III. CRITICAL OUTCOMES
Introductory: From the Aporia of Structure to the Critique of Practice
The analytic tradition’s inquiry into the structure of language, throughout the course of its itinerary, has repeatedly taken up the question of the relationship of language to its everyday use, practice or employment. This inquiry has not yielded any consistent or complete positive theory of this relationship. But its most significant implication might be its ability to continue, and re-inscribe, the traditionalcritique of reason
on the indeterminate ground of the everyday relationship of language to the life of the being that speaks. For with its ongoing consideration of the structure of language, the analytic tradition has, as we have seen, also sought to understand how language structures the possibilities of a human life. In seeking a description of the rules and regularities that would determine the extent and nature of the possible meaningfulness of signs, and so fix the bounds of linguistic sense, it has also sought to elucidate what we can understand or appreciate in the words or utterances of another, what we can take as a reason for an action or an explanation of its sense, what we can see as a project to be shared or contested, a way of life to be endorsed or refused.
The desire for the clarification of meaning that underlies this inquiry is an ordinary one, marked already in the most mundane requests for clarification, the most everyday questions of shared meaning. But in its detailed development in the analytic tradition, its “object” is the same as that which philosophical thought has long sought to grasp aslogos
, the form of the meaning of words as well as the linguistic reason their everyday practice embodies. Historical reflection on the itinerary of the tradition’s encounter with this problematic object suggests both a more comprehensive sense of the significance of its most innovative methods and a more exact placement of them in a broader geography of critical thought.
The analytic tradition’s inquiry into language, in most of its historical forms, looks toward the completion of a comprehensive theoretical or descriptive understanding of the possibility of linguistic meaning. Most often, this takes the form of the search for a descriptive overview or systematic clarification of the rules or regularities conceived as constitutive of language and its possibilities of use. As we have seen over the last several chapters, however, this quest for understanding repeatedly succumbs to inherent ambiguities and instabilities, grounded in the essential ambiguities of the structuralist picture of language itself. The quest is open to criticism on the basis of an expanded conception of the kinds of explanation, or intelligibility, we may wish from a theoretical “account” of language. But it is also clear that the ambiguities it evinces are already present, if only in a vague and inarticulate way, in the ordinary language that it aims to theorize. As we have seen, in particular in relation to Quine, these ambiguities are indeed present as soon as language can speak of itself, as soon as there are words for its capacity to mean anything, and thus as soon as the meaning of words, their bearing on our lives, becomes a topic for human conversation at all.
Thus it is that, according to what might well be considered one of the most consistent results of the tradition, linguistic reason, in its everyday employment, poses certain questions that are unavoidable for it, but at the same time cannot be answered univocally by the elucidation of logical or grammatical structure. The situation is closely reminiscent of that described by the famous first lines of the first edition of Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason
:
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, a prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
Indeed, as I shall argue in this final section, like the Kantian project which responds to a similar exigency of reason, the analytic inquiry can be seen as performing a complexcritique
of linguistic meaning itself on the ambiguous ground of its relationship to human life. The critique effectively challenges the underlying ideological bases of some of the most prevalent social practices of modernity by revealing their complex relation to the forms of language and assumptions about meaning that support them.
At the beginning of the analytic tradition, Kant’s critique of reason provided both a model and an inspiration for practitioners of the newly developed methods of logical and grammatical analysis. This influence was felt not only by philosophers like Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle (whose training and background in the Neo-Kantianism of Cohen, Natorp and Rickert played a decisive role in determining the Circle’s project) but just as much by the young Wittgenstein, who saw in the new methods of analysis pioneered by Frege and Russell the possibility of conceiving of all philosophy as linguistic critique:
All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
Like Kant’s own project, the methods of this new form of linguistic critique would seek to elucidate and demonstrate the necessary forms of the representation of facts, and thereby to gain an understanding of theira priori
conditions and the limits of their possibilities. But the definitive inspiration of the new practice of critique was that this form could be grasped aslogical
orlinguistic
one, and so could be clarified through the newly developed methods of analysis. The Russellian theory of descriptions itself was a limited case, bearing only on the question of the actual significance of a certain class of apparently referring propositions, and eventually to be undermined by its own set of seeming counterexamples. But for Wittgenstein as well as other early analytic philosophers, it provided an essential early demonstration of the bearing of the methods of analysis on theclarification
of language, the illumination of its “real” possibilities of meaning over against the tendency of ordinary language to obscure or falsely assimilate these forms. Such was the singularity of Wittgenstein’s insight, or the specificity of his historical position, that he could see philosophy’s problems as entirely and universally grounded in such linguistic obscurities and illusions. And such was the audacity of his vision of language that he could declare these problems universally resolved by their critique.
