to
look.
19
Michael Peters and James Marshall, Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy (Westport, CT:
Bergin & Garvey, 1999), p. 27.
20 Rorty, p. 340.
13
It is with this enterprise that Wittgenstein began his philosophical career. In his first
year of studying aeronautics at Manchester University, Wittgenstein stumbled across a copy
of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica , in which he became immediately absorbed. 21
He was so taken by Russell’s idea that all of mathematics could be derived from basic
principles of logic that he abandoned his studies in engineering and, upon Gottlob Frege’s
advice, went to Cambridge to study under Russell . 22 Wittgenstein soon earned Russell’s
respect, and it eventually became clear to Russell that not only was this bothersome “German
ex-engineer” not a fool as he had initially thought, 23 but he also possessed a genius that had
the potential to extend Russell’s work on logic into realms that Russell himself could not. In
1913 Wittgenstein moved to a remote house in Norway in order to collect his thoughts and
produce his first great work that would solve all the problems of philosophy. The first world
war came unexpectedly in the following year, and Wittgenstein enlisted as a volunteer for the
Austro-Hungarian army. 24 It was in the trenches that Wittgenstein completed his manuscript
for his Logisch -philosophische Abhandlung (literally, logically philosophical treatise) that
was turned down by several German publishers in 1919 but eventually was, with the help of
an introduction by Russell, published in 1921 as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . 25
It is in this brief work that Wittgenstein’s modern thought comes to fruition. In
looking for the key elements of this stop on the Denkweg , Wittgenstein’s preface provides a
good starting point:
The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason
why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood...
Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought... It will therefore only be in
Monk, p. 30.
Monk, p. 36.
23
Monk, p. 39.
24
Monk, p. 111.
25
Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973), p. 4. Henceforth cited with Kenny and
page number.
21
22
14
language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will
simply be nonsense. 26
The project of the Tractatus , then, is to define the limits of language, which Wittgenstein
equates with the limits of thought, and indeed, the limits of the world. The world that
Wittgenstein presents in the Tractatus is a strange one; the first claim of the Tractatus is that
the world consists of everything that is the case (alles, was der Fall ist) and is “the totality of
facts, not of things.” 27 Thus, neither the copy of the Tractatus that is lying on my desk, nor
the desk itself belongs to the world, but only the fact that the book is lying on my desk is part
of this logical space that is the world. Thought occurs when we make a logical picture, or
Bild, of such facts, which can either be true and in accordance with real states of affairs, or
false. 28 Janik and Toulmin make the good point that, although English translations of the
Tractatus seem to exclusively translate Wittgenstein’s Bild as picture, a much better
translation is the broader term model, which compares much better to Hertz’s use of the word
in The Principles of Mechanics , with which Wittgenstein in his engineering days had become
very familiar . 29 The essence of thought is the construction of logical models that can be
compared to the actual states of affairs in the world, and Wittgenstein suggests many
different analogies to explain this modeling, the first of which appearing in a journal entry
from September 29, 1914—“In the proposition a world is as it were put together
experimentally. (As when in the Parisian courtroom a car accident is represented with dolls,
etc.)” 30
26
TLP , preface.
Ibid. , 1,1.1.
28 TLP , 2.2.1.
27
Janik, p. 183.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Tagebücher 1914-1916” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Werkausgabe Band I (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1999), S. 95. Translation mine. Any references to the German text of the Tractatus are taken from
the German edition in this collection, but for the purpose of simplicity, those references will be noted as the
English version with TLP and remark number.
29
30
15
Wittgenstein is clearly not suggesting that all of thought really consists of painting
visual pictures of the world in our heads—although sadly many interpretations seem to take
the heralded “picture theory of meaning” in precisely that literal sense—but rather that
underlying all meaningful, coherent thought there must be logical form. The form itself is
not directly accessible to us, but Wittgenstein suggests that just as the gramophone record on
which a piece of music is recorded, the musical thought which it expresses, the written notes
which tell the musician how to play it, and the sound waves that the performance of it
produces all are in what Wittgenstein calls a “modeling internal relationship” ( abbildenden
internen Beziehung ), so must language and the world relate to one another . 31 I see this as
implying that there is a transcendental logical form that makes relations between language
and world possible; the statement “the book is lying on the desk” can relate to the physical
book and desk only through this higher logical form. The sheer fact that the same music can
be modeled and manifested in such radically diverse ways makes one wonder what kind of
thing the music itself is. In the same way that there are all kinds of noises that one would not
consider music because there is no evidence of an underlying musical form, Wittgenstein
makes the bold statement that all language which does not show evidence of the underlying
logic of language, or Sprachlogik — including most of philosophy and everyday language—is
simply nonsensical, and therefore cannot count as language in the Tractarian sense of the
word. 32
In his search for logical purity in language, Wittgenstein is forced to treat the
Sprachlogik of thought as something hidden behind, but also reflected in, language. This turn
towards higher-level entities that, in Rorty’s words, “contextualize and explain but cannot, on
pain of infinite regress, be contextualized or explained” is the classic—Rorty might say
31
32
TLP , 4.014. My translation.
Ibid. , 4.003.
16
tragic—modern philosophical move, and Wittgenstein takes it to its extreme. Indeed,
Wittgenstein seems utterly convinced in the preface to the Tractatus that he has completed
the last great modern project of philosophy: “I am of the opinion that I have essentially
solved the problems [of philosophy] for once and for all.” 33 But in order to solve those
problems, Wittgenstein showed just how frighteningly small the truly modern conception of
world must be. The Tractarian model of the world is only viable in so far as it makes clear
boundaries to keep the nonsense out. Late in the Tractatus Wittgenstein criticizes his fellow
moderns because they fail to see this point:
The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the socalled laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena... Thus people today
stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate
were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view
of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus,
while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained. 34
This remark is particularly interesting because it points to a classical, pre-modern mode of
thought that sees the world through the black and white distinctions provided by culture and
mythology, in contrast to the modern mode which seeks through scientific investigation to
find the “real” underlying principles at play. Wittgenstein’s critique is that people do not
realize that the laws of physics are not to be equated with the real principles governing the
world; a scientific formula is just as incapable of encapsulating the essence of nature as a
sentence is incapable of encapsulating the true essence of thought. Thus Wittgenstein makes
the prescient observation that Newtonian physics tells us something about the world not
because the world can be described by it, but because the world can be described by it in a
particular way, leaving room for alternative models such as relativity that also describe the
very same world in a dramatically different way. 35
33
Ibid. , Preface. My translation.
Ibid. , 6.371-2.
35
Ibid. , 6.342.
34
17
And so our idea of modernism begins to come into focus. The modern mode of
thought seeks truth, form, and certainty, and can find them only in a hypothesized, not
directly expressible logical space that is reflected in, but somehow separate from, the real
world in which we live, think, and talk. Wittgenstein takes this modern view to its logical
extreme, and comes up with a world out of which all that has no clear logical form is shut. It
is significant that Wittgenstein wrote the final remarks of the Tractatus while fighting on the
front line of the Austro-Hungarian offensive in the heart of the first world war, for it is in the
last few pages of the work that Wittgenstein starts to see what might lie outside his narrow
world of logical purity. In this period of existential crisis, Wittgenstein makes the remarks
that Òthe meaning of the world must lie outside of it,Ó 36 that “ethics is transcendental ,Ó 37 and
that “sentences can express nothing higher .Ó 38 Here Wittgenstein hits against the walls of the
distinctly modern world of logical truths and states of affairs in which his thought has been
trapped, and realizes that all value and meaning is strangely inaccessible to him. Though he
likely initially viewed the Tractatus as strictly a treatise on logic and language, after its
completion and publication Wittgenstein spoke of it in very different terms:
The book’s point is an ethical one É My work consists of two parts: the one presented
here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the
important one . My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it
were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those
limits.39
Because he viewed the logical limits of modern thought as insurmountable, Wittgenstein’s
peculiar logical-turned-ethical treatise can only approach ethics from inside the sterile
chamber of modern thought, describing the sun by the reflections that happen to pass through
the chamber’s one small window, as it were. I think he had simply not yet found the door.
