Abstract
In this paper, I examine Wittgenstein’s frequent and pervasive of the adjective “complicated.” I begin by comparing and contrasting the adjective’s use in the Tractatus and the much later manuscripts on the philosophy of psychology. While there are a number of important and illuminating affinities between these uses, I argue that these need to be balanced against the wide disparities between them: in contrast to the Tractatus, the later philosophy preserves a sense of “surface” complexity while jettisoning the idea of a deep—but hidden—simplicity that logical analysis promises to reveal. The notion of a surface must thus be reconceived as complicated in terms of its “spread” rather than in relation to what lies “beneath” it. Wittgenstein’s later appeals to what is complicated need to be read in tandem with his critique of the idea of there being an “absolute sense” of “simple.” Doing so prevents our seeing in his later appeals to complexity a new, more substantive notion of complexity that a more adequate philosophical theory must capture or reflect. On the contrary, the appeal to something as complicated plays a recollective and corrective role that challenges the viability of a theoretical-explanatory perspective.
Here I quote from one of Wittgenstein’s later manuscripts, the second volume of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. The full remark reads:
If you consider the reasons someone might have for stifling pain, or simulating it, you will come up with countless ones. Now why is there this multiplicity? Life is very complicated. There are a great many possibilities.
But couldn’t other men disregard many of these possibilities, shrug them off, as it were? (§ 639)
The stretch of remarks in which this one appears will be of particular concern throughout this paper. Further citations from this work will be made parenthetically using the abbreviation RPP II.
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Notes
- 1.
Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment, edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte; translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, § 1. Further citations to this work will be made parenthetically using the abbreviation PPF. Citations from Philosophical Investigations, which appears in the same volume, will be made parenthetically using the abbreviation PI.
- 2.
Newton Garver is the one prior commentator I’ve come across who asks specifically about the adjective here rather than the whole phrase. In his collection of essays, published as This Complicated Form of Life (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), he writes:
It is interesting not only that there is a single form of life determined by mastery of the use of a language, but also that it is complicated. Why “complicated”? It is true that there are many subtle nuances of hope, but they would seem to be a rather insubstantial basis for calling the form of life complicated. What complicates this form of life are all the other possibilities besides just the phenomena of hope. (p. 253).
- 3.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
- 4.
Here is the passage in full (other portions of it will be attended to in due course):
Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is – just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced.
Everyday language is part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is.
Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.
The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.
Chon Tejedor’s “Tractarian Form as the Precursor to Forms of Life” (Nordic Wittgenstein Review, October 2015 <https://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3358>) provides an illuminating discussion of this remark in relation not just to the Tractatus’ overarching concern with form, but to the evolution of that concern in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.
- 5.
Even seeing the movement as an action—any action—already involves seeing it against a background “within human life,” which is complicated in a way that resists spelling out. Consider Wittgenstein’s question in the Investigations: “What gives as so much as the idea that beings, things, can feel?” (PI, § 283) Replace “feel” in this question with “act” and we are apt to feel an analogous sense of puzzlement as the one he is trying to induce at this juncture of the Investigations.
- 6.
Notice what Wittgenstein says very early in the Investigations: “One has already to know (be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name. But what does one have to know?” (PI, § 30) Analogously, we might ask what someone “has already to know” in order to judge an action in the sense we’ve been considering. That such judgments register, or enlist a sensitivity to, a background tempers the expectation of an exhaustive answer here. I take it that achieving this same kind of tempering of expectations is one of Wittgenstein’s motives in raising the question about naming in the Investigations passage. In other words, what is most important about Wittgenstein’s raising that question at the end of § 30 is his leaving it unanswered.
- 7.
I am indebted here to J. F. M. Hunter’s “‘Forms of Life’ in Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 4 (October, 1968), pp. 233–243, which contrasts the simple and the complicated in this manner with particular reference to 4.002 of the Tractatus. See especially p. 238.
- 8.
The Big Typescript: TS 213, edited and translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Citation from p. 311e.
- 9.
In the continuation of the passage from Garver cited in Note 3 above, he likewise links the appeal to what is complicated to Wittgenstein’s insistence in § 23 of Investigations that there are “countless kinds of sentences.” So “complicated” in “this complicated form of life” indicates not just multiplicity and variety, but also refers to something about that multiplicity and variety, as being, for example, countless. I return to this sense of indefiniteness at the conclusion of the paper.
- 10.
Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Logic and Knowledge, edited by R. C. Marsh. London: Unwin Hyman, 1956. The citation is from the second lecture, p. 198. The privacy asserted here is bound up with the way “this” is attached to a simple sensory element with which the speaker is acquainted in Russell’s special sense, where no two speakers are ever acquainted with the same elements.
- 11.
Consider, for example, Tractatus 3.23: “The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate,” and shortly thereafter, at 3.25: “A proposition has one and only one complete analysis.”
- 12.
Here I draw on Richard Rorty’s characterization of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as “pure satire.” See his “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein” in his Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982; pp. 19–36. See especially p. 34.
- 13.
Denis McManus has in more than one place drawn attention to the difficulties of appeals to a background as playing a fundamental explanatory role. See his “Rules, Regression, and the ‘Background’: Dreyfus, Heidegger and McDowell.” European Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 3 (December, 2008): 432–458, as well as Heidegger and the Measure of Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 (see especially Chap. 4).
- 14.
I examine this tendency toward mystification at greater length in my “Ground, Background, and Rough Ground: Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology” in Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology, edited by. M. Burch, I. McMullin, and J. Marsh. London: Routledge, 2019.
- 15.
Culture and Value, translated by P. Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 16e.
- 16.
Compare Wittgenstein’s remark on the desire for sharp boundaries:
If someone were to draw a sharp boundary, I couldn’t acknowledge it as the one I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I didn’t want to draw one at all. It can then be said: his concept is not the same as mine, but akin to it. The affinity is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with blurred boundaries and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed by with sharp boundaries. The affinity is just as undeniable as the difference (PI, § 76).
- 17.
Recall: “What has to be accepted, the given, is—one might say—forms of life” (PPF, § 345).
- 18.
Thanks to Edmund Dain, Duncan Richter, and especially Denis McManus for their helpful suggestions when discussing some of the ideas in this paper.
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Cerbone, D.R. (2020). “Life is Very Complicated”: Remarks on a Recurring Adjective. In: Wuppuluri, S., da Costa, N. (eds) WITTGENSTEINIAN (adj.). The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27569-3_10
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