To appear in Philosophical Investigations Rhees on the Unity of Language Lars Hertzberg, Åbo Akademi University If someone learns to speak, he does not just learn to make sentences and utter them ... If that were all he ever did, I should not imagine that he could speak, and I should never ask him anything. When he learns to speak, he learns to tell you something; and he tries to. In learning to speak he learns what can be said; he learns – however fumblingly – what it makes sense to say. He gets some sense of what different remarks have to do with one another. That is why he begins to follow a conversation, or to carry on a conversation himself. Or rather: it is misleading to say ‘this is why he does that’, as though we had to do with a condition and what follows from it. For in beginning to carry on a conversation – in trying to tell you something and in trying to understand your answer – he is getting a sense of how different remarks have a bearing on one another. Rhees, “Wittgenstein’s Builders”, Wittgenstein and Possibility of Discourse.1 1. Let me start by saying a few words about Rhees’s place in the history of contemporary philosophy. During his tenure as lecturer at Swansea, from 1940 to 1970, Rush Rhees exerted a profound influence on the philosophers around him. Among these were a group of philosophers who are sometimes referred to as the 1 Edited by D. Z. Phillips, 1st ed., Cambridge University Press, 1988, subsequently referred to as WPD. The quotation is from p. 185. 1 Swansea school, most prominently Peter Winch, Dewi Phillips and Roy Holland, but also to some extent Cora Diamond and David Cockburn. Before coming to Swansea, Rhees was a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cambridge. They became close friends, and Wittgenstein was to appoint Rhees as one of his literary executors. Rhees published very sparingly in his lifetime, and is best known for essays in which he commented on themes in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Because of this he was long regarded as simply an interpreter of Wittgenstein’s work. Rhees’s personal modesty must have contributed to this perception. In fact Rhees was an original thinker in his own right. He was not only an interpreter but, in a sense, also a critic of Wittgenstein. It is true that Wittgenstein’s thought was the fertile ground from which Rhees’s thinking grew, and in fact, calling him a critic of Wittgenstein might easily lead to misunderstanding. Unlike many critics of Wittgenstein he spoke from a high respect for his work, while struggling to make clear what he thought were its limitations. In most other cases, the critique of Wittgenstein has been driven by a desire to counteract his influence in philosophy, on the part of those who have felt it to be of dubious value or detrimental to the discipline. Rhees’s attitude is the opposite of this. He considered Wittgenstein’s influence in philosophy to be a salutary one; at the same time, he thought, it had its limitations, and hence was in need of deepening. Rhees’s main criticism concerned Wittgenstein’s use of the notion of a language-game. In his best-known essay, “Wittgenstein’s Builders”, from which the epigraph of this essay is taken, Rhees discusses Wittgenstein’s comparing of language to a range of games. When Wittgenstein introduces the builders’ game in § 2 of the Philosophical Investigations, this is part of a critique of St Augustine’s account of learning to speak. Augustine argued that a child learns to speak by having physical objects ostensively defined to it. In putting forward the idea of the builders’ game Wittgenstein was making a concession in the direction of those who are inclined to think like Augustine. He is saying, as it were, “Let’s suppose you’re right and all the words of our language do designate physical objects; this is what you’d end up with”. His point is that, to begin with, this dreamed up language is radically 2 impoverished in relation to any actual human language; and apart from that, even a simple sign system such as envisaged by Augustine could not be learnt in the way he described, since the designative role of the words in the builders’ game depended on their being bound up with specific activities which could not have been conveyed through the simple act of pointing to objects as Augustine imagined. Wittgenstein goes on to make two points: on the one hand, he suggests that the builders’ game, i.e. an Augustinian language suitably amended, might be the whole language of a tribe, and on the other hand, he claims that all of human language could be thought of as simply consisting of a range of different language games. Rhees finds these ideas questionable. What he finds missing in the game perspective on language is the way speaking is connected with life.2 Rhees reflected deeply on what is involved in the game metaphor in a way that many other readers of Wittgenstein have not : this primarily concerned the contrast between playing a game and really doing something – really meaning what one says – in a context in which the question of one’s standing behind one’s words arises. In this essay, I shall begin by outlining Rhees’s critique of the language-game metaphor. After that, I shall make an attempt to understand how Rhees thought about the connection between language and life. I will suggest that one can distinguish between what might be called an anthropological and an ethical strand in his thinking, and will raise the question how these are related to one another. Finally, I shall discuss the dialogue in a short story by Ernest Hemingway; I believe it can be taken to illustrate some of the ways in which we may fail to live up to the requirements of a genuine conversation. 2. Consider the landscape into which Wittgenstein introduced the concept of a language game. Starting earlier but culminating around the turn of the previous century, there had been a shift in philosophers’ focus, within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, from thoughts or judgments to sentences or propositions. A basic 2 It might be thought that in fixing onto Wittgenstein’s suggestion that the builders’ game might be a whole language to itself, Rhees is ignoring the strategic role of Wittgenstein’s example. Whether he does so or not, the point he means to be making is independent of what Wittgenstein aims to do in these remarks. 3 assumption was that a judgment could, ideally, be identified by means of the sentence expressing it. In principle, if not always in practice, it was thought, one could determine the logical properties of a judgment by reference to the sentence expressing it. The sense was, as it were, packaged into the sequence of words (sounds or marks). This perspective formed part, say, of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, of Frege’s idea of a Begriffsschrift, etc. This view, too, formed the core of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (either literally or in the form of a parody, depending on one’s reading of that work). This perspective on language offered an excuse for not looking at what speakers are actually doing when they utter words in specific contexts. Thus it encouraged a spirit of apriorism. This was what Wittgenstein was trying to battle. Against the fixation on words and sentences, he introduced the notion that the sense of a linguistic expression depends on its place in a language game. It is misleading to think of the sense as something that could – even ideally – be fixed by reference to the sentence itself, without regard to the wider activity of which uttering it forms a part. Or differently put: it is only when the sentence is being considered as used in a particular context that it can be said to possess a distinct form. (In fact, it could be argued that the contrast between the sentence as a bare range of sounds or markings and the sentence in actual use is itself a spurious one. To be certain I had rendered the words uttered or written by someone correctly I would have to understand what use the speaker or writer was making of them.) Wittgenstein’s aim was to open philosophers’ eyes to alternative possibilities: for one thing, within our language, similar-looking sentences might carry different senses in different contexts of use; accordingly the logical relation between sentences could not be read off from their appearance.3 Furthermore, life- forms could be imagined in which words were used within activities wildly different from ours. The idea of the language game, then, as I see it, was primarily directed at the philosophical inclination to adopt a narrow perspective on linguistic phenomena. 3 In Philosophical Investigations § 117 Wittgenstein speaks of the idea of meaning as “an aura the word brings along with it and retains in every kind of use”. (4th edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2009.) 4 Wittgenstein was exhorting the philosopher to raise his eyes and look around rather than limiting his attention to sentences by themselves. Rhees, in turn, considered this holistic perspective an unqualified advance in our thinking about what it is to speak. The problem, in his view, was that Wittgenstein did not go far enough in his holism. According to Rhees, the fragmentation in the view of language evident in the emphasis on sentences (propositions) was preserved in the idea of language being made up of a range of independent language games.