36
37
38
39
Ibid. , 6.41. My translation.
Ibid. , 6.421. My translation.
Ibid. , 6.42. My translation.
Quoted in Janik, p. 192. Emphasis in original.
18
II. Early Heidegger: Towards a Postmodern Sense of Being
Ontology is possible only as phenomenology . The phenomenological concept of
phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings—its meaning,
modifications, and derivatives... The being of beings can least of all be something
“behind which” something else stands, something that “does not appear.”
—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 40
Our story continues at about the same time as the publication of the Tractatus , though
it takes place not in the British or Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the post-war Weimar
Republic of Germany. In the town of Marburg, the young professor Martin Heidegger was
struggling with the question of Being. His ideas on the topic seemed primitive to some, and
irrelevant to others, because they hearkened back to Aristotle and ancient Greek notions of
Being and essence that modern western philosophy had simply moved beyond. Heidegger
knew that the question of Being was far from resolved, and demanded an entirely new
approach if there was to be progress on the matter. His mentor Edmund Husserl seemed to
offer a promising new method of philosophical discussion in phenomenology, which called
out with Husserl’s bold battle cry: “to the things themselves!” At the insistence of his
colleagues at Marburg University, Heidegger put together a manuscript of his admittedly
incomplete phenomenological analysis of Being in 1926, and when that analysis was
published under the bold title Sein und Zeit, the world of continental philosophy was shaken.
David Krell gives us some idea of its philosophical influence:
With its appearance the neo-Kantian preoccupation with theory of knowledge and
philosophy of values seemed outdated; the customary separation of systematic and
historical orientations—against which Heidegger’s own earlier work had
struggled—no longer held... and the whole history of metaphysics from Plato through
Nietzsche came into radical question. 41
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit , trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State
University of NY Press, 1996), p. 31 (S. 35-6 in original German edition). Emphasis in original. Henceforth
cited with BT and original German pagination in the interest of cross-referencing. References to the German
version are taken from: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (TŸbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993).
41
David Farrell Krell, “General Introduction: The Question of Being” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), p.17. Henceforth cited with Krell and page number.
40
19
Already in this brief quote we can see the traces of a major shift in thought out of the
structures and categories of Kant’s undeniably modern philosophical thought into ideas that
were both historical and systematic. This shift is what I characterize as the movement from
modern to postmodern thought, and Being and Time pioneered this new mode of thinking
which has since overtaken the mainstream of academia, including our friend Richard Rorty.
Through an analysis of key aspects of the first section of Being and Time , it will become clear
why Heidegger’s approach is not just phenomenological, but also distinctly postmodern, and
therefore revolutionary.
It was upon reading the pioneering phenomenological thought of Husserl’s Logical
Investigations that Heidegger first and it is largely the phenomenological project itself that
sets Heidegger on the path to postmodern thought. In the introduction to Being and Time ,
Heidegger’s description of the phenomenological approach he has chosen sounds distinctly
anti-modern:
The term “phenomenology” expresses a maxim that can be formulated: “To the things
themselves!” It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it
is also opposed to taking over concepts only seemingly demonstrated; and likewise to
pseudo-questions which often are spread as “problems” for generations. 42
The modern academic tradition in which Heidegger was brought up abounds with such
“constructions” and “pseudo-questions;” giving an account of something seemed to
necessarily involve the invention of conceptual tools and structures which the world was
supposed to fit into, such that understanding Spinoza, for instance, consists largely in making
sense of the constructions and categories that he himself creates, and those will not likely
map onto the structures of another thinker such as Kant. While traditional modern thought
grounds itself in concepts and theories, phenomenology grounds itself, quite simply, in the
phenomena. This means that philosophy moves away from artificial explanation but instead
42
BT S.27-8.
,
20
engages in detailed description that gains its validity from the way phenomena present
themselves in the world, and so leads to an understanding of those phenomena. Heidegger’s
analysis of being is centered around the unique kind of being that has the capacity to question
its own being, and always already has some pre-ontological sense of its own being: the
human being, which Heidegger calls Dasein. In order to be properly phenomenological,
Heidegger’s analysis of this human kind of being must be open to the many ways Dasein
actually presents itself in the world, and extremely cautious of seductive constructions or
categories:
[N]o arbitrary idea of being and reality, no matter how “self-evident” it is, may be
brought to bear on this being in a dogmatically constructed way; no “categories”
prescribed by such ideas may be forced upon Da-sein without ontological
deliberation. The manner of access and interpretation must instead be chosen in such
a way that this being can show itself to itself on its own terms. And furthermore, this
manner should show that being as it is initially and for the most part—in its average
everydayness [AlltŠglichkeit].43
The reason preserving everydayness is important, is that Dasein nearly always lives and
moves in the world of the everyday: where else can the being of human beings be expected to
present itself? The shift towards the everyday is simultaneously a shift away from the
modern thought-world of conceptual ideals and artificial terms, and from that point, the path
to the postmodern lies clearly in view.
As Heidegger’s investigation into the nature of Dasein progresses, he hits upon a
second key element in the postmodern scheme: context. The first existential character of
Dasein that Heidegger finds in his phenomenological study is what he calls “being-in-theworld” (in-der-Welt-sein). This is the “fundamental constitution” of Dasein, and as such it is
something that we humans cannot escape. 44 By being-in-the-world Heidegger does not mean
being in a spatial relationship to other objects—that is a being suited more for tables and
43
Ibid. S. 16.
Ibid S. 53.
,
44
.,
21
chairs than for people—but rather invokes a deeper sense of the preposition “in” that
connotes dwelling, familiarity, caring, and nearness . 45 Heidegger’s basic intuition here is that
we are contextual beings. We live in a world, not just alongside other objects and people, but
truly with them in a socially meaningful way, 46 continually interacting with one another.
Hubert Dreyfus offers a cogent description of the contextual element of being-in:
What Heidegger is getting at is a mode of being-in we might call “inhabiting.” When
we inhabit something, it is no longer an object for us but becomes part of us and
pervades our relation to other objects in the world... Dwelling is Dasein’s basic way
of being-in-the-world. The relation between me and what I inhabit cannot be
understood on the model of the relation between subject and object . 47
The world that we constantly inhabit indeed pervades every moment of our being. It is not
some abstract Wittgensteinian world of states of affairs, nor is it merely a physical space. It
is where we live, where we come from, and in this truly postmodern notion of context we are
forever inextricably situated.
The third aspect of Heidegger’s postmodern turn is his movement toward the
pragmatism with which Rorty so strongly resonates. By pragmatism I mean a general
emphasis on use and useability in the investigation of phenomena such that practice ( Praxis)
takes priority over theory or logical form. Heidegger draws the connection between
pragmatics and use quite clearly:
The Greeks had an appropriate term for “things”: pragmata , that is, that with which
one has to do in taking care of things in association (praxis). But the specifically
“pragmatic” character of the pragmata is just what was left in obscurity and “initially
determined as “mere things.” We shall call the beings encountered in taking care
useful things... We must elucidate the kind of being of useful things. 48
45
Ibid ., S. 54.
46
The German preposition “bei” is especially difficult to translate into English, though “with” is certainly the
best of all available options. The problem is that “bei” has a special personal and social sense that “with” does
not adequately convey. When Heidegger speaks of Sein bei der Welt , he implies a personal sense of carrying
out a social activity in the household of the world, just as one spends a weekend at a friend’s house ( bei einem
Freund).
47
Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 45. Henceforth cited with Dreyfus and page number.
48 BT , S. 68. Emphasis in original.
22
For Heidegger, pragmatism has everything to do with the way we interact with the useful
things in the world. In elucidating Dasein’s relationship with other kinds of being in the
world, Heidegger makes the critical distinction between Vorhandenheit which literally
translates as availability (in the sense of stock in a warehouse) but is commonly translated as
“objective presence,” and Zuhandenheit , one of Heidegger’s famous original word creations
that is best translated as “handiness,” or “being at hand.”
