On Wanting to Compare Wittgenstein and Zen

Abstract

In his paper on ‘Wittgenstein and Zen’,¹ Professor Canfield argues that ‘For both Wittgenstein and Zen, language and understanding do not require thought. For Wittgenstein, rather, language and understanding are grounded in what he calls “practice”. Wittgenstein’s idea of a practice overlaps with the Zen idea of what shall be called here “just doing” something; that is doing something with a mind free of ideas or concepts’ (p. 383). In discussing the sense in which language does not require thought, Canfield wishes to combat the compelling picture that language conveys thoughts which are logically and temporally prior to it; thoughts without which there could be no such thing as language. In opposition to such a picture Canfield expounds Wittgenstein’s view thus:

To understand a concept is to be able to use the corresponding word or words in their language game, or to be able to play the language game (or one of the language games) in which a word expressing the concept has a home. Thus, mastery of a concept consists not in having some idea or other, but in having a certain skill: namely being able to participate, by means of ‘just doing’ in a certain pattern of interaction. This just doing will consist in using the word in the language game to do a certain job, namely that job which it is the word’s role in the language game to do. In this sense of ‘concept’, the word is robbed of any mental attributes; in this sense to have a concept is not to have some particular idea’ (p. 401).