Did Wittgenstein Disagree With Heidegger

Did Wittgenstein Disagree With Heidegger?

Duncan Richter

Review of Contemporary Philosophy

Vol. 6, 2007

If Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most influential analytic philosopher of the last century, and Martin Heidegger the most influential continental philosopher of the last century, then one would think there would be a lot of interest in the relation between the two. There is some such interest, of course, but it is of a curious kind. On the one hand, the old ‘Manichean divide’ thought to exist between the analytic Wittgenstein and the continental Heidegger is still, I think, quite alive.[1] On the other hand, there are those who write as if Wittgenstein and Heidegger were almost the same, whether the emphasis be on their supposed pragmatism or the fact that they were both concerned with a peculiar kind of wonder or something else.[2] It is not my intention to deny such similarities, but to contribute to an investigation into how two thinkers could be thought to be both so different and so alike. It is surely noteworthy that Wittgenstein and Heidegger wrote in very different ways, and about, seemingly, very different things. An obvious task for historians of twentieth century philosophy, and for any contemporary philosopher seeking to bridge the analytic-continental divide, is to investigate why this might be. And yet what Wittgenstein thought of Heidegger, and vice versa, has been little discussed.

My goal in this paper is to look at what Wittgenstein said about Heidegger. So little attention has been paid to this subject that his few recorded remarks on Heidegger have only recently all been translated into English.[3] I will examine these remarks closely in what follows. I will also look at some of what has been said about them recently, and finally analyze them in order to draw a conclusion about what Wittgenstein really thought of Heidegger’s work. That conclusion will be that he is in fact much more sympathetic than he has usually been taken to be, but that he is far from accepting Heidegger’s approach to philosophy uncritically.

I want to start, then, with the orthodox view, which treats Wittgenstein’s opinion of Heidegger as essentially the same as Rudolf Carnap’s. So first I will consider not Wittgenstein but Carnap. This will lead to a consideration, in part II, of James Conant’s remarks on Carnap, which will be followed by my looking at P. M. S. Hacker’s criticism of Conant. Here we get what has been for years the standard kind of understanding of Wittgenstein’s relation to Heidegger. Hacker shows just how hard it is to read Wittgenstein as a friend of Heidegger’s. Part IV, though, introduces Gordon Baker’s reading of some of the same remarks that Hacker quotes from, showing that Wittgenstein is not so straightforwardly against Heidegger as Hacker might lead us to believe. After this I turn to Wittgenstein himself. In a nutshell, my conclusion is that Wittgenstein’s remarks are rather ambivalent, and that a properly Wittgensteinian interpretation of Heidegger will depend on a careful reading of Heidegger’s works and (perhaps to a lesser extent—Wittgenstein rarely commented explicitly on such things in his writings about other philosophers) consideration of their historical and cultural context. I cannot offer such a reading here, but for what it is worth, I think it would show that Wittgenstein would not be in complete sympathy with Carnap, even if it is clear that there are some grounds for thinking of Wittgenstein as consciously opposed to Heidegger and his project.

I. Carnap on Heidegger

Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger is one of the most well known works of twentieth century philosophy, but it is worth going over what he says here, since the exact nature of his criticism is a matter of some dispute, as is its degree of similarity with Wittgenstein’s verdict on Heidegger.[4] Carnap accuses Heidegger of issuing pseudo-statements of two kinds:

either they contain a word which is erroneously believed to have meaning, or the constituent words are meaningful, yet are put together in a counter-syntactical way, so that they do not yield a meaningful statement.[5]

With regard to the first kind of pseudo-statement, according to Carnap, Heidegger is guilty of introducing new words, such as “nihilates” (also translated as “nothings” or “noths”), to which he has given no meaning. As for the second kind of pseudo-statement, Heidegger talks about (the) nothing as if it both referred to nothing in a familiar sense and yet also could be regarded as a kind of thing that does things (namely, “nihilates”). A sentence such as “The nothing nihilates” is thus in trouble on more than one count. Carnap does consider the possibility that Heidegger is using words in some new way, one that does make sense after all, despite appearances, but quickly rejects this possibility on the basis of (i) Heidegger’s use of other particular words, i.e. “only” and “nothing else” (as in “What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else”), which Carnap takes to show “unmistakably that the word ‘nothing’ here has the usual meaning,”[6] and (ii) Heidegger’s apparent admission of the “absurd” nature of his claims. By his own account, Heidegger is concerned with what he calls “the question of the nothing”[7] and says explicitly that “With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd.”[8]