49
In the spirit of pragmatism,
Heidegger gives Zuhandenheit ontological priority over Vorhandenheit. Pragmata, such as a
hammer or a pencil, are not meaningless objects in Dasein’s world; their being is in fact
determined by their usefulness, not by their sheer presence as objects extended in space. And
so Heidegger says that the Zuhandenheit of a hammer is discovered in the “act of hammering
itself.” 50
This is not to suggest that using a hammer involves Dasein thinking something like,
“Hmm, now where can I find that being whose proper handiness is hammering?” To the
contrary, Heidegger provides a quintessentially pragmatic response: “What is peculiar to
what is initially at hand is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of handiness in order
to be really handy. What everyday association is initially busy with is not the tools
themselves, but the work.” 51 Heidegger states that it is only in cases where a tool is broken or
lost that we become aware of its proper handiness: ‘Darn it, the lead broke and my pencil
won’t write. Now where’s the pencil sharpener?’ 52 The type of being that Heidegger is
researching is not supposed to be some transcendental form of which Dasein must be
conscious; it is rather a being that arises out Dasein’s simple, practical, everyday being-inthe-world. While Wittgenstein seems to suggest that all our thoughts are really models of
49
Ibid
Ibid
51 Ibid
52
Ibid
.,
50
.,
.,
.,
S. 69.
S. 69.
S. 69.
S. 75.
23
states of affairs—that we’ve really been performing complex Fregean logic all along when
speaking language—Heidegger leaves our experience just as it is, and whatever notions of
being he discovers in his research provide an illuminating interpretation that describes rather
than prescribes.
It is that interpretation that forms the last major component in our sketch of
Heidegger’s postmodern thinking. In section 32 of Being and Time Heidegger discusses the
topic of “Understanding and Interpretation” as possible modes of the being of Dasein. With
the postmodern components of everydayness, situatedness, and pragmatism in place, the
move into the hermeneutic stage is straightforward. Given that Dasein is always situated in
its own everyday world, characterized by its activity and interaction with that which is ready
to hand, that very interaction must be seen as a kind of interpreting that is merely seeing
something as something, implicitly answering the question:“What is that for?” As was the
case with Dasein’s awareness of Zuhandenheit , Heidegger indicates that the interpretation of
beings in the world need not be articulated, and that indeed such an implicit interpretation is a
prerequisite for the being-in-the-world of Dasein:
The circumspect, interpretive association with what is at hand in the surrounding
world which “sees” this as a table, a door, a car, a bridge does not necessarily already
have to analyze what is circumspectly interpreted in a particular statement. Any
simple prepredicative seeing of what is at hand is in itself already understanding and
interpretive . 53
That last statement is a bombshell. It suggests that some level of interpretation occurs at even
the most basic levels of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, and it is around this fundamental beingin-the-world that the postmodern revolution turns. Whereas early Wittgenstein assumed his
ideas about the world facts to be universally applicable, Heidegger realizes that each and
every Dasein moves within its own local world, of which the ever-interpreting, ever-caring
Dasein is the center. In postmodern thought, the world does not consist of objective truth that
53
Ibid ., S. 149. Final emphasis mine.
24
is “out there” to be discovered, but rather it is up to the individual Dasein to interpret the
world. David Hoy recognizes Heidegger as the original pioneer of the so-called
“hermeneutic turn” in philosophy, and sums up Heidegger’s contribution by saying that
“contrary both to Kant and to transcendental hermeneutics, Heidegger is trying to show us
that we need not take ‘knowledge’ as primary and see ‘understanding’ and ‘interpretation’ as
derived, but that we can reverse the derivation.” 54 And so Heidegger turns the main priniciple
of the Tractatus —and modern thought itself—on its head: the truth of the world that modern
thought aspired to directly access suddenly seems secondary to the individual’s implicitly
interpretive worldview.
III. Late Wittgenstein: The Language of Postmodernism
The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakeable. You can never get outside it; you must
always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe.—Where does this
idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see
whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 55
At this point in our study, the story of the postmodern revolution has only been half
told; we return to dear Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, just two years after the publication of
Heidegger’s Being and Time , returned to academia after an extended sabbatical to develop
nascent postmodern ideas of his own. Since leaving his graduate studies at Cambridge in
1913 to go write his Tractatus , Wittgenstein had experienced a lifetime’s worth of adventure
and hardship: he fought five hard years in World War I, received a mammoth inheritance
upon the death of his wealthy father only to sign it all over to his siblings, saw his Tractatus
published, worked for six years as a schoolteacher in remote schools in the Austrian Alps,
and took on the two year project of designing and building a large house in starkly modern
54
David Couzens Hoy, “Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger , ed.
Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p.175.
55
PI , § 103.
25
style for his sister in Vienna . 56 Since his completion of the Tractatus , Wittgenstein’s
philosophical output had all but ceased until his return to Cambridge as a professor in 1929,
after quickly getting the Tractatus approved as the doctoral thesis of the work he left in
1913. 57
Wittgenstein was in for a monumental change. By 1929, Wittgenstein was beginning
to see major problems with the philosophical system he had elaborated ten years earlier, for
which he had since become well known, especially among the Vienna Circle of logical
positivists, led by Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann . 58 It is in correspondence with
Waismann that Wittgenstein sees the first great oversight of the Tractatus :
All this I did not yet know when I was writing my work... I had not yet seen that an
inference can also have the form: ‘This man is 2m tall, therefore he is not 3m tall.’
That is connected with the fact that I believed that elementary propositions must be
independent of one another... But if my present conception of a system of
propositions is correct, it will actually be the rule that from the existence of one state
of affairs the non-existence of all other states of affairs described by this system of
propositions can be inferred. 59
In the Tractarian model, the most analyzed form of language is the elementary, or atomic,
proposition which shows an aspect of the truth of the world that is entirely independent of all
other such propositions. Upon investigating such topics as length and color, Wittgenstein
found the first traces of what is a pillar of postmodern thought: interdependence. If one
knows a book is red, then one also knows that it is not blue, pink, or chartreuse, and thus the
statement ‘This is red’ cannot qualify as an atomic proposition. In the Tractatus ,
Wittgenstein simply dismisses “the simultaneous presence of two colors in the visual field”
as “logically impossible,” 60 but Wittgenstein’s colleague at Cambridge Frank Ramsey made
56
Monk, various sections.
Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1967), p. 26. Henceforth cited with
von Wright and page number.
58 Monk, p. 243.
59 Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle , trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (New
York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 64. Henceforth cited with Waismann and page number.
60 TLP , 6.3751.
57
26
the objection that this claim depends upon “ necessary properties of space, time, and matter”
rather than pure logic. 61 This led Wittgenstein to the idea of there being different logical
spaces, or propositional systems for categories such as color, sound, or length. Thus the
proposition ‘this is two meters long’ would somehow belong to the space of length, where it
makes sense to say ‘this is not three meters long’ but not ‘this is loud.’ 62 This was one of
many attempts at revising his earlier thoughts that Wittgenstein made in his first year back at
Cambridge. Ultimately, he wanted to find a philosophical method that would do real work,
and it became increasingly clear to him that the pseudo-propositions of the Tractatus could
not provide the answer.
By the fall of 1930, Wittgenstein realized that there was indeed another way of doing
philosophy, but that such a new approach demanded the complete deconstruction of of his
own previous methods. In a conversation with Schlick on December 30, 1930, Wittgenstein
seems to realize that when one considers the phenomenon of natural language, the whole
project of logical analysis of language suddenly seems bankrupt:
Can only logical analysis explain what we mean by the propositions of ordinary
language?... Are people therefore ignorant of what they mean when they say “Today
the sky is clearer than yesterday”? Do we have to wait for logical analysis here?
What a hellish idea!... I must, of course, be able to understand a proposition without
knowing its analysis. 63
Here Wittgenstein finally begins to sees the light of postmodern insight. Rather than
performing logical analysis of language under the assumption that such analysis will yield
truth, Wittgenstein considers the possibility that ordinary language could carry truth in its
own right. Indeed, everyday language must be able to confer meaning, because it is what
everyday people use in everyday life, without being aware of an underlying logical structure
at all. Natural language works perfectly well in the complex communications of everyday,
61
62
63
Quoted in Monk, p. 274.
