Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Life’s Infinite Variations: Wittgenstein and Cultural Generalization
Patricia Sayre, Saint Mary’s College, USA
1. Finding the Theme in the Variations
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a
transcendental deduction laying out in highly abstract
terms the conditions making representation possible. By its
very nature, this project has little concern with the
particularities of culture; one has to look hard to find any
allusion at all to cultural matters in the Tractatus. There is,
however, an acknowledgement that these particularities do
matter, for “The tacit conventions on which the
understanding of everyday language depends are
enormously complicated.” (Wittgenstein 1961, 19) But
complicated though language in its cultural setting may be,
to the extent that it succeeds in representing the world it is
susceptible to logical analysis, and what that analysis
reveals is an underlying logical structure that is the same
whatever the particular language or culture. This is an
approach to language, then, that looks for the theme in the
variations; once that theme is identified, the foundations
for intercultural communication are firmly laid.
What then of our cultural generalizations with all
their potential to enlighten and oppress? According to the
scheme developed in the Tractatus, cultural
generalizations, if legitimate at all, differ not one whit from
other sorts of generalizations. To generalize is to make a
claim about how things stand in the world, where one
takes into consideration not simply an isolated state of
affairs but a pattern present in a whole set of states of
affairs. One’s claim is true if the pattern represented as
obtaining does in fact obtain, and false otherwise.
Consider, for example, Wittgenstein’s comment in his
notebooks from 1929 to the effect that Austrian literary and
musical work “is particularly hard to understand” because it
is in some sense “subtler than anything else and its truth
never leans towards plausibility.” (Wittgenstein 1998, 5e) If
we take this to be a descriptive rather than evaluative
claim, then its truth or falsity depends on whether those
who encounter Austrian works and are in position to
compare them with works produced in other cultural
settings do in fact find them “particularly hard to
understand” and in some way “implausible”—a complex
state of affairs we would attempt to verify, presumably,
using techniques available to us in the social sciences.
If we are concerned with the potential of cultural
generalizations to both enlighten and oppress, however,
we are not concerned with them as descriptive claims, but
with their moral impact. Here, the Tractatus famously
insists, we are attempting to consider something of which
we cannot speak, but about which, Wittgenstein later
admits in the “Lecture on Ethics,” we have a strong
tendency to want to say something nonetheless.
Wittgenstein himself, even if he does not give in to the
temptation to think he can say anything true or false about
such matters, does seem, in the concluding sections of the
Tractatus, to want to use words to produce an effect that
will help us see that which cannot be said. What we need
to see is that facts, as such, have no value—it simply
makes no sense to describe one state of affairs as better
than another, or to view some facts as the effect of acts of
will and others not. Rather, “If the good or bad exercise of
the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of
the world, not the facts…in short, the effect must be that it
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becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to
speak, wax and wane as a whole.” (Wittgenstein 1961, 72)
A cultural generalization, then, to the extent that it is
true or false, has no particular moral valence. However, to
the extent that the attitude expressed in the use of it can
alter the limits of the world by causing it to wax or wane,
the result can be either enlightenment or oppression. The
enlightenment that comes with the world’s waxing is the
reflection of an expansive consciousness that wills actively
to represent all there is to be represented. Rabindranath
Tagore, whose writings Wittgenstein much admired,
captures the idea well: “…the only true human progress is
coincident with this widening range of feeling…Man does
not acquire rights through occupation of larger space, nor
through external conduct, but his rights extend only so far
as he is real, and his reality is measured by the scope of
his consciousness.” (Tagore 2004, 14). Generalizations,
furthermore, can be devices for altering consciousness in
such a way as to enable it to expand, or wax, so as to
grasp the infinite as a single unity. An attitude that causes
the world to wane, by contrast, rather than opening us up
to a view of the world seen sub specie aeterni as a limited
whole, confines our consciousness and hence our world to
that which, to once again quote Tagore, reflects “our
egoistic impulses, our selfish desires,” obscuring our vision
within the limits of “our narrow self.” (ibid., 21)
2. Finding the Variations in the Theme
Comparing Wittgenstein’s earlier with his later works is a
study in both continuity and contrast. By way of contrast,
we find the later Wittgenstein moving away from his earlier
fixation on representation to consider a much wider range
of uses to which language can be put. The aim is no
longer to find the single underlying theme in the variations,
but to teach us to how to see the many variations lurking
within every theme; rather than dealing in abstract
generalities, the focus is on the particularities of practices
both real and imagined. The meaning of our language lies
not in its capacity simply to picture facts about the world,
but in the endless uses to which it is put within the context
of our social interactions. But, while the whole tenor of
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy warns us against making
generalizations based on apriori requirements, there is no
prohibition on looking to see what resemblances one
notices as one travels from one instance to the next. The
movement, significantly, is horizontal rather than vertical:
we are not rising above to take in the whole in a single
vision, but, as Wittgenstein says of his work in the
Philosophical Investigations, traveling over a wide field
“criss-cross in every direction” so as to assemble an album
from which a picture of the landscape will gradually
emerge. (Wittgenstein 1958, v)
When the picture is of a culture, something like the
unity of vision pursued in the earlier work is possible, for a
genuine culture, Wittgenstein writes, “is like a great
organization which assigns to each of its members his
place, at which he can work in the spirit of the whole.”
(Wittgenstein 1998, 8e-9e) And yet, insofar as we come to
understand that culture through an album, our
understanding is always open to shifts in insight which
differ from the mere accretion of factual information in