I am just finishing a talk to give at Heythrop College Research Seminar next Wednesday 25th February (4.30pm) entitled:
Saying and Showing: the Choreography of Psychology and Religious
Understanding
Some of which I include below.
As I was working on it I happened to watch 'The Lavender Hill Mob' again, that great Ealing comedy (incidentally made the year Wittgenstein died, 1951). There is an extraordinary scene in the film where Alec Guinness persuades Stanley Holloway to commit a robbery but doesn't say so at all... the dialogue in itself is rather humdrum, all the work is done through the 'showing' (and brilliant acting of the two). It is a wonderful example of the Wittgensteinian choreography of saying and showing and I hope to show it at the seminar next week... do come along!
You can find a link to the film here:
If you cant come along I hope you enjoy this great film!
best wishes
Peter
1. A Change of Aspect
Wittgenstein’s later thought on the process
of what he would call ‘aspect-seeing’ was particularly stimulated by his prolonged
reflection on Jastrow’s famous ‘Duck-Rabbit’ diagram:
As he lived in virtual isolation at a
farmhouse in Rosro near Connemara, Ireland (having resigned his professorship
in Cambridge and more or less withdrawn from academic life) there are amusing
stories of the great philosopher drawing the diagram in the sand of the
sea-shore and then standing there for hours staring at it - much to the
bemusement of his fellow villagers. In the final remarks on ‘the philosophy of
psychology’ he returns continually to the figure and how an aspect is changed
in our thought and life. What fascinated him was how ‘nothing and yet everything’
is changed with the change of aspect As he wrote in 1948 at Rosro:
What is incomprehensible
is that nothing, and yet everything, has changed, after all. That
is the only way to put it. Surely this way
is wrong: It has not changed in one respect,
but has in another. There would be nothing strange about that. But ‘Nothing has
changed’ means: Although I have no right to change my report about what I saw,
since I see the same things now as before – still, I am incomprehensibly
compelled to report completely different things, one after the other. (RPP2:
474)
As we look at the duck-rabbit, or indeed
other parts of our perception of the world, ‘a new aspect’ dawns - everything
has changed while nothing has changed. In his prolonged reflection on this
phenomenon Wittgenstein is at pains to discount two lines of explanation. The
first is what he calls ‘the psychological’, my second aspect of a
Wittgensteinian psychology that would like psychology to move away from
thinking itself as ‘pseudo-science’:
2. Not a Pseudo Science
Such a view, he explains, would be to ‘seek
causes’ for the change – I would interpret this as perhaps a neurological or
reductionist search for the physical causes of the change - either in the
firings of neurons or some other aspect of brain structure:
Indeed, I confess,
nothing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the
definite opinion that there is no picture/representation in either the
physiological or nervous systems which corresponds to a particular thought, a particular
idea or memory. (LWP1: 504, I have adjusted the translation slightly)
True to his later growing disillusion with
the universalist claims of such ‘scientism’ he declares that such searching for
causes is of no interest to him (LWP 1:434)[1]. For
as he says himself in the Philosophical
Investigations, by ‘giving all these
examples I am not aiming at some kind of completeness, some classification of
psychological concepts’ (PI: 206e).
3. Not Interior
Having resisted the
siren voices of neo-empirical psychology, Wittgenstein then proceeds to turn
his guns on what he sees as the other chief distraction in formulating his
response to the change of aspect – the lure of inwardness. As he warns: ‘Do not
try to analyse the experience in your self’ (PI: 204e/ LWP 1.548)[2].
‘Inner pictures’/ Inneren Bilden are
‘misleading, for this concept uses the ‘outer picture’ as a model’ for ‘the use
of the words for these concepts are no more like one another than the uses of
‘numeral’ and ‘number’. (And if one chose to call numbers ‘ideal numerals’, one
might produce a similar confusion)’ (PI 196e/PU 523).[3] As I
have argued elsewhere (Tyler 2011), I see one of the characteristics of
Wittgenstein’s style is the use of ‘shock tactics’ to force his reader to think
for themselves. As I wrote in The Return
to the Mystical (Tyler 2011), Wittgenstein ‘prods and pokes’ his reader to
allow each of us trapped flies to escape our own personal ‘fly-bottles’.
Typical of these tactics (common with, I have argued, the great writers of
mystical theology such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross) are the use of
irony (in Wittgenstein’s case inherited from his master Søren Kierkegaard), exaggeration, paradox and humour.
Wittgenstein’s later writings are peppered with many examples of all of these
and one of his most startling assertions makes its appearance in his critique
of the inner:
I can know what someone
else is thinking, not what I am thinking.
It is correct to say ‘I
know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking’
(A whole cloud of
philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar).
(PI 222e/ PU565)
[1]
Interestingly this final part is deleted in the published version of the Investigations: ‘Its causes are of
interest to psychologists, not to me’ in LWP becomes ‘Its causes are of
interest to psychologists’ in the final version of PI. Was one of his editors
worried about Wittgenstein’s perceived anti-psychologism here – or that his
method somehow transcends psychology? As no editorial guidance was given for
this decision in 1953 we cannot know.
[2] The
official translation here is ‘Do not try to analyse your own inner experience’.
[3] See also
LWP 2.13e: ‘The aspect seems to belong to the structure of the inner
materialization’.
