Abstract
In this chapter, Gebauer applies Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to Wittgenstein’s concepts of “life-form” and “certainty”. Not only is the human being contained in the rule-structured world; the world is also contained in acting human beings in the sense that each one possesses a specific life-form. By adopting a life-form, people also adopt a whole network of certainties. In Wittgenstein’s discussion of these concepts, it is clear that his thought is not oriented toward epistemological knowledge of the world but toward the individual subject’s relationship with herself. In the grammatical form of the first person, language creates an interchange through which the unexpressed bodily reactions can enter into the language-game.
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein’s key works of this period include the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, die Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volumes 1 and 2, which form the foundation for the second part of the Philosophical Investigations, as well as On Certainty. On the philosophy Wittgenstein developed during this period, see Moyal-Sharrock 2004; Bouveresse et al. 2002.
- 2.
See Puhl (1999), Part III.
- 3.
“Proof of an external world” and “A defence of common sense” (Moore 1963). Moore expressed this view in a lecture in which he stated that he knew with certainty that the following proposition was true: “Here is one hand, and here is a second.” He uttered these words while gesturing first with first one hand and then with the other. Although Wittgenstein was of a fundamentally different opinion than Moore, he considered these ideas to represent some of Moore’s best philosophical work.
- 4.
The certainty of our hands cannot come from sensory experience because they belong to the conditions of possibility for all experience, all knowledge, and all speech. See OC §250: “My having two hands is, in normal circumstances, as certain as anything that I could produce in evidence for it. That is why I am not in a position to take the sight of my hand as evidence for it.” See also OC, §369: “If I wanted to doubt whether this was my hand, how could I avoid doubting whether the word ‘hand’ has any meaning? So that is something I seem to know after all.”
- 5.
Laugier (2002), p. 239.
- 6.
Rhees (2003), p. 91.
- 7.
In his critique, Wittgenstein asserted that Moore had a false conception of knowing. See OC, §90: “This would give us a picture of knowing as the perception of an outer event through visual rays which project it as it is into the eye and the consciousness. Only then the question at once arises whether one can be certain of this projection. And this picture does indeed show how our imagination presents knowledge, but not what lies at the bottom of this presentation.” In his critique of private language, Wittgenstein repudiated the idea that there are inner processes that take place within human beings in which self-observation is possible: sensations, perceptions, thought processes, or linguistic processes that we can directly observe and analyze. We cannot look within ourselves with a kind of inner vision. Such inner observation—as a kind of higher-order seeing—ought to provide greater certainty of knowledge. But how could we question the idea that outer seeing is false and inner seeing is correct? If I were to make this assertion, I could also ask whether I am seeing at all and whether I know that I am seeing. It would make equally little sense for me to assert that I know my knowledge. I have no higher standpoint from which to judge whether the expression I have chosen fits the situation at hand.
- 8.
Rhees (2003), p. 90. See also OC, §663: “I have a right to say ‘I can’t be making a mistake about this’ even if I am in error.”
- 9.
On the role of naming in the context of the ontogenetic development of the individual and of language, see Gebauer in: Gebauer et al. (1989).
- 10.
The certainty of our body use is “as it were…something animal” (OC, §359).
- 11.
The “phantom limb” sensation is not a genuine counterexample since it represents the absence of a body part that was once present. “Phantom pain” is not the false sensation that one still has a right hand; the pain is real, but it is localized in a place where the hand no longer exists.
- 12.
Wittgenstein does not presuppose that one actually has an intact, complete body—instead, he means that we have what I have referred to here as a “common body.” Someone who has lost a hand in war takes his bearings from practices that emerged from common ideas about the body. Wittgenstein’s brother Paul, a well-known concert pianist who lost his right hand in World War I, commissioned composers Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, and Paul Hindemith to write piano compositions for him that were to be played solely with the left hand. In this case, the specification “for the left hand” explicitly denotes the orientation toward a normal body.
- 13.
- 14.
PI, §11 and §12.
- 15.
Krais (2003), p. 164
- 16.
In OC, §152 Wittgenstein speaks of an “axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.”
- 17.
- 18.
Nietzsche (1988), p. 883, translated here from the German.
- 19.
For this reason, it is of paramount importance for Wittgenstein that one can rely on the exercise of the practice, but also on its knowledge among experienced practitioners. If, for example, there is no one is left who knows how a dying custom is practiced, this custom risks losing its certainty. If we assume one finds a group of people in a far-off corner of the world who have practiced this custom, their knowledge could be cited as an argument for the correctness of their practice thereof.
- 20.
M. Merleau-Ponty (1969), pp. 130–156.
- 21.