At first, the critique of language meant the drawing of a criticalline
, within the totality of language itself, between themeaningful
propositions of scientific or objective description and those that (though they might serve to express a mood or feeling) lacked meaning in this sense. From the beginning, though, the critical practice that would delimit linguistic sense by clarifying the real or genuine forms of meaning encountered the question of the methodological basis of its own claim to enact this delimitation. Thus structuralism was faced with the further critical question of the ground of its own defining commitments. And the philosophical reflection that took up this question as the question of linguistic signs to their ordinary use also took up the deeper critical inquiry to which it led.
The results of this inquiry - in particular, as we have seen, those of the Sellars, Quine, and the later Wittgenstein - tended to problematize what we may assume about our ordinary relationship to “meaning” by calling into question the structuralist model that earlier projects had uncritically presupposed. In different ways, each of these projects articulated a fundamental instability that troubles the structuralist attempt to characterize linguistic meaning by describing its basis in rules of use. In the case of Wittgenstein’s consideration of rule-following in particular, this instability defines a fundamentalaporia
or gap between what the structuralist picture envisions as rules and what is involved inapplying
orfollowing
them in the varied circumstances of a human life. The gap is uncrossable by any theoretical explanation as long as linguistic meaning is conceived in structuralist terms, since any such conception leads to the paradox ofPI
201. Its diagnosis and criticism is to make way for an alternative way of understanding what is involved in following a rule, a way that expresses itself in what we call “following a rule,” or “going against it”, from “case to case” of actual “use.”
At PI 217, Wittgenstein asks, in an interlocutory voice, “How am I able to obey a rule?” The question, as I shall attempt to document in this final section of the book, can also be seen asthe
central question of those forms of contemporary social, political, and cultural critique that take up the question of our relationship to linguistic reason and the forms of life and practice determined by this relationship. Within these forms of life and practice, the most normal form of the determination of action is its being in accord with one or another symbolically formulable rule. Here, theforce of reason
- what motivates or compels us to choose the better action rather than the worse, to accept the claim that is best justified by the evidence or follow the course of action that will lead to the best outcome - is also typically comprehensible as the justification of action by rules that can be stated and discussed, explicated and evaluated. In the course of such discussion, I may present my action as justified by reference to one or another cited rule; but I may also ask the question of what in the cited rule itself demands or even suggests my particular action, of how I should understand the ultimate basis of its (actual or “normative”) force in determining what I do. The question, in its general form, is the same as the question of linguistic reason’s authority, the relevance of its claims to the pursuit of a linguistic life. It formulates, in distinctively linguistic mode, one of the most central questions of the Kantian critique of reason itself.
Wittgenstein’s immediate response to the interlocutor, without answering the question, expresses a pervasive sense that such answers may fail to do what we expect of them, may fail ultimately to place the distinctive force of reason on any more basic foundation than it already has:
If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”
The paradox of PI 201 articulates the gap between a rule and its application that makes any further description of ourpractices
- any further description of what we do - idle in answering the question of the ultimate ground of rational force. It thus demonstrates a nullity at the center of structural reason’s claim to force over a life responsive to its dictates.
Like the more formal results of Gödel and Tarski before them, the results of Sellars, Wittgenstein, and Quine demonstrate the necessary failure of a natural and plausible theoretical project, in this case the project of a total structuralist explanation of linguistic meaning. And if, in the larger context of the history of the analytic tradition, these results wereonly
comprehensible as the outcomes of a positive, theoretical explanatory project (one whose ambition, for instance, were simply to contribute to a growing fund of scientific or empirical knowledge about language) they would indeed amountonly
to failures, and their repeated occurrence would suggest that the entire project from which they arose be abandoned or at least seriously reconsidered. But if seen within the broader context of the critical methods that the tradition has practiced since its inception, they drive toward a very different possibility, one that could ensure the continuance rather than the abandonment of the reflective project they represent. For they could be the basis of an explicit renewal of the analytic tradition’s ongoingcritical
consideration of our access to linguistic meaning, of the contours of its inherent possibilities and the threat of its failures, and of the implications of the determinate pursuit of its structure for our understanding of its role in the life of the being that speaks.
