Abstract
“How does Wittgenstein stand with respect to hermeneutics?” is a question that has often been posed by interested but puzzled hermeneuticists. They feel instinctively a certain sympathy for his idea of “seeing the world rightly” in the Tractatus as well as with his views about, say, what it is to understand persons in the Philosophical Investigations. Yet, there remains something strange, even foreign to the hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey to Gadamer in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings.1 Like the hermeneuticists, Wittgenstein insists, for example, that description must replace explanation in philosophy but what he understood by description has precious little to do with either the historically-oriented contextualism of Dilthey or the phenomenology of the early Heidegger. Wittgenstein describes in the form of thought experiments, examples, aphorisms, analogies, metaphors and questions — the most interesting single fact about the Investigations is that it contains 784 questions of which only 110 are answered of which in turn 70 are answered falsely on purpose.2 This is a very curious way to do hermeneutics indeed. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein, despite his insistence that philosophy was a kind of analysis (PI, I, 91), always distanced himself from the tradition of Logical Positivism by emphasizing that it was fundamentally about meaning rather than truth. Indeed, the later Wittgenstein’s lack of concern for issues relating to truth in philosophy has been perceived by many, not least Bertrand Russell, as scandalous. His ways of “reminding” us of the multiple modes of interweaving words and gestures into meanings are, nevertheless, highly reminiscent of hermeneutic techniques. Yet, Wittgenstein’s rejection of Positivism was never for a moment connected with a temptation to develop an anti-positivistic philosophy like those of Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. The question is why? The answer is to be found in his scientific background — the last place that either a Positivist or a hermeneuticist would look.
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Notes
I refer to Wittgenstein’s writings in the text parenthetically as follows: PI with paragraph/page number (for parts 1 and 2 respectively) = Philosophical Investigations, trans., (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). Other works by Wittgenstein will also be referred to in the text parenthetically with page; date, or section number as is appropriate as follows: BBB with page number = The Blue and Brown Books,ed. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper’s, 1956); CandV with page number = Culture and Value,trans. Peter Winch (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980); GT with date — Geheime Tagebücher,ed. W. Baum (Vienna: Turia andKant, 1992); N with page number = Notebooks 1914–16,trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961); OC with paragraph number = On Certainty,trans. Anscombe and Denis Paul (New York: Harper’s; 1969); T with proposition number = Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); W-F with letter number = Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker,ed. G.H. von Wright (“Brenner Studien” Vol. 1; Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1969); WV with page number = Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977); WWK with page number = Wittgenstein and der Wiener Kreis shorthand notes by F. Wasimann, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967). z K.T. Fann, Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 109.
Heinrich Hertz, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1894), 9. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as PM with the appropriate page number.Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
Professor G. H. von Wright emphasized this to me in conversation in 1966; cf. von Wright, Wittgenstein,trans. J. Schulte, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 29. Brian McGuinness emphasizes how it was the boldness of Hertz (and Boltzmann), as opposed to Mach’s less daring way of thinking — and of presenting his thoughts—that impressed Wittgenstein so deeply, Young Ludwig (London: Duckworth, 1989) 39; whereas Ray Monk writes, “throughout his life, Wittgenstein regarded Hertz’s solution to the problem [of force in Newtonian physics] as a perfect model of how philosophical confusion should be dispelled,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 446. Monk sees Hertzian elements in Wittgenstein’s wartime suggestion to the doctors with whom he worked at Guy’s Hospital that they always write the word “shock” with a line drawn through it to remind themselves of how many different things it was used to refer to and thus of its dubious classificatory value.
G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), I 6.
Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge,trans. W. Woglom and C. Hendel (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1950), 85 et passim. See Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations,trans. C. M. Williams ((New York: Dover, 1959); The Science of Mechanics,trans. T. J. McCormack (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1960); Erkenntnis and Irrtum (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1905); cf. A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 132–45. In Wittgenstein’s Vienna,the opposition between Mach and Hertz is exaggerated; moreover, the crucial role of “appropriateness” in Hertz is all but unrecognized. I am grateful to my Innsbruck student, Walter Klingsbigl, for pointing out that already in The Analysis of Sensations,Mach’s “elements” are only perceptible in terms of a syntactical framework, which confers a coherence upon them. For Mach this means that ordered perception is only possible on the basis of mathematical models (which is precisely what rules out an “impressionist” reading of his notion of the “elements” of experience). What makes Hertz different from Mach really becomes apparent only when we begin to consider the various roles that the “appropriateness” of models plays in his philosophy of science.
Leszek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought,trans. N. Guterman (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 102;120. Mach steadfastly disputed being termed a Positivist. However, the associations he rejected are with nineteenth century Positivism, not “Logical Positivism.” Nineteenth century Positivism was unacceptable to Mach for at least two reasons: its ontological commitment to materialism, and its epistemological commitment to Newtonian mechanics as the ideal to which all rational enterprises should aspire, both of which were under fire within the community of scientific philosophers. See Cassirer, / oc. cit. et passim. As the principal inspiration for the Vienna Circle nobody has a better claim on the term in the twentieth century. In fact the official organ of the group of philosophers who have come to be termed the Vienna Circle was the “Ernst Mach Verein.” Moreover, if by positivism one understands strict rejection of all forms of unobservable entities in explanations of the world order, nobody better deserves the title than Mach, although, given his efforts to distance himself from nineteenth century Positivism, the term “Neo-Positivism” (which was previously often used) is perhaps the most appropriate description of Mach’s phenomenalist position. For a defense of Newton’s Platonizing against Mach’s Positivist critique, see Stephen Toulmin, “Criticism in the History of Science: Newton, Time and Motion,” Philosophical Review LXVIII (1959): 1–29, 203–227.
