Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 1 Karsten Harries Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy Fall Semester 2014 Yale University Copyright Karsten Harries Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 2 Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Cartesian Method 14 3. Ontological Implications 27 4. The Adequacy of Pictures 39 5. Two Conflicting Interpretations of Language in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 50 6. Truth and Transcendence 59 7. Heidegger’s Logical Beginnings 69 8. Nihilism and Mysticism 80 9. The Shipwreck of Philosophy 94 10. Legitimacy and Limits of Scientific Language 103 11. Two Conflicting Interpretations of Language in Wittgenstein’s Investigations 114 12. Ordinary Language as Ground 128 13. No Place for Freedom 138 14. Language and Fundamental Ontology 145 15. Discourse and Language 153 16. Idle Talk 163 17. Language and Authenticity 176 18. Poetry 190 19. The Ontological Difference and the Holy 199 20. Poetry and Truth 209 21. Is There a Measure on Earth? 218 22. Hölderlin, Patmos 229 Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 3 23. Heidegger and Hölderlin 247 24. Poetry and Community 256 25. Poetry and Metaphysics 265 26. Conclusion 273 Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 4 1. Introduction1 1 In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein remarks that philosophical problems: have the form “I don 't know my way about.”2 Of course, not all problems having this form are therefore philosophical: e.g., to have lost one's way in some strange city hardly suffices to make one a philosopher. But why not? Is it perhaps because in such cases our disorientation is only superficial? In a deeper sense we still know our place and what to do. Thus we could ask someone for help or look for a map. The problem poses itself against a background of unquestioned ways of doing things, on which we can fall back in our attempt to discover where we are and where we should go. Philosophical problems have no such background. They emerge only where human beings have begun to question the entire place assigned to them by nature, society, and history, and, searching for firmer ground, demand that his place be more securely established. The fundamental question of philosophy is “where is man's proper place?” and philosophy comes to an end when this question no longer is raised, either because man has become secure in knowledge or faith or because he has found it a treacherous question to which there is no answer. If it is a desire for security that leads human beings to philosophy that same desire can also lead them to forsake it. In dread of its restless questioning, man may ask to be delivered of philosophy and of the threat it poses to the security offered by what is generally accepted. Philosophy is then asked to reform and serve the established —some ideology or faith, science, or the reigning common sense for example — or, unable to perform such service, to criticize and finally destroy itself. Such doubts concerning philosophy are part of recent philosophizing. They have found expression in recurring attempts to move beyond what philosophy has been. Of 1 See Karsten Harries, "Wittgenstein and Heidegger: The Relationship of the Philosopher to Language," The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 2, no. 4, 1968, pp. 281-291. 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations [abbreviated PI], trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1959) §123. Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 5 these Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's have been the most significant. Both have provided interpretations of language that call philosophy in the traditional sense into question. In this course I shall examine and criticize certain theses fundamental to these interpretations in an attempt to show that philosophy, understood as the search for man's pIace, is both possible and necessary. 2 But why try to cover both Heidegger and Wittgenstein in one course? Do they not have their place in very different philosophical corners? What separates these two thinkers, often thought to have been the two most influential philosophers of the 20th century, is indeed more readily apparent than what unites them. ''What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence," says Wittgenstein in the preface to the Tractatus.3 Such clarity is hardly what one associates with Heidegger’s writings. And although Wittgenstein was to abandon the position of the Tractatus, there still seems to be an almost insuperable gap separating the Investigations, with their emphasis on "our language" as the ground to which he bid philosophers return, from the dark sayings of the later Heidegger. The shared presuppositions that are necessary if there is to be a genuine conversation appear to be lacking. And yet there is much they share and in the past few decades there has been increasing discussion of what joins these two philosophers. I am thinking especially of philosophers like Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, where it is worth noting that both have their places on the fringes of today’s philosophical establishment and are more likely to be read in literature departments than in departments of philosophy. But what joins Heidegger and Wittgenstein is indeed apparent: in their very different ways, both have contributed decisively to the linguistic turn — the title of a collection of essays edited by Richard Rorty — that has shaped modern philosophy. Both were convinced that language mediates our access to reality. Heidegger thus was to call language “the 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1922) Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 6 house of being,”4 a metaphor to which I shall have to return. Careful attention to language thus would seem to be essential to philosophy. But language is an elusive phenomenon. Where should we look to get at what matters here? Is it logic that holds the key, as the young Wittgenstein and the young Heidegger both thought? Is it ordinary language, as Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations insist — and, as we shall see, Heidegger‘s position in Being and Time is not so very different? Or is it poetry, as Heidegger later came to think? Heidegger’s poetic thinking, to be sure, would appear to be representative of a kind of thinking with which Wittgenstein had no patience. In the end the paths marked out by these two thinkers would thus seem to diverge radically. And those who follow one or the other of these paths tend to publish in different journals, read different books, speak different languages. Those unfortunate enough to lose their way and to end up in the wrong camp may find it difficult to understand the curious language-games people there are playing. All the more reason for those who refuse to accept the division of philosophy into these different camps to consider the common origin of Wittgenstein's and Heidegger's thought. That this common origin has received insufficient attention is hardly an accident; both thinkers have invited such disregard of the past. This is certainly true of Wittgenstein: in the preface to the Tractatus he says explicitly that it is a matter of indifference to him whether the thoughts he is presenting were thought by some other thinker before him and suggests that the problems that have figured in traditional philosophy rest on a misuse of language. In the Investigations he suggests that these problems are generated by an idling of language. One can point to such passages to present Wittgenstein as an anti-philosopher who has surpassed or undercut the philosophy of the past by showing that the puzzles that occupied it can be made to disappear by "bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."5 Heidegger, too, speaks of the end of traditional metaphysics; his own thinking is an attempt to step back to a more fundamental plane. This, it has been argued, makes it impossible to compare Heidegger to the philosophers of the past. His thinking is 4 Martin Heidegger, Brief über den Humanisnus (Frankfiurt am Main: Klostermann, 1949), Wegmarken (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1967), p. 164. (GA 8) 5 Investigations §116. Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Future of Philosophy 7 fundamental and original in a way that forbids all such comparisons.6 But if the work of the mature Heidegger and of the Wittgenstein of the Investigations does constitute a break with traditional, especially with Cartesian philosophy, as an effort to overcome that tradition, it retains its roots in it. An attempt to relate and evaluate Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's thought can be made by appealing to this common origin. This is made easier by the fact that both have written works that are still very much part of the Cartesian tradition, so that their break with it is at the same time also a break with an earlier phase of their own thinking. Thus Wittgenstein came to criticize the Tractatus, while Heidegger abandoned the views of his dissertation, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus,7 and of his Habilitationsschrift, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus.8 2 Modern philosophy was given its direction by Descartes' method. But not just modern philosophy, modern science, and that is to say our technology, and that is to say, our modern world. To fully understand the nature of Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's move beyond this conception of philosophy it is necessary to see what is implied by Cartesian method — the first meetings of this course will be devoted to it. Of special interest here are the often neglected consequences that Descartes' method has for value theory.