Stanley Cavell gives an apt sense of the cultural bearing of this critique, as it appears in the texts of the late Wittgenstein:
That the justifications and explanation we give of our language and conduct, that our ways of trying to intellectualize our lives, do not really satisfy us, is what, as I read him, Wittgenstein wishes us above all to grasp. This is what his ‘methods’ are designed to get us to see. What directly falls under his criticism are not the results of philosophical argument but those unnoticed turns of mind, casts of phrase, which comprise what intellectual historians call ‘climates of opinion’, or ‘cultural style’, and which, unnoticed and therefore unassessed, defend conclusions from direct access - fragments, as it were, of our critical super-egos which one generation passes to the next along with, perhaps as the price of, its positive and permanent achievements …
Like an earlier epoch of enlightenment thought, the analytic critique of language aims, in one of its most prominent historical modes, at the identification of sources ofmythology
, and so culminates in thedemystification
of the pictures of human life they impose and diagnosis of the false consciousness that accompanies them.
One of its first and still most significant accomplishments, for instance, was to provide linguistic grounds for challenging the longstanding picture of the content of thought as consisting in the conscious processes of a closed, centered subjectivity. The critique of psychologism that Wittgenstein inherited from Frege exposed this picture to its own fatal failure to account for the meaningfulness of language that is presupposed by it. Psychologism, like others of the various pictures of human life that the analytic tradition takes up, is perspicuous to the critique as a “grammatical” illusion, one deeply grounded in the forms of ordinary language, the ordinary descriptive locutions and turns of phrase it permits.
Like other such pictures, it arises from certain characteristic desires, presenting their imagined fulfillment; but it does not survive the lucid description of these desires and reflection on the nature of their demand.
More generally, the modes of analytic criticism expressed in projects of Sellars, Quine, and Wittgenstein, and formulated in their most significant results, express grounds for criticizing what we might describe as our tendency to assume thefixity
of meaning across the heterogeneity and diversity of contexts of linguistic use. The metaphysical picture of rules that is the target of Wittgenstein’s criticism in theInvestigations
, for instance, is a picture of the basis of such fixity, of the regular meaning of a word as consisting in the regularity of the rule that underlies its use. Something similar could be said about the critical bearing of Quine’s radical translation result against Carnap’s conception of languages as calculi, and Sellars’ criticism of Ryle’s structuralist eliminativism. In each of these cases, analytic reflection on the problematic relationship of language to anything intelligible as its “use” leads to a deep challenge to the claim that the meaningfulness of terms is explicable by means of an explication of the rules supposed to be responsible it. In this challenge, even if it is not generally perceived as posing a devastating challenge to structuralism as such, the inherent instabilities of the structuralist picture of language come to the fore as challenges to the coherence or possibility of its existing specific formulations.
But if the real object of critique is not any of these specific formulations, but rather their moregeneral
, and deeply natural, picture of language that they determinately formulate, then the sites of criticism do not stop short of the infinitely varied contexts of a human life, wherever meaning is in question at all. For the commitments and pictures that lead us to (as we may put it) “assume” the fixity of meanings, or “presuppose” substantial identities of sense underlying our varied uses of a word, are already present, in our ordinary language, as soon as we begin to reflect on the relationship of words to their meanings, as soon as we experience their singular tokens asinstances
of a more general category at all. The critique that begins as “linguistic” demystification is therefore, with its more radical application to the “metaphysics of meaning” that must be seen to underlieeveryday
reflection on meaning as much as the determinate theoretical forms of analysis and explanation that grow from it, no longer presentable simply as consisting in the dissolution of errors or superstitions. It cannot be seen (though this is certainly part of its work)simply
as eliminating distorting falsehoods from a human life that could then be revealed, purged of the mystifications of philosophy, in an undistorted and pure form. Rather, the analytic critique of language joins with those other expressions of a broader critique of metaphysics that have increasingly located the sites of its operation, and the point of its threat to the clarity of the human life, in nothing short of the innumerable variety of contexts in which meaning is open to question, from the first word of language to the last.