Monk, p. 293.
Waismann, p. 129-30.
27
and once Wittgenstein truly considered the potential of natural language, logical analysis
seemed artificial. Early Wittgenstein was certainly aware of the communicative power of
everyday language—in the Tractatus he states that “the propositions of our everyday
language... are in perfect logical order” 64 —but he assumed that such power must come from
an underlying logical order that is “prior to all experience.” 65 Wittgenstein criticizes his
earlier project as presupposing an ideal of logical purity that was simply not to be found:
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.)... We have got on to 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! 66
Here we see a poignant expression of the crisis of modern thought. When the models and
abstractions of modern thought are compared to the everyday world, they appear at once
inadequate, impractical, and naïve. For someone who was viewed as the poster-child of
modern thought, this revelation was earth shattering.
As traumatizing as the postmodern shift must have been for Wittgenstein, by the time
his Philosophical Investigations was published in 1945, he had made much progress in
developing an alternative, postmodern approach to philosophy. In order to avoid the
mistakes of the artificially prescriptive modern approach, Wittgenstein calls for a method that
is undeniably phenomenological:
We must do away with all explanation , and description alone must take its place.
These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into
the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those
workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not
by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known... 67
64
TLP , 5.5563.
PI, § 97.
Ibid. , § 107. Emphasis in original.
67
Ibid., § 109.
65
66
28
This call for description of the natural phenomenon of language rather than prescription of a
logical form in an underlying metalanguage gets at the core of postmodern thought. In The
Postmodern Condition , Jean-Frangois Lyotard defines of the term postmodern as just such
“an incredulity toward metanarratives.” 68 While early Wittgenstein looks to the
metanarrative of logic to explain how thought and language work, under the assumption that
“if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according
to definite rules,” the late Wittgenstein asks why it makes sense to posit such an inner
calculus at all. If one makes the phenomenological move to the things themselves, one sees
that speaking a language rarely involves an explicit awareness of grammar or logic, and from
the postmodern standpoint, the claim that the logic is nevertheless really there at some higher,
inaccessible level is immediately suspect.
After two years of working with this new anti-analytic, phenomenological approach
toward language, Wittgenstein happened upon a new idea that would allow for the beginnings
of a postmodern understanding of language: the Sprachspiel , or language-game. 69 In order to
better understand the way language functions in the world, Wittgenstein began to consider
hypothetical situations in which very primitive languages would be used. His most famous
example of such a language is the four word language that could be used by a builder and an
assistant, in which the assistant would bring the appropriate object in response to the
builder’s command of either ‘Block!’, ‘Pillar!’, ‘Slab!’, or ‘Beam!’. 70 There is no mental
calculus here. This language is pure activity; understanding the language entails being able
to respond differentially to the four possible commands, and learning the language is a matter
of training. Wittgenstein realizes that the builders demonstrate only one possible type of
68
Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), p. xxiv. Henceforth cited with Lyotard and page
number.
69 Monk, p. 330.
70 PI , § 2.
29
language, and play one of countless possible language-games, but his major insight is that all
language can be viewed as being part of one language-game or another, and that it is in
teasing out the rules and conventions of a language-game that the language itself can be
understood. With this new model, language is no longer treated as a logical formula that one
thinks through, or a logical space in which one dwells, but rather as “part of an activity, or of
a form of life” which one simply does . 71
With the language-game model in place, we gain insight into Wittgenstein’s real
postmodern work, and can thus begin to see the various ways in which this work both
parallels and complements that of early Heidegger. Once one understands language as an
activity and not an exercise in logic, one realizes that meaning cannot be contained in a
definition, but must be determined by use. Wittgenstein states that—in many cases—the
meaning of a word is its use,72 such that knowing the meaning of a word is being able to use
the word properly in the language-game, and that does not necessarily entail being able to
define the word explicitly at all. Wittgenstein’s use theory of meaning—as this idea is often
called, though Wittgenstein himself clearly bristles at any mention of ‘theory’ —parallels
closely with Heidegger’s account of the priority of Zuhandenheit in Dasein’s being-in-theworld. Whereas Wittgenstein’s study centers on the language-game in which one speaks,
Heidegger’s investigation centers on the local world in which one lives, and the linguistic and
ontic worlds they describe are local, practical, social, and contextual. 73 The importance of
context in postmodern thinking can hardly be overestimated, and both Wittgenstein and
Heidegger pioneered new notions of situatedness and contextuality. For Wittgenstein, the
71
PI , § 23.
PI , § 43.
73 In Being and Time Heidegger also addresses the topic of language explicitly in his brief discussion of Gerede
and Rede , but his purposes are more to describe the activity of speech as a mode of the being of Dasein, rather
72
than to elucidate the grammatical properties of language itself. His discussion of the being of things provides a
more apt parallel to Wittgenstein’s ideas of meaning, and for that reason early Heidegger’s ideas on language
will not be addressed in this paper.
30
meaning of a word is not merely influenced by the context in which it appears, but in fact
arises out of the word’s repeated use in multiple contexts. Looking for meaning outside of a
context makes no more sense than looking for Dasein outside of the world. Heidegger also
indicates the importance of context in his discussion of pragmata :
There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things
[Zeugganzheit] in which this useful thing can be what it is... The different kinds of
“in order to” such as serviceability, helpfulness, usability, handiness, constitute a
totality of useful things... useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other
useful things... A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the
individual useful thing. 74
Context necessarily entails a deep interrelatedness and interdependence, and Heidegger
recognizes that in Dasein’s view, useful things are always already in contextual relation to
one another; the pencil is related to the paper and the eraser, and its being is forever situated
in the context of writing. In much the same way Wittgenstein understands that speech only
makes sense in the context of “the language-game which is its original home. ” 75
Once we commit ourselves to a philosophical approach that is sensitive to context, the
philosophical project becomes much more complicated, but it also enables a richness of
understanding that is extremely powerful. At first it may seem as though late Wittgenstein’s
call for inquiry into the grammar of language-games is just as tied to strict notions of form as
his earlier investigation into Sprachlogik—the rules of a game such as chess are certainly
clear and distinct, after all—but late Wittgenstein’s postmodern stance makes his account far
more complex, nuanced, ambiguous, and flexible. Wittgenstein quite intentionally mentions
diverse games like chess and tennis to form an analogy with language-games, because the
strength of the analogy is in its diversity. When he inquires into the nature of games,
Wittgenstein finds not a universal set of qualities that all games have, but rather “a
complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall
74
75
BT, S. 68-9.
PI, § 116.
31
similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” 76 This opens up the possibility for an altogether
new kind of concept which gains its meaning not from formulae or ideal principles, but rather
from the clustering of what Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances.” 77 Even though there is
no common element to them all, games can be seen to form a family, such that new cases of
activity can still be judged to fall clearly within or clearly outside the concept of game;
although the boundary between game and non-game is blurry, it still makes sense to speak of
there being a boundary. Such blurriness and ambiguity are anathema to the modern thinker,
as Wittgenstein demonstrates at Frege’s expense:
Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an area with vague boundaries
cannot be called an area at allÉ But is it senseless to say: “Stand roughly there”?
Suppose that I were standing in a city square and said that. As I say it I do not draw
any kind of boundary, but perhaps point with my hand. And this is just how one
might explain to someone what a game is. 78
The elucidation of such fuzzy concepts is a matter of training, where understanding arises out
of use in a great number of different cases. Wittgenstein’s basic postmodern insight here is
that diversity and difference do not negate meaning but strengthen it. In the world of
everyday, it is only through the use of a word in a great multiplicity of contexts that the word
can attain any depth of meaning. This revelation turns the modern philosophical project on
its head. Whereas the early Wittgenstein thought he had discovered the logical principles of
language for once and for all, the late Wittgenstein sees that the project of philosophy is to
uncover a deep grammar that can never be fully articulated or exposed. Wittgenstein’s
grammatical project is in many ways parallel with early Heidegger’s hermeneutical one; the
postmodern emphasis on diversity can be seen not only in the deep sensitivity he displays to
the meanings of words, but also in his recognition of the great multiplicity of modes of being
76
Ibid. , § 66.
