It is always sad to see a blog where the blogger has run out of steam and this may well be what this site looks like (or even is!?). The truth of the matter is that this site signalled my wish to get back to thinking and writing about things and that has not changed even if my productivity has fallen to zero. In fact, as may have been obvious, I have become very interested in psycho-analysis and I hope that at some point I will get round to writing a good book on Wittgenstein and Freud. There is certainly a lot to be said there, since a lot of what Freud writes is scarily bad from a Wittgensteinian point of view and yet he was very clearly onto something. It would be nice to show Freud fans that Wittgenstein can bring some useful clarity and to show Wittgenstein fans that psychoanalysis is not just an “abominable mess”. Anyway, in the meantime I do not have the time and energy to go back to Wittgenstein in the way I had hoped, so I fear that this post may be it for some time (or even indefinitely). However, hopefully that won’t mean that I have given up thinking about things. And one day if my brain has not gone soggy, I hope I will have something to share 
Apology for Interrupted Service
Who Knows my Unconscious Thoughts?
Before Freud, the idea of unconscious thoughts and feelings would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but today such ideas have permeated deep into our culture. The games we play with these concepts, however, are far from clear. If I do not know my unconscious thoughts, who does and how do I find out what they are? If my unconscious does all sorts of thinking I am unaware of, is it possible that it has worked out a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture or a sure-fire way of making money on the stock-market? Probably not, but who is to say?
From a Wittgensteinian point of view, the idea of the unconscious may seem particularly paradoxical, since Wittgenstein spent a lot of time emphasising the special role we assign to the subject’s sincere utterances about his (or her) inner world. The subject is not privileged because he is the only one who can see (and describe) that inner world; rather he is privileged because his utterances express that world. They are what justifies our calling those thoughts and feelings his. If you ask me whether I think Wittgenstein was a great philosopher and I sincerely tell you that I think he was, there is no scope in our normal language-game for you telling me that actually I am wrong and what I really think about him was that he was a terrible philosopher. So far, so simple.
But we do play more complicated games. Lying is not really one of them. If I tell you that Wittgenstein was a terrible philosopher because I think this will impress you, there is nothing particularly complicated about this. My utterance is insincere – I am lying and I know it! What is more complicated, however, are situations where we say that someone is deceiving himself. Imagine, for example, that I tell you how much I love my wife’s cooking and yet you notice that I seem to spent all my time minimising the number of times I eat at home, offering to do the cooking myself, not managing to finish what is on my plate because I unfortunately over-ate at work etc. You may conclude that actually my thoughts about my wife’s cooking are not in fact what I claim them to be.
Now perhaps I know this in which case my utterances are polite or diplomatic lies, but let’s imagine that when you confront me, I am genuinely bewildered by your statements and sincerely assure you that you are wrong and that I do indeed love my wife’s cooking. At this point, you will have to decide what you think, but if the other evidence is sufficiently strong, you may persist in thinking that actually I don’t really like my wife’s cooking. Indeed, in our post-Freud world you might even start wondering whether my desperate self-deception in relation to my views on my wife’s cooking is not a reflection of a deep insecurity in my feelings about my wife.
So what has happened to the link between my utterances and my thoughts? Well, you are not denying that link altogether – what you are suggesting is that if I was not blinded by my love for my wife (or perhaps insecure about my love for my wife), then I would be able to recognise that you are correct and that in truth I do not like her cooking. So “ultimately” the correctness of your view would be shown by my agreement. But this “ultimately” is a little bit confusing, for it points to a conceptual or grammatical link rather than something that will always eventually happen. Suppose I divorce my wife and accept that I never really loved her. Presumably you will now expect me to be able to admit to myself (and to you) that I never really liked her cooking. If I don’t admit this, but on the contrary maintain that her cookery was actually one of the few things about her that I really did like, then you may change your view about what I really thought of her cookery. Or you may not – and just conclude that when things get personal, people do and say the strangest things!
So what should we make of all of this? Well, it illustrates the obvious point that when we interact with people we are confronted with what they say and what they do and typically we expect what they say to give us the key to what they do. This is what treating them as conscious agents is all about. But recognising this point does not mean we have to adopt a picture of ourselves (and of others) as simple beings, fully as it were transparent to ourselves. It didn’t take Freud to tell us that we are complex beings, but his work has massively boosted awareness of our own complexity and invited us to play games where we take more complicated relationships to ourselves (or which comes to the same thing use more complicated pictures of our selves) and to others. The permutations of these new games are potentially endless, but if they are to connect up with our usual language games they must at some point or in some way come back to the subject – with the correctness of the account of his inner world lying in his “ultimate” endorsement that it is correct. Otherwise one does indeed end up with a split subject – a person who sometimes acts and can give a uniquely insightful account of those actions, and sometimes not (“it’s as if some of my actions are done by someone else”).