In this, the analytic tradition joins with, as I shall argue in the following chapters, the neighboring traditions of “continental” philosophy that have, especially in the twentieth century, taken up an older critique of metaphysics in the critical mode of reflection on the forms of language and our access to them. In recent historiography, the origin of the widely acknowledged “divide” between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy has been widely and variously located in time and space. Some locate it at the beginning of the existence of the analytic tradition as such (for instance, in the discussion between Frege and Husserl over logic, language, and psychology and in the different conclusions they reached about the centrality of language to philosophical analysis;
or in Russell and Moore’s rebellion against post-Hegelian idealism
). Others cite some of the particularly divisive episodes in which analytic philosophers have explicitly attacked the methods and results of “continental” philosophers. One infamous example of such an attack is Carnap’s scathing criticism of a few sentences drawn from Heidegger’s 1929 Freiburg inaugural lecture, “What is Metaphysics?”
Still others locate the historical origins of the divergence in more or less contingent historical or sociological facts
(for instance the immigration of many prominent representatives of logical empiricism to the U.S.A. after World War II).
However, though, the split of the analytic tradition from its philosophical neighbors is located, it can hardly be denied that questions of the structure and limits of linguistic meaning played a decisive role in producing it. Early in the tradition, the project of linguistic criticism combined with positivistic assumptions about experience and the forms of objective knowledge to produce the project of the “overcoming of metaphysics” that Schlick, Carnap, and other members of the Vienna Circle pursued zealously, and with prejudice, against the methods, aims, and statements of contemporary philosophers like Husserl and Heidegger. The analytic philosophers who applied this kind of critique saw themselves as possessing clear, logically based criteria of meaningfulness and empiricist criteria of significance that expressly excluded what they saw as the speculative, non-empirical claims of phenomenologists. The criticism, however, often showed no very clear understanding of the actual motivations and projects underlying these claims, and so as often as not mistook them; often the claims themselves were much more humble and “analytic” than their critique implied.
In any case, the specifically positivist and verificationist terms of the critique were soon themselves to be overcome, within the analytic tradition itself, by midcentury projects that saw themselves as having decisively passed beyond logical positivism.
Interestingly, though, even when it became clear that these criteria of meaningfulness and significance could not be applied in the straightforward and univocal way that the logical empiricists had supposed, analytic philosophers have persisted in criticizing the claims and expressions of continental philosophers in methodologically similar ways. The newer attacks most often deploy more general criteria of clarity in argumentation and precision in expression, criticizing the claims of continental philosophers as being unclear or even unintelligible.
But like the earlier attacks, they rest essentially on the analytic philosopher’s claim to pass judgment on linguistic possibilities of sense.
Methodologically speaking, then, the claim of analytic philosophers to criticize continental projects has remained dependent on the claim, already decisive for the logical empiricists, to determine, and apply, a standard capable of circumscribing the possibilities of meaningful philosophical language. The prejudicial application of this critique against the projects of continental philosophy has been vastly excessive; and the subsequent internal development of the analytic tradition’s own modes of critique indeed provides reason to doubt its continuing trenchancy. As I shall attempt partially to demonstrate over the next three chapters, in fact, shat the analytic criticisms of continental philosophy have most pervasively and unfortunately missed is the extent to which various projects of continental philosophy over the twentieth century have themselves moved to perform a sophisticated critical reflection on the role of language in the life of its speakers. Over the course of the twentieth century, the inquiries of phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory and deconstruction have all undertaken deep and penetrating investigations into the “nature of language,” into its underlying forms and the implications of its role in human life. These inquiries, good heirs to the Kantian project, have self-consciously struggled with and against the claims of a metaphysics that they have come to recognize as pervasive in everyday as well as philosophical language, a metaphysics that is as old as philosophy and whose effects on the forms and practices of our everyday lives are both ubiquitous and determinative. One of my hopes in pursuing the significant, and deepening, connections between this critical struggle and the parallel one that, I argue, the analytic tradition has similarly undertaken, is that the usual dismissive attitude that one still finds among practitioners of each “tradition” toward the other can yield to a broader and more responsible conversation, informed by the deep questions of language that both traditions share.
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Author: Paul M. Livingston