A sign or representamen is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity“ C. S. Peirce, ”Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,“ Philosophical Writings of Peirce,ed. J. Buehler (New York: Dover, 1955), 99. It follows from this definition that we never know the meaning of a sign till we understand it in the sense of the person or persons for whom it functions as a sign.
Robert S. Cohen, “Hertz’s Philosophy of Science: An Introductory Essay” in Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form,trans. D. E. Jones and J. T. Walley (New York: Dover, 1956), section 4.
I have benefited from conversation with Kelley Hamilton on Hertz generally and particularly on the question of how successful Hertz’s program for axiomatizing mechanics really is.
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu jener künftigen Metaphysik (Werke,3 Vols.; Berlin: Knauer, n.d.), II, 353.
William Shakespeare, King Lear,I, 4, 88. Cf. Baker and Hacker, op. cit.,17.
On problems surrounding the notion of “influence” as they bear upon Wittgenstein, see my “Wie hat Schopenhauer Wittgenstein beeinflußt?,” Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, 73 (1992): 75–76.
On Wittgenstein’s relationship to Freud, see Brian McGuinness’s excellent “Freud and Wittgenstein,” Wittgenstein and His Times,ed. B. F. McGuinness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27–43. 26 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Frühversion 1937–1938,eds. G.H. von Wright and H. Nyman (Helsinki: privately printed, 1979); I, 106.
Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 ), 33.
Frege to Wittgenstein, 30.X.19, “Gottlob Frege: Briefe an Ludwig Wittgenstein,” eds., Allan Janik and C.P. Berger, Grazer Philosophische Studien,Vol. 33/34 (1989), 3–33.
See John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy ( London: Duckworth, 1957 ), 154.
In a sense the difference between Wittgenstein and Frege with respect to clarity could be formulated as a difference of opinion with respect to value axiomatization as an aspect of the permissibility or appropriateness of a theory. In any case both of them could have appealed to aspects of Hertz in defending their particular notions of clarity. However, “philosophical thinking began for him with `painful contradictions’ (and not with the Russellian [and Fregean] desire for certain knowledge,” Ray Monk, op. cit., 26. Moreover, it is altogether too little recognized that the truth table method of showing the distinction between empirical propositions and tautologies is for Wittgenstein simply a way of getting clear about things that we already know in practice, i.e., with respect to things that “show themselves” in practice: in theTractatus, he emphasizes that the mark of a tautology is that you can do anything with it in reasoning, nothing with a contradiction. Everybody knows this. The problem is that we cannot always distinguish between the different types of propositions. Thus the value of the truth table method of representing them, T, 6. 1262.
Frege to Wittgenstein, 16.IX, 19.
Kenny, Wittgenstein,42.
For the similarities between Wittgenstein’s mature concept of philosophy and R. G. Collingwood’s view of metaphysics see my Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), xiii et passim.
On Heidegger see A. Janik, “Carl Dallago and Martin Heidegger: Über Anfang and Ende des Brenner,” Untersuchungen zum Brenner: Festschrift fir Ignaz Zangerle, W. Methlagl, E. Sauennannn and S. P. Scheichl, eds., (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1981 ), 28–29.
Alois Pichler, “Wittgensteins spätere Manuskripte: einige Bemerkungen zu Stil and Schreiben,” Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Archiv 12 (1993), 8–26.
Jörg Zimmermann has brilliantly explored the hermeneutic moment in Wittgenstein in Wittgensteins sprachphilosophische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1975). The fact that Prof. Zimmermann was long a practicing geologist perhaps accounts for his perspicacity here.
For example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, the most distinguished contemporary hermeneuticist, only reluctantly and very late (thanks to the persuasive efforts of Patrick Heelan) came to see that natural science was relevant to hermeneutics and vice versa. See Gadamer, “Naturwissenschaft and Hermeneutik, ”Filosofi och Kultur 3 ( Lund, Sweden, 1986 ), 39–70.
Maurice O’C. Drury, The Danger of Words (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1973), ix.
K.T. Fann, Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy.
It might be objected that my emphasizing Wittgenstein’s debts to Hertz ignores the role that Boltzmann, the first figure on his list, played in his development. I take it that Wittgenstein would not have had to mention Hertz at all were he only influenced by the (considerable) elements on Boltzmann’s thinking that the latter shared with Hertz. If Wittgenstein found Hertz worth mentioning, then he got something from him that he could not find in Boltzmann himself, namely, the importance of “appropriateness” in philosophical analysis. Boltzmann took Hertz principally as contributing to the logic of science in suggesting a program for mechanics in the distant future. For Boltzmann’s views of Hertz see the essays “On the Development of the Methods of Theoretical Physics in Recent Times,” and “Lectures on the Principles of Mechanics” in Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, trans. P. Foulkes (“The Vienna Circle Collection,” Vol. 5; Dordrecht: Reidel, 1947 ), 77–100, 223–254.
See Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?,ed. Peter Winch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) for a provocative exploration of the importance of Wittgenstein’s “religious point of view” for his philoso-phizing.
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Janik, A. (2002). Wittgenstein, Hertz, and Hermeneutics. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_7
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