In his lectures on Aesthetics, Wittgenstein gives a simple but interesting example. He imagines that he and Taylor (one of his students) were walking along the river when Taylor stretches out his hand and pushes Wittgenstein into the river. “When I ask why he did this, he says: “I was pointing out something to you”, whereas the psycho-analyst says that Taylor subconsciously hated me” (L&C pg22). So we have two very different explanations and Wittgenstein suggests that they might both be correct. This may seem a surprisingly conclusion, but let’s explore it. Can both explanations be right? Well, in terms of our normal language game we might well conclude that Taylor did not deliberately push Wittgenstein into the river. He seems upset and embarrassed about what happened, but he does not seem guilty; and when he protests his innocence, there is no hint of insincerity. There is a possibility of error (of his being an expert liar) as there always is, but even if Wittgenstein had died in the river, it is pretty clear that no court in the world would do anything but acquit Taylor.
But that need not be the end of the matter. Suppose when we examined Taylor’s recent past we find lots of “accidents”, all with a common theme. Wasn’t Taylor the one who made that embarrassing typo in a recent article and referred to “Professor Twittgenstein”? Six months ago didn’t he accidently ride his bike into a small, ageing visiting academic from Hungary? If we did find incidents like this, we might well start to think that Taylor harboured unconscious feelings of hostility to Wittgenstein (or to foreigners or whatever). The exact nature of these incidents (details about what happened and Taylor’s demeanour and reactions) would determine whether they led us to call into question Taylor’s sincerity in relation to the river incident or to see him as influenced by repressed feelings in his unconscious, but it is certainly entirely possible that we will conclude both that Taylor did not deliberately push Wittgenstein into the river and that the incident was not simply an accident but was caused by hostile feelings that Taylor may genuinely be unaware of.
At this point it is interesting to look at things from Taylor’s perspective. We can imagine various different scenarios. He might, when confronted with evidence of his unconscious feelings, agree that he has always had somewhat ambiguous feelings about Wittgenstein and that he has never really wanted to recognise his feelings of envy and irritation. Or he might reject the evidence and insist that all his feelings towards Wittgenstein are positive. Well, depending on the evidence, perhaps we will believe him, perhaps we won’t. Perhaps we will think: he needs 10 years of analysis and then he might finally be able to face up to the difficult feelings Wittgenstein stirrs up in him. But there are also quite other conclusions we could draw – maybe we will say he is ill and give him drugs to help him become normal or in some cultures he might be seen as possessed and the answer seen as exorcism.
Even for Taylor there are more options than those we have already mentioned – he might, for example, sincerely maintain that he has no hostile feelings towards Wittgenstein and yet still make a mental note that it is probably not a good idea for him and Wittgenstein to go cliff walking together. Would this be a step towards recognising his unconscious feelings or is he simply worried that he might not always be fully in control of his actions? Well, we can ask him or maybe time will tell. An interesting issue here is that we seem both to make a judgement within a language-game (he is lying vs he is telling truth) and to decide which language-games we think are appropriate to apply (he has repressed feelings of hostility vs he is possessed vs it was an accident). In any event, we can make a judgement about what we think is going on here and maybe subsequent evidence (his actions and/or his words) will reinforce our view or maybe it will lead us to change it.
What Wittgenstein disliked in Freud
Wittgenstein was interested in Freud and thought he had something to say, but he also warned about his approach, indeed, he suggested that it was a way of thinking that needed to be combatted. So what was it that he didn’t like?
One thing Wittgenstein disliked is the presentation of psycho-analysis as a science. Wittgenstein was not anti-science, but he thought the phenomenal success of this type of thinking created huge risks that we would want to take the same approach in areas where it is was less appropriate, and the work of Freud would seem to be a case in point. Furthermore, a belief in science is often linked to an idea of progress (one day science will be able to explain everything) and a high-handed dismissal of non-scientifically-based views - two attitudes which Wittgenstein had little sympathy for.
These points sound like an emotional rather than an intellectual response to Freud, so what substantive issues did Wittgenstein have with Freud’s work? Well, one obvious point is that, although Freud takes the natural science as a model, he does not actually engage in experiments in the way that natural scientists do. He has theories and his work with patients in a sense gives him “data”, but it is all clearly very different from the way a physicist or even a medical researcher operates. Another point Wittgenstein draws attention to is the science-influenced assumption that things like dreams and jokes etc will have one cause. By contrast, Wittgenstein was keen to emphasise that such concepts tend to bring together a group of related phenomena and hence were likely to have multiple explanations. “It is probably that there are many different sorts of dreams, and that there is no single explanation for all of them. Just as there are many different sorts of jokes. Or just as there are many different sorts of language” (L&C pg48).
