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Later Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophical Therapy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2014

Dale Jacquette
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Abstract

The object of this essay is to discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks in Philosophical Investigations and elsewhere in the posthumously published writings concerning the role of therapy in relation to philosophy. Wittgenstein's reflections seem to suggest that there is a kind of philosophy or mode of investigation targeting the philosophical grammar of language uses that gratuitously give rise to philosophical problems, and produce in many thinkers philosophical anxieties for which the proper therapy is intended to offer relief. Two possible objectives of later Wittgensteinian therapy are proposed, for subjective psychological versus objective semantic symptoms of ailments that a therapy might address for the sake of relieving philosophical anxieties. The psychological in its most plausible form is rejected, leaving only the semantic. Semantic therapy in the sense defined and developed is more general and long-lasting, and more in the spirit of Wittgenstein's project on a variety of levels. A semantic approach treats language rather than the thinking, language-using subject as the patient needing therapy, and directs its attention to the treatment of problems in language and the conceptual framework a language game use expresses in its philosophical grammar, rather than to soothing unhappy or socially ill-adjusted individual psychologies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 251 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2014 

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References

1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Edition, translated by Anscombe, G.E.M. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1989)Google Scholar (all references to Wittgenstein's text in the notes below are abbreviated as PI, to avoid confusion with the eponymous journal).

2 See Hallett, Garth, A Companion to Wittgesntein's Philosophical Investigations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 9–11Google Scholar; 233; 335–336. For detailed notes on the meaning of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations §133.

3 Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript: TS213, edited and translated by Luckhardt, C.G. and Aue, M.A.E. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2005)Google Scholar, 421 (marginal manuscript page reference).

4 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), revised edition, edited by von Wright, G.H., with the assistance of Heikki Nyman, translated by Winch, Peter (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 1998)Google Scholar, 50.

5 See Crittenden, Charles, ‘Wittgenstein on Philosophical Therapy and Understanding’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 1970, 10: 20–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brand, Roy, ‘Philosophical Therapy: Wittgenstein and Freud’, International Studies in Philosophy, 2000, 32: 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gefwert, Christopher, Wittgenstein on Thought, Language and Philosophy: From Theory to Therapy (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003)Google Scholar. Hagberg, Garry, ‘On Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing’ (Symposium: Wittgenstein and Literary Aesthetics), Philosophy and Literature, 2003, 27: 196–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hutchinson, Phil, ‘What's the Point of Elucidation?’, Metaphilosophy, 2007, 38: 691–713CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Crippen, Matthew, ‘The Totalitarianism of Therapeutic Philosophy: Reading Wittgenstein Through Critical Theory’, Essays in Philosophy, 2007, 8: 1–24Google Scholar. Harré, Rom, ‘Grammatical Therapy and the Third Wittgenstein’, Metaphilosophy, 2008, 39: 484–491CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Wittgenstein confided to M. O'C. Drury: ‘You know I said I can stop doing philosophy when I like. That is a lie! I can't’. Drury, M. O'C in ‘Conversations With Wittgenstein’, Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rhees, Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984)Google Scholar, 219, note 7.

7 Glock, Hans-Johann, ‘Philosophical Investigations Section 128: Theses in Philosophy and Undogmatic Procedure’, in Arrington, Robert and Glock, (eds), Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Text and Context (London: Routledge, 1991), 69–88Google Scholar. Genova, Judith, Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar, especially pages xiii–xvii; 1–6. Winnewski, J. Jeremy, ‘Five Forms of Philosophical Therapy’, Philosophy Today, 2003, 47: 53–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Plant, Bob, ‘The End(s) of Philosophy: Rhetoric, Therapy and Wittgenstein's Pyrrhonism’, Philosophical Investigations, 2004, 27: 222–257CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 I discuss these topics at greater length in Jacquette, Dale, Wittgenstein's Thought in Transition (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1998), 134–159Google Scholar.

9 See Jacquette, , ‘Wittgenstein as Trans-Analytic-Continental Philosopher’, Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, edited by Williams, James, Reynolds, Jack, Chase, James, and Mares, Edwin (London: Continuum Books, 2010), 157–172Google Scholar. Also my review of Alice Crary (ed.) Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (electronic format), http://ndpr.nd.edu/ review.cfm?id = 11863; 2007.12.05.

10 Here I have in mind especially Fischer, Eugen, Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy: Outline of a Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar, especially pages 256–257. See page 257: ‘Unwarranted but distressing or otherwise disabling emotions are constitutive of emotional problems…In other words, Wittgenstein's chief goal is the therapeutic aim of solving emotional problems.’ Fischer represents the psychological interpretation of the later Wittgenstein's concept of philosophical therapy to which I am generally opposed.

11 Drury, M. O'C in ‘Conversations With Wittgenstein’, Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rhees, Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press)Google Scholar, 117.

12 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, edited by Ogden, C.K. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1922), 3.328Google Scholar; 5.47321.

13 I have been most encouraged in this reading of the later Wittgenstein by Hacker, P.M.S., Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, especially pages 146–214. Also Garver, Newton, This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court, 1994)Google Scholar, especially pages 149–268.

14 A version of this essay was presented as an invited contribution at the World Congress of Philosophy (FISP), Special Round Table Session on Wittgenstein: Therapy or Post-Therapy?, British Wittgenstein Society, Athens, Greece, 4–10 August 2013, under the title, ‘Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Anti-Philosophy’. I am grateful to participants at the session for valuable informed discussion.