Here, Bourdieu uses the same term (coincidence) as Merleau-Ponty.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
Bourdieu conceives of this state of being-grasped along materialist lines. His thinking on this subject bears some resemblance to the method used by Foucault to describe the impact of the spatial and temporal structures of the disciplines on the subject in Discipline and Punish. What distinguishes Bourdieu’s concept from Foucault’s, however, is the fact that, in the second movement, the subject develops a practical comprehension (compréhension pratique). It is important to remember that Bourdieu was interested in contributing to a materialist theory of knowledge. See Bourdieu (2002), p. 26.
- 25.
Bourdieu (2000), p. 135.
- 26.
Nietzsche describes this process in the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1967, p 60). First, duality is generated in thought by the scholastic point of view, which holds that the body is at once observed from the outside as an object and then, through introspection, illuminated by the “mind’s eye” (which Jacques Bouveresse in 1976 calls “le mythe de l’intériorité”). Only the notional body is divided into two sides, which the individual can now no longer conceive of together.
- 27.
Bourdieu (2000), p. 134. In this general anthropological designation, too, human beings are social creatures insofar as they are oriented to the world and to others, and as each person lives within a specific community.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 134 f.
- 29.
The spatial dimension of the use concept has rarely been taken into consideration. This is precisely the area where Bourdieu’s work made significant contributions that can be used to supplement Wittgenstein’s thinking and thereby to clarify this obscure yet extremely important aspect of the language-game concept. Linguistic usages always take place at specific locations within the social space. They unfold in three dimensions; they take up space and time. Use can be perceived and evaluated from multiple perspectives. Bourdieu drew attention to the fact that social space has boundaries and is internally structured both vertically and horizontally. One must however, first enter into the social space, and to do so, a person requires a “droit d’entrée” (right of access). There are conditions for gaining access: one must be able to fit inside the space, adjust to it, blend in. Before an individual has fulfilled these conditions, while still a novice, she goes through a process of “initiation.” Initiation is a more accurate term here than “learning.” It is a separate process than the one that takes place in school. In this case, an individual is inducted into a situation and to certain manners and customs, and is shown what to do and not to do, how to behave at specific times, what to say, what habitus to adopt, which individuals are especially important, etc. It is a complex introduction into a cultural space, like an initiation into the particular customs of a foreign culture, e.g., the Japanese tea ceremony. To take part in this process, the novice needs one or more people who introduce the practice, who demonstrate how it is done, who can be observed and followed. This is the mimetic aspect. A person never learns one thing in isolation, but rather many things simultaneously: one learns to distinguish, to structure; one grasps the idea of orientations and hierarchies and how to navigate them appropriately. The individual is introduced into an entire cultural space that is filled with meaning.
- 30.
Customs and usages develop in particular through bodily practice. The body is ideally suited to habituation, to inclusion in society, to the acts of giving and receiving because it is open to a counterpart, an Other.
- 31.
Custom usually has an undetected performative character that distinguishes it from accidental or inadvertent behavior (which does not belong in the particular space).
- 32.
“‘Primitive’ is a relative term,” as Säätelä points out. “Thus the reaction to another person’s pain is indeed prelinguistic, but the very fact that we can identify it as a reaction to pain presupposes the language game of pain behavior.” (Säätelä 2002, p. 66)
- 33.
See RoF, p. 133.
- 34.
The agreement is not cognitive. Its first principle is not learning. Cometti (2002) writes: “…the understanding and application of the rule cannot appeal to a calculation or an interpretation: they must have an immediate status.” (p. 79) “Far from being incompatible with the fact that meaning resides in use, the immediacy of understanding and of meaning are its very condition.” (p. 81)
- 35.
Bourdieu (2000), pp. 135–36.
- 36.
See PI, §19: “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” This means that if Wittgenstein conceives of a language, that is, if he invents a new language in the sense of his fictional ethnography, he begins essentially conceiving of another form of life.
- 37.
A possible reference to Goethe would support such an interpretation. In his “Observation on Morphology in General,” Goethe writes that the study of “life” represented the “attempt to discover the laws an organism is destined to follow as a living being. For the sake of argument this life was quite properly viewed as derived from a force, an assumption justified and even necessary because life in its wholeness is expressed as force not attributive to any individual part of an organism.” (von Goethe 1988, p. 59)
- 38.
See Canguilhem (1998), p. 83.
- 39.
Canguilhem (1998), p. 88.
- 40.
See Claude Bernard, La vie c’est la création, cited in Canguilhem (1998), p. 99.
- 41.
Canguilhem (1998), 85 f.
- 42.
von Goethe (1994), p. 121.
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Gebauer, G. (2017). Materialism and Belief. In: Wittgenstein's Anthropological Philosophy. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56151-6_7
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