Ibid. , § 67.
78 Ibid ., § 71.
77
32
that the ever-interpreting Dasein. With the postmodern move, truth is no longer determinate,
but organic, complex, contextual, interconnected, and beautifully fuzzy around the edges.
It may seem that Wittgenstein’s pioneering move into the postmodern proudly and
definitively resolves all philosophical problems, reducing most of them to a matter of
grammatical analysis and throwing others out as irrelevant and poorly phrased, but
Wittgenstein himself doesn’t seem to think so. In stark contrast to the confident preface of
the Tractatus , the preface to the Investigations reflects Wittgenstein’s own frustration with
his inability to have written a coherent book, rather than disjointed remarks:
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I
realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more
than philosophical remarks É And this was, of course, connected with the very nature
of the investigation. 79
The problem with seeing all the diversity that comes into focus through the postmodern lens
is that notions of unity are simultaneously fragmented by the same lens. In seeking to avoid
the mistakes of the modern stage that precedes it, postmodern discourse tends to be primarily
deconstructive, showing all theories and principles to be oversimplified, artificial, and
privileged. Wittgenstein is especially sensitive to philosophy that advances any kind of
universal theory, since he himself very publicly committed such “grave mistakes” in his own
earlier work . 80 With the postmodern move, philosophy becomes localized, as Lyotard
remarks in his analysis of the postmodern condition:
[T]he society of the future falls less within the province of a Newtonian anthropology
(such as structuralism or systems theory) than a pragmatics of language particles.
There are many different language games—a heterogeneity of elements. They only
give rise to institutions in patches—local determinism. 81
The consequence of this local view is that it dispels hope for non-local truth that reaches
across the “heterogeneity of elements.” One feels a need for some kind of positive account
79
80
81
Ibid. , Preface.
Ibid ..
Lyotard, p. xxiv.
33
that saves philosophical discourse from an extreme relativism that argues that anything can
be true in some language-game, but Wittgenstein does not seem able to provide it.
The closest we get to constructive philosophy in late Wittgenstein is his very
occasional mention of Lebensform , or form of life. The term does not denote merely a way
of life, or Lebensart , but implies some kind of form or structure to the way people live their
lives, and has been variously interpreted as culture, biological/behavioral commonalities,
human nature, and as the language-game itself. 82 Judging by the incongruency of the few
places where he makes mention of the term, it seems that Wittgenstein himself lacked a clear
idea of what a form of life would be, but nevertheless intuited that there must be room for
some kind of unity within the diversity of language-games that the resists extreme relativism:
“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—It
is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they
use. That is not in agreement in opinions but in form of life.” 83
Here form of life suggests a principle with which one cannot argue, but Wittgenstein gives
little indication of where this principle is to be found. Nicholas Gier makes the good point
that, while “Heidegger attempted to unify all of the existentials into one,” Wittgenstein
“definitely would not have attempted any such systematic effort with his forms of life.” 84
Indeed, while both thinkers share the positive insights of the postmodern mode of thought,
the late Wittgenstein seems more attuned to the postmodern predicament of fragmentation
and relativism. From an extreme postmodern stance, other cultures are not simply other
possible modes of Dasein, but utterly unintelligible:
[O]ne human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we
come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions...We do not understand
the people...We cannot find our feet with them. 85
82
Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl,
Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (Albany: State U of New York P, 1981), p. 20. Henceforth cited with Gier and
page number.
83
PI , § 241.
84
Gier, p. 131.
85 PI , p. 223.
34
As someone who lived his life at the border between the cultures of Vienna and Cambridge,
Jew and Christian, academic and aristocrat, Wittgenstein of all people needed to be able to
find his feet with different cultures, but his postmodern ideas could only leave him strangely
stranded.
IV. Late Heidegger’s Voyage into the Post-Postmodern
To head toward a star—this only.
To think is to confine yourself to a
single thought that one day stands
still like a star in the world’s sky.
—Martin Heidegger, The Thinker as Poet 86
For the final chapter in our story we return to Freiburg, Germany, where Martin
Heidegger took up the position of chair of philosophy vacated by his mentor Edmund Husserl
in 1928. Soon after the publication of Being and Time , at roughly the same time that
Wittgenstein was beginning to abandon his earlier ideas, Heidegger began to undergo his own
shift in thinking, commonly referred to as the Kehre , or turn. In his Letter on Humanism ,
Heidegger documents some kind of turn to have occurred around 1930:
The sufficient execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons
subjectivity is indeed complicated, since with the publication of Being and Time , the
third division of the first part, “Time and Being,” was held back ... Here the whole
project reverses itself. The questionable division was withheld because the thinking
failed in the sufficient telling of this turn [Kehre] ... The lecture “On the Essence of
Truth” which was thought and delivered in 1930... provides a certain insight into the
thinking of the turn. 87
Scholars in no way agree on the nature of this turn—there is great debate about when it
occurred, what it consisted in, and how long it took—but it is undeniable that Heidegger
experienced some significant change after publishing Being and Time, a work that Heidegger
86 Martin Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), p. 4. Henceforth cited with TAP and page number.
87 Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1949), S. 17. Translation mine.
35
never was able to complete as he intended . 88 The years following its publication were
tumultuous ones, during which Heidegger faced great political, personal, and philosophical
challenges. Chief among these was his appointment to the position of rector at the university
in April 1933, just after the National Socialists came to power in Germany. Heidegger
seemed to have great hope in the new government at first, only to become disenchanted with
it and resign from the position in February of the following year upon the insistence of the
Nazi leadership. 89 He spent the next ten years lecturing under close government supervision,
often using his lectures as a platform to criticize the Nazi regime sharply, but obliquely . 90
Perhaps most significant to our argument is the fact that during the de-Nazification
trials of 1945, Heidegger suffered a nervous breakdown and was placed in a sanatorium for
three weeks, after which he lost his right to teach at the university . 91 While living in relative
obscurity in a cabin in the Black Forest following the breakdown, Heidegger wrote what was
later published as Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (in English under the title “The Thinker as
Poet”) . This collection of short philosophical poems shows a dramatic change from the
writing and thinking style of the early Heidegger, a change that brings him into the realm of
his later thought, which has been variously described as eastern, poetic, and mystical. 92
While those labels are certainly not unfounded, they bring with them a connotation of a
88
For the purposes of this paper, ‘late Heidegger’ will include only post-war writings. It is clear that the Kehre
to which Heidegger refers in the letter occurs much earlier, and I do not deny that Heidegger underwent
significant philosophical change and development in the intermediate years between 1927 and 1945. However,
the kind of post-postmodern thinking that I suggest Heidegger discovers seems to show itself only after the
war’s end, and for that reason the ‘middle’ writings are left out of the current discussion. This decision also has
the advantage that it mostly avoids the nagging questions of the Nazi influence on Heidegger’s thinking under
the Nazi regime. I personally believe that Heidegger’s brief support of the party should in no way discredit his
philosophical ideas, but I am not prepared to advance such a claim in this particular essay.
89
Karl A. Moehling, “Heidegger and the Nazis” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker , ed.Thomas Sheehan
(Chicago: Precedent, 1981), p. 35.
90 Ibid ., p. 38.
91
Otto Pšggler, “West-East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-tzu” in Heidegger and Asian Thought , ed. Graham
Parkes (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1987), p. 51. Henceforth cited with Pšggler and page number.
92
Pšggler notes that Heidegger’s interest in Taoism can be traced back at least as far as a 1930 lecture (Pšggler,
p. 52), but it seems clear that that nascent interest first really took off after the war, to the point that Heidegger
began a German translation of the Lao-tzu in 1946 (Pšggler, p. 50).
36
softening of thought; ‘eastern’ thought tends to be politely excluded from the philosophical
canon, while ‘poetic’ thinking is easily relegated to the world of literature, and ‘mystical’
thinking is considered to be the concern of religion. I take serious issue with this. I think that
Heidegger’s later thought ought to be considered as real, rigorous philosophy every bit as
much as Being and Time , and for this reason I view Heidegger’s post-war thought as being its
own stage along the Denkweg that moves beyond the limitations and frustrations of
postmodernism into something that can best be described as post-postmodern. An
interpretation of select later writings of Heidegger will help elucidate what this altogether
new stage might be like.