Developing this point, consider Freud’s claim that all dreams are wish fulfilments. It is pretty clear that this is not an empirical discovery. Freud did not look at millions of dreams, dreamt by a wide range of people of different ages and with different cultural backgrounds, occurring in all sorts of different human situations. Rather on the basis of a very limited sample, he made a universal claim. The form of his claim (“All dreams are …”) suggests that it is definitional. Effectively, Freud is defining a new kind of activity (psycho-analysis) and saying that within that activity: “to be a candidate for correctness, a dream interpretation must show how the dream was fulfilling a wish of the dreamer”. To put it another way, effectively he is saying: “dreams can be helpful in working with a patient if we use them to help the patient understand what his/her unconscious wishes are”.
If at this point someone objects: “but surely the real issue is whether a wish really did or did not cause the dream?”, then it is hard to know how to respond, since the content of the question is not as clear as it might seem. What do we actually mean by “cause” in this context and how do we test one causal hypothesis against another? As mentioned earlier, it does not seem to be a matter of experiment. Freud suggests that our unconscious wishes cause our dreams, but there is no indication that he tried a whole list of possible explanations before concluding that this was the right one nor indeed that he ruled out the hypothesis that dreams (or some aspects of them) have as it were non-meaningful (as opposed to meaningful) causes. None of these points implies a rejection of what Freud was trying to do – they simply suggest that he was confused insofar as he treated his activities as similar to those of a natural scientist and assumed that applying the concept of causation can be applied in these new areas unproblematically.
Another point Wittgenstein draws attention to is the attractiveness of Freud’s explanation. This may seem a slightly strange observation, since Freud often stresses the resistance to his explanations, but the point is that, unlike the explanations of natural science, Freud’s explanations have an impact quite apart from any evidence for or against them. “Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some way of the anxiety we felt at birth. He does not establish this idea by reference to evidence – for he could not do so. But it is an idea that has a marked attraction. It has the attraction which mythological explanations have for , explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before” (L&C pg43).
This gets us closer to what Wittgenstein really did not like about Freud’s work, which is his belief that what was really going on was being hidden from people and that the prestige of science was being used to make people accept something that they did not have to accept. For example, Wittgenstein criticises Freud for giving one of his patients a sexual interpretation of her dream that robs it the beauty it had previously had in her eyes; according to Wittgenstein, the patient does not have to accept that the dream was bawdy – why shouldn’t she stick with her original claim that it was beautiful? Wittgenstein actually accuses Freud of cheating his patient here and I think that is an overstatement. It is an understandable response if Freud is seen as saying: “science has demonstrated that as a matter of fact your dream was bawdy even if you thought it was beautiful”, but it is misplaced if Freud is seen as saying: “seeing your dream in this way (or recognising these elements in it) will help you find a better way of living”.
To sum up, Wittgenstein was very interested in what Freud was saying, but he was clear that it was not science and he reacted negatively to what he saw as Freud’s attempts to use the prestige of science to force people to accept a particular approach and theories. In particular, Wittgenstein objected to the idea that the analyst could give the individual the scientific truth about his or her experiences. He saw this as confused and therefore in a sense a deception. I think there are other accounts of what is going on in psycho-analysis that Wittgenstein might have been more open to, but what he saw in Freud was an attempt to impose on patients a way of thinking that was presented as the scientifically-proven truth, and that he certainly did not like.
The Strange Feeling of Being Watched
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was watching you? It’s a feeling that many people talk about and it is seen as as a somewhat strange feeling, since it seems a bit uncanny that somehow we can sense that someone is looking at us. I would imagine that researchers have done experiments to explore this feeling and it would be interesting to know what they have concluded about the correlation between the feeling of being looked at and the fact that the subject was actually being observed. One is tempted to assume (if there is a correlation) that sub-consciously the subject detects the observer, e.g there is a movement on the edge of their visual field or some barely audible noise that suggests to them that someone is near them. And one could test this hypothesis by ensuring that the observer was never in the subject’s visual field and that the two were completely isolated from each in terms of noise etc. So there are all sort of things that one might explore empirically and I imagine somewhere (or probably in several places) this sort of research has been done. [Read more...]
What did Wittgenstein want from philosophy?
Wittgenstein’s philosophy (or rather both of them – that contained in the Tractatus and that contained in his later writings) is unusual in that it does not set out to give answers to any of the great philosophical questions that drive most people to philosophy (including perhaps even Wittgenstein himself). ”So what?”, you might say. Wittgenstein came to see philosophy as involving a lot of conceptual confusion, so he developed a method to help people avoid confusion. In the process philosophy stops being a search for answers and because a matter of becoming more proficient at understanding how our concepts really work. It stops being grand but empty and becomes modest and practical. [Read more...]
Struggling for Certainty
On Certainty is the first Wittgenstein text I read cover to cover – in fact, I seem to remember reading it twice feverishly over one weekend. It’s more a collection of notes than a worked-up text and it is slightly infuriating – you keep thinking he has got the issue sorted and then he starts at it again and the solution goes out of focus. Wittgenstein seems to have had a similar feeling – using a not very politically correct metaphor, he noted: “I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again; now her spectacles, now her keys” (OC para 532). [Read more...]
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