One of the most convincing arguments for there being a significant change in thinking
in late Heidegger is that Heidegger himself became a vocal advocate for a new kind of
thinking. In “The Thinker as Poet,” Heidegger hints at this new thinking:
We never come to thoughts.
They come to us.
That is the proper hour of discourse.
Discourse cheers us to companionable reflection. Such reflection neither parades
polemical opinions nor does it tolerate complaisant agreement. The sail of thinking
keeps trimmed hard to the wind of matter. 93
The notion that thoughts somehow “come to us” may seem at first reminiscent of the
phenomenological turn to the things themselves, or of Wittgenstein’s command “don’t think,
but look!”, 94 but the reflection to which Heidegger calls us seems somehow more deeply
involved in the phenomenon at hand, such that there is a sense of companionship between the
thinker and the object of thought. This kind of thinking is what Heidegger later calls das
Nachdenken or das besinnliche Denken , translated as meditative thinking. In his Memorial
93
94
TAP , p. 6.
PI , § 66.
37
Address for the celebration of the anniversary of the composer Conradin Kreutzer’s birthday
in 1955, Heidegger distinguishes this meditative thinking from calculative thinking:
Calculative thinking [ das rechnende Denken ] computesÉ Calculative thinking never
stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not
thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is. 95
Heidegger states that each kind of thinking is “justified and needed in its own way,” but
suggests that modern man has drifted dangerously far from meditative thinking in the then
nascent atomic age . 96 Heidegger sees calculative thinking as the cause of the everaccelerating development of technology, leading from the steam engine to the atomic bomb.
Technology long presented a worrisome problem for Heidegger, and believed at least initially
that National Socialism was out to tackle the problem of man’s relation to the technology of
the modern age. The problem is not with technology itself, but in how people use it.
Heidegger describes the optimal relation to technology as one of acceptance and
nonattachment:
We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside,
that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent on
something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses
“yes” and at the same time “no,” by an old word, releasement toward things
[Gelassenheit] . 97
The word Gelassenheit means calmness and composure in colloquial German, but also was
used by the German mystic Meister Eckhart in the sense of letting go and giving oneself to
God. The mystical connection is not accidental. Heidegger’s talk of nonattachment and a
“dependence on something higher” resonates with countless meditative traditions, but it is
important to realize that this mystical turn has real consequences for his philosophical project.
No longer is Dasein situated in a world of handy tools, forever using, acting, interpreting,
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking , trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper
& Row, 1966), p. 46. Henceforth cited with DT and page number. References to German are taken from the
original version: Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Verlag GŸnther Neske, 1959).
96
Ibid ., p. 46.
97 Ibid ., p. 54.
95
38
caring, and worrying; a truly thoughtful Dasein is able to step back from the beings of the
world, contemplate their purpose in it, and let them go if need be.
This attitude of releasement is not to be confused with prescriptive modern thought, as
Rorty might interpret it. Indeed, modern formula-based thinking is precisely what modern
science, and therefore modern technology, are based upon. To meditate on the purpose of
technology is not to prescribe an arbitrary judgment, but to let the truth shine through. The
threat of atomic warfare provides an illuminating example. Whereas modern thinking’s
response to the nuclear age would see the problem from one perspective—‘So long as the
Russians are building nuclear warheads, we’d better be building them too’—postmodern
thinking would be crippled by seeing the multiplicity of perspectives involved: ‘What can the
rest of the world do when its fate is to be decided by politicians who are more interested in
playing war games than in protecting human rights?’. The strength of the postmodern view is
its openness to diversity, but when it comes to value judgments, that diversity becomes
problematic. Gregory Smith provides a striking account of the postmodern predicament:
Throughout postmodernism there is a fascination with the surface, conjoined with a
perception that all of existence is a humanly constructed surface that has about it the
aura of “contingency”... There is no natural ground for difference; all difference is
relational. This understanding leads to an ironic attitude toward life that inevitably
transforms itself into a form of cynicism—a tendency to give in to a mocking
superiority, the sense that nothing is worthy of passion or commitment because
everything dissolves upon one’s approach. An attitude of indifference, weariness, and
exhaustion is the result. 98
Once modern claims of inner truth are dismantled and deconstructed, the postmodern thinker
becomes suspicious of all depth. Wittgenstein’s response was to preach surface instead of
substance in the analysis of language, which works well to describe the simple behavioral
language-games of everyday, but cannot even begin to tap into the depth of poetry.
Heidegger’s later writing is poetic to the core, and that does not mean it is any less rigorous
98
Gregory Bruce Smith, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1996), p. 9-10.
39
than the technical language of Being and Time . The power of Heidegger’s meditative
thinking is that frees us to ponder deep questions, and come to real answers. Man need not be
“a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the superior power of technology,” for
man has the power to think deeply, and come to the realization that nuclear holocaust goes
against all notions of life, goodness, and humanity. 99 As thinking beings, we can say no to
the deep wrong of atomic warfare, and yes to the deep good of human life. These are not
trained responses or shallow metaphysical claims, but pure intuitions of the non-relative truth
that is.
With meditative thinking’s aspirations to some kind of higher truth, it may seem as
though postmodernism’s insights into the deep contextuality of all beings are lost. To the
contrary, one of the basic insights of post-postmodern thinking is the importance of being
properly rooted in a context. In the Memorial Address, Heidegger says that the main threat of
the atomic age is the elimination of “autochthony [BodenstŠndigkeit] of the works of man.” 100
He sees that, while Kreutzer’s music is certainly accessible to those who do not come from
Swabia, it nevertheless has its roots in that culture, and from those roots it gains its beauty.
Heidegger’s complaint that Germans have lost touch with their homeland, either by moving
away or by simply absorbing the international media which “give[s] the illusion of a world
that is no world,” 101 seems reminiscent of racist Nazi rhetoric, but it is clear that Heidegger
speaks of the challenge to rootedness as a global problem, that threatens not only Swabia but
also “East Prussia, Silesia, and Bohemia.”
102
Post-postmodern rootedness differ from
postmodern contextuality in that it holds within it the potential for growth:
, p. 52-3.
Ibid. p. 53.
101
Ibid p. 48.
102 Ibid p. 47.
99 DT
100
,
.,
.,
40
For a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount
from the depth of his home ground up into the ether. Ether here means the free air of
the high heavens, the open realm of the spirit. 103
The problem with postmodern conceptions of situatedness and context is that postmodern
understanding limits itself to the surface of that context. Wittgenstein realizes that language
is an incredibly rich, incredibly complex phenomenon, but he does not tap into that richness
and complexity because thinks that all that can be understood about language in a way
already is understood because people use it. Similarly, early Heidegger’s conception of
things as always already zuhanden prevents him from delving into the being of things in
themselves. The rootedness that late Heidegger calls for is not something that one merely
acknowledges as being reflected in one’s surface identity, but rather it is something that one
must actively explore and discover, and it is with that discovery that one’s identity can grow
and blossom. Like the seed, we must first send a root into the soil of our origin before we can
sprout leaves and grow to stretch our branches toward the sun.
With each stop along the Denkweg , the conception of world seems to change, from
the egocentric, logical world of the Tractatus to the local, contextual environment of Dasein.
With the move into post-postmodern thinking, we gain the first glimpses of a truly global
space. In the “Conversation on a Country Path” Heidegger makes his most explicit effort at
philosophically describing the new space he has discovered. The conversation between a
scholar, a teacher, and a scientist addresses the nature of knowledge, and explores a new kind
of learning. The answer is not in what Heidegger calls representing ( vorstellen , literally, to
place in front of) which “places before us what is typical of a tree É as that view into which
we look when one thing confronts us in the appearance of a tree.” 104 Instead the conversation
103
Ibid. p. 49.
Ibid p. 63.
,
104
.,
41
suggests that objects appear out of a “openness which surrounds us.” 105 This openness is not
a vacuum, but rather the space of being out of which all phenomena arise: “a region
[Gegend], through whose magic [Zauber] everything that belongs to it returns to that in
which it rests. ” 106 Unlike Dasein’s Umwelt or Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel , this region is not
local but global; it is not merely “one region among others, but rather the region of all regions
[die Gegend aller Gegenden ].” 107 The teacher suggests that we call this all-encompassing
Gegend by the old word Gegnet which means “open expanse,” and in my view translates best
as ‘the field.’ 108
The consequences of acknowledging such a field are vast. First of all, the field opens
up philosophical discourse from the flatland of surface postmodern interpretations to a new
dimension. Through representational thinking the field “reveals itself to us as the horizon,”
but the field itself has more than two dimensions; 109 while late Wittgenstein’s languagegames and forms of life display their surface richness on a two-dimensional canvas of
complex overlapping patterns, shapes, and colors, late Heidegger’s field sees those same
structures in a unified three dimensional space where they all dwell, dance, and interact.
Such a space is not easy to step into, and the scientist, scholar, and teacher must work
cooperatively to discover its curious properties:
(Scientist): I believe I see this much, that the field pulls itself back rather than comes
to meet us ... (Scholar): ...so that also the things which appear in the field no longer
have the character of objects. ( Teacher) : Not only do they no longer stand opposite
105
Ibid ., p. 64.
Ibid ., p. 65. Translation mine, emphasis in original.
107 Ibid .. Translation mine.
108
Ibid ., p. 66. Anderson and Freund translate Gegnet somewhat awkwardly as the noun phrase ‘that-whichregions,’ emphasizing its obvious connection with the neologism Heidegger creates for regioning, das Gegnen .
While the actively regioning character of the Gegnet is indeed important to the concept Heidegger is trying to
106
communicate, I feel that the awkwardness of the term ‘that-which-regions’ threatens to render the text
completely impenetrable. Heidegger gives the idea a simple, one word name, so that the reader can come to
understand the old colloquial word in a new sense. I hope that in calling it ‘the field’—with its many colloquial
uses as well as its related use in ideas of a ‘unified field’ of physics—similar semantic possibilities will open up
in English.
109 Ibid . p. 73.
42
us, rather they longer stand at all ... They rest in the return to the dwelling of the
expanse of their self-belonging [Sich-gehšrens]. 110
This rather cryptic passage indicates an important distinction between things [ Dinge] and
objects [GegenstŠnde ]: while objects are abstractly placed before us in thinking, things abide
in the very same field as we do, and it is only by attaining the properly meditative state of
mind that we can see their place in the field and come to know their true character, their selfbelonging essence. Heidegger suggests that the proper comportment for this new kind of
understanding is Gelassenheit , or releasement, but he is quick to point out that Òit is in no
way a matter of weakly allowing things to slide and drift along,” but an active receptivity to
the field and the people and things that resonate within it. 111 With this active but humble
receptivity, which in the Memorial Address Heidegger calls “openness to the mystery,Ó
112
truth is not merely phenomenologically observed but channeled; neither the teacher, nor the
scientist, nor the scholar take credit for discovering the meaning of Gelassenheit , but
characterize it as a product of the right kind of listening, that hears Òthe answer appropriate to
the word” from the murmurings of the field itself. 113 It is in being receptive to the everregioning, ever-diversifying field that one arrives at a notion of non-relative truth that
transcends local language-games and perspectives:
[T]he essence of man [das Wesen des Menschen] is therefore released into the field
and used by it accordingly, solely because man of himself has no power over truth and
truth remains independent of him ... The independence of truth from man is evidently a
relation to the essence of man after all, a relation that rests in the enregionment
[Vergegnis] of the essence of man into the field. 114
In post-postmodern thinking, truth is not something one posits like a modern thinker, nor is it
something one merely deconstructs and naturalizes like a postmodern thinker. Post-
110
Ibid ., 66-7. Translation mine.
Ibid ., p. 61.
112
Ibid ., p. 55.
113
Ibid ., p. 71.
114
Ibid ., p. 84. Translation mine.
111
43
postmodern thought realizes that, while a great degree of what is called truth is relative to
context, there is also a non-relative kind of truth that one receives from the field which is not
itself posited, but opened up to and intuited. The amazing thing about the conversation,
which is modeled after a real conversation Heidegger had just after the war, is that the
scholar, scientist, and teacher are able to have constructive dialogue at all. They each come
from vastly different spheres of discourse, and yet they are able to explore the field together,
because they all experience and take part in the very same field. That is the mystical insight.
All of this abstract talk about releasement and the field may seem to have more to do
with spiritual comportment than philosophical approach, but upon consideration of
Heidegger’s essay “Das Ding,” or “The Thing,” we get an example of a real post-postmodern
ontological study. In the 1949 essay, Heidegger inquires into the being of an object that
would seem ordinary to the modern or postmodern thinker: the jug. Heidegger’s analysis
begins by stating that a jug is no mere object because it is “something that is self-sustained,
something that stands on its own [in sich steht],” although representational thinking can very
well treat it that way. 115 If we think back to Being and Time , we can characterize the jug as
something vorhanden and merely objectively present, as a modern thinker might view it, and
also as something in terms of its purpose and Zuhandenheit, as a pragmatic postmodern
thinker would tend to see it. Late Heidegger’s interpretation is something altogether
different. While he acknowledges that the jug’s thingness has much to do with its pragmatic
role as vessel that can hold water and wine, Heidegger sees that it is not the clay jug that does
the holding, but rather the empty space within it. 116 The connection with Zen Buddhist
notions of emptiness is surely not accidental, as Heidegger engaged in much academic
115
Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” in in Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), p. 167. References to German are taken from: Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding” in Martin
Heidegger: VortrŠge und AufsŠtze (Pfullingen: Verlag GŸnther Neske, 1954). Henceforth cited with Thing and
page number.
116
Ibid ., p. 169.
44
discourse with Japanese scholars in his time in Freiburg, but it is also important to consider
the implications of the jug’s emptiness within late Heidegger’s own conceptual scheme. For
a thing to be apprehended in its thingness, it must be seen as a thing in the field, and from that
standpoint of releasement, the jug, the emptiness within it, its everyday use, its history as art
and artifact, and indeed the infinite field itself are al reflected within it. In contrast to the
modern scientific view of the jug as Òa hollow within which a liquid spreads,” 117 Heidegger
suggests an alternate interpretation of the drink-giving jug which is at once integral, poetic,
and deep:
The spring stays on in the water of the gift. In the spring the rock dwells, and in the
rock dwells the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky.
In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of sky and earth. It stays in the wine
given by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth’s nourishment and the sky’s
sun are betrothed to one another. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth
dwell É In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell. 118
This is truly integral philosophy. Just as Wittgenstein sees that a word has no meaning
outside of its relation to other words in the language-game, Heidegger realizes that even very
ordinary things cannot be properly understood outside of their relation to the whole field.
This contextualization is not local, but global, in that it entails all regions and all languagegames.
In the same way that a star’s gravitational pull is only fully described in
relation to the masses of all other objects in the universe (unless, of course, we make the
modern perspectival blunder of assuming that gravity can only exist between two bodies in
one-dimensional space, since our formulas do not work for three, let alone infinite, bodies),
any given thing in the field is only fully described in relation to all other things. This is not
relativism but relativity. With this insight of deep interdependence, the philosophical project
is not crippled but liberated; meaning is not to be found in a delimited context, but it is to be
discovered in the endeavor of meditative thinking and poetic interpretation. The corollary to
117
118
Ibid p. 170.
Ibid. p. 172.
.,
,
45
this infinite interdependence is a sense of infinite identity. Not only is a thing connected to
everything else in the field, but it also reflects the whole field within it:
In the gift of the outpouring earth and sky, divinities [ die Gšttlichen ] and mortals
dwell together all at once . These four, at one because of what they themselves are,
belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they are enfolded into a single
fourfold [ein einziges Geviert] É The gift of the outpouring stays the onefold of the
fourfold of the four. And in the poured gift the jug presences as jug. 119
It is less important to know precisely what Heidegger means when he speaks of earth, sky,
divinities, and mortals than it is to realize that the jug has the capacity to somehow hold all of
them—indeed, all that is —within itself. Seeing this kind of deep ecology depends more on
meditative intuition than on description or explanation, and therefore can only be expressed
in language that seems more poetic than philosophical. To the thinker who is closed to the
mystery of the field, it will surely make little sense. Suffice it to say that the post-postmodern
conception of being sees not mere objects, and not mere tools, but something more integral,
deeply contextualized, and—to use Heidegger’s own strange vocabulary—thingly.
The final moment in our investigation of post-postmodern thinking returns to the
central problem of the postmodern predicament: diversity. These days much talk is made
about the importance of diversity, and the positive effects it can bring to public discourse, but
such discourse presupposes there being a possibility of common ground. The postmodern
insight into the rich diversity that is inherent in all things is an extremely important one, but
without an account of how unity and identity can be found within a climate of diversity and
difference, there can be no cross-cultural meaning, no universal concepts, and no dialogue.
In Identity and Difference , what Heidegger considered his most important publication since
119
Ibid ., p. 175. Emphasis in original.
46
Being and Time , Heidegger addresses this problem directly. 120 He begins by making a sharp
critique of modern thought, which depend on a naïve notion of identity:
What the principle of identity... states is exactly what the whole of Western European
thinking has in mind—and that is: the unity of identity forms a basic characteristic in
the Being of beings ... what is successful and fruitful about scientific knowledge is
everywhere based on something useless. The claim of the identity of the object
speaks, whether the sciences hear it or not, whether they throw it to the winds or let
themselves be strongly affected by it. 121
The problem with science and modern thought in general is that it is constantly reifying terms
and making implicit identity claims without allowing for the difference and diversity inherent
in the things of the world, and “without heeding the difference as difference,” as Heidegger
puts it. 122 Heidegger realizes that difference is an essential aspect of being, and so
recommends a step back from identity-oriented tradition of metaphysics to a postmodern
stance that is “closer to rigorous thinking” and thinks of Being “in terms of the difference.” 123
Just as Wittgenstein encourages a grammatical investigation that comes to understand the
meaning of a word through a diversity of different uses, Heidegger states that any proper
account of Being must view it “in its difference with beings, and of beings in their difference
with Being.” 124
Unlike Wittgenstein, Heidegger also seeks a new kind of unity that makes it possible
to see a way that man and Being can belong together in a kind of unity and structure that does
neither ignores the difference between them nor throws them into the postmodern “oblivion
of difference.” 125 To achieve this new understanding of identity that can arise out of
difference, Heidegger calls for a spring into the field itself:
120 Joan Stambaugh, “Introduction” in Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference , trans. Joan Stambaugh (New
York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 7. Henceforth cited with ID and page number. German text included in this
edition.
121
ID , p. 26-7.
122
Ibid ., p. 70.
123
Ibid ., p. 65.
124
Ibid ., p. 62.
125
Ibid ., p. 72.
47
The spring is the abrupt entry into the realm from which man and Being have already
reached each other in their active nature, since both are mutually appropriated
[einander übereignet], extended as a gift, one to the other. Only the entry into the
realm of this mutual appropriation determines and defines the experience of
thinking. 126
In this passage Heidegger indicates a complex interaction that occurs between things in the
field that amounts to much more than cause and effect. Man and Being do not cause one
another, but participate in and mutually receive one another. Heidegger refers to this kind of
co-arising activity as “a strange ownership and a strange appropriation [ Vereignen und
Zueignen]” which he terms Ereignis . 127 In colloquial German Ereignis means ‘event,’ but as
with his use of Gegnet, Heidegger wants to use the word as a term which “can no more be
translated than the Greek logos or the Chinese Tao .” 128 Heidegger’s choice of the word
Ereignis seems to have to do with its emphasis on activity:
The event of appropriation [Ereignis] is that realm, vibrating within itself, through
which man and Being reach each other in their nature, achieve their active nature by
losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them. 129
The unity which post-postmodern thinking promises is nothing like the presupposed unity of
classical metaphysics; indeed, the Ereignis entails losing the labels and false constructions of
metaphysics. Heidegger’s conception of Ereignis is perhaps best elucidated in terms of
meditative experience, where one lets go of one’s constructed ego identity in order to enter
the field of Being and gain a deep meditative insight that pervades all meditative traditions: ‘I
am part of the field, and the field is part of me; I am fielding the field, and the field is fielding
me.’ Like the subatomic particle that can only to come into existence simultaneously with its
anti-particle, so must man and the Being of man co-arise in a nearness that is a belonging in
the field. With the power of the Ereignis , post-postmodern thinking discovers that underlying
126
Ibid. p. 33.
Ibid p. 36.
Ibid
129
Ibid p. 37.
,
127
128
.,
..
.,
48
all difference is a kind of unity that shows that everything is interrelated and interacting
within the field. And it is only by tapping into this field that dialogue can occur.
VI. Philosophical Progress and the Denkweg as a Whole
Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If somebody scratches where it itches, must
there be visible progress? Is it real scratching or real itching otherwise? And can’t
this response to the irritation continue for a long time in this way before a cure for the
itching is found?
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 130
After our extensive study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s development along the
Denkweg , it may still not yet be clear why the changes in thought patterns we have outlined
ought to be seen as progress along a path, and not shifts of focus. What keeps up from
making a classically postmodern argument, and saying that the philosophical models of the
Tractatus , Being and Time , and Gelassenheit each represent unique language-games that are
simply too different to be compared? The first argument against this interpretation is that the
philosophers themselves indicate that they did not abandon one set of philosophical issues for
another, but rather discovered a new and better way of approaching those issues. The kind of
development I am suggesting does not entail replacing old models with new ones; the later
philosophies of late Wittgenstein and Heidegger incorporate the positive advances of their
earlier work, while resolving—or dissolving—their former problems. Although postpostmodern thinking rejects the extreme relativism of postmodern thought, it maintains the
postmodern insights of contextuality and diversity, while building upon and expanding them.
Post-postmodernism represents the most mature mode of thought because it evidences an
awareness of both modern and postmodern insights, and once one sees this, it becomes clear
how counterintuitive Rorty’s claim is that Heidegger would regress to a modern worldview
after seeing the postmodern light, so to speak. This is not to imply that modern thought is not
130
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value , ed. G. Heidegger. von Wright (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), p.
86-7. Translation mine.
49
useful—indeed, all of modern technology depends upon it—it is only when modern thinkers
posit their brand of logical truth as the one true structure of the universe that problems arise.
The linear model of the Denkweg outlined in this essay is, of course, somewhat
oversimplified. Wittgenstein’s experience of the postmodern was clearly different from
Heidegger’s own exploration of that mode of thought, and it makes little sense to suggest that
they just made a stop at the postmodern bench while hiking along the very same trail. A
better analogy might be to criss-crossing thought trails that travel through a gradually
changing countryside. That metaphor has the advantage of allowing for the possibility of a
gradual shift in thinking, and implying that there are modes of thought that precede the
modern, and even some that succeed the post-postmodern. With Wittgenstein and Heidegger
we get distinct glimpses of three kinds of ecosystems unfolding from one another, but that in
no way eliminates the possibility of there being others.
In conclusion I would like to return to Heidegger’s quote which began this essay. It
ends with the curious implication that “we can travel [Denkwege] forwards and backwards,
that indeed it is the way back that first leads us forward.” 131 This idea of backward movement
seems to run counter to the notion of philosophical progress, but it actually provides us with
one last important element to the post-postmodern move. By opening up to the deep context
of the field, Heidegger begins to see the structure of the Denkweg itself, and he realizes how
his earlier ways of thinking arose out of one another to bring him to his present position.
With an awareness of our origins, we finally meet our true identity in “that nearest nearness
which we constantly rush ahead of, and which strikes us as strange each time anew when we
catch sight of it.” And with that realization of Self, we can make the next step forward.
131
US, p. 94. Translation mine.
50
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