It does not follow, however, that what Heidegger says about this question is absurd. Carnap does not claim otherwise, but he still might seem rather too quick to draw his conclusion that Heidegger is guilty of writing nonsense. Carnap goes on, though, to make a quite different objection, which appears to justify his verdict. Metaphysical works such as Heidegger’s, Carnap says, do manage to express their author’s general attitude towards life. The best such expressions are works of art, to which Carnap has no objection:

What is here essential for our consideration is only the fact that art is an adequate, metaphysics an inadequate means for the expression of the basic attitude. Of course, there need be no intrinsic objection to one’s using any means of expression one likes. But in the case of metaphysics we find this situation: through the form of its works it pretends to be something that it is not. The form in question is that of a system of statements which are apparently related as premises and conclusions, that is, in the form of a theory. In this way the fiction of theoretical content is generated, whereas, as we have seen, there is no such content. It is not only the reader, but the metaphysician himself who suffers from the illusion that the metaphysical statements say something, describe states of affairs. The metaphysician believes that he travels in territory in which truth and falsehood are at stake. In reality, however, he has not asserted anything, but only expressed something, like an artist.[9]

Unlike lyrical poets, to whom Carnap has no objection, “the metaphysician supports his statements by arguments, he claims assent to their content, he polemicizes against metaphysicians of divergent persuasion by attempting to refute their assertions in his treatise.”[10] In other words, Carnap’s objection is not to what he takes Heidegger to have done, namely to his having written works with expressive but not cognitive meaning, as he puts it in a 1957 appendix.[11] His objection is to Heidegger’s having (allegedly) done so unwittingly, and in a confusing way.

The identification of particular types of pseudo-statement in Heidegger’s work now seems to be something of a red herring, at least as far as Heidegger in particular is concerned. No doubt nonsense can be generated by inserting ‘words’ with no meaning into otherwise correct sentences, or by inserting words that do have meaning (i.e., roughly, they are in the dictionary) into inappropriate places in sentences. But even Carnap does not take Heidegger to be doing merely this. He is expressing an attitude, creating a kind of artwork. The problem is that it is an “inadequate” form of expression. If this is not to be simply an expression of Carnap’s personal taste, then we must take this inadequacy to be a matter of an alleged confusion in Heidegger’s mind and, consequently, in his readers’ minds. The somewhat deductive form of Heidegger’s prose makes this allegation plausible. Heidegger’s frank reference to absurdity and his apparent rejection of logic (“The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning”[12]) speak against it. The conclusion that suggests itself is that it is no easy matter to know what is the product of confusion. (On the other hand, it is perfectly obvious that Heidegger’s work can produce confusion. Even Carnap’s can do that.)

II. Conant on Carnap on Heidegger

Conant is unsympathetic toward Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger. Carnap presents Heidegger as having made a series of simple mistakes, resulting from, for instance, employing the word “nothing” as a noun.[13] “It is,” Conant says, “hard to credit the hypothesis that the author of this text [i.e. Heidegger] has been led astray by the surface grammar of ordinary language; for precisely what puzzles and challenges us in Heidegger’s assertions is their peculiar surface grammar.”[14] Carnap’s interpretation is weak, according to Conant, because he relies so much on a belief that he knows what Heidegger was thinking, how he meant certain words (such as “the nothing”). This violates the Fregean principles of looking at the context in which words are used in order to determine their meaning, and of not trying to look into the mind of the speaker or author. Of course Carnap does look at the context, but only in the sense of looking at a few nearby words (which he apparently assumes have their usual meaning there) and Heidegger’s confession of absurdity. He needs, as Conant sees it, to look at a wider context. Otherwise it becomes utterly obscure what Heidegger was playing at. If the decisive evidence that what he says is nonsense is his own apparent claim that he is talking nonsense, then we surely need to offer some account of why someone would deliberately and frankly write such stuff.

Conant takes this to be a problem for Carnap:

Carnap wants … to eschew any consideration of the semantics of a metaphysician’s utterances … by identifying metaphysical statements as cases of nonsense solely through an attention to (what he calls) their syntax. He wants to apply his analytical tools directly to the metaphysician’s words considered in isolation from possible contexts of use.[15]

So Carnap criticizes Heidegger on the basis of his belief about what it is that Heidegger confusedly wants to do, and Conant criticizes Carnap on a parallel basis. Both Carnap and Conant might be quite right about what the objects of their criticism want, but it is hard to know. Instead of thinking about what they want to do, it might be better to look at what they do.

Carnap does not simply look at Heidegger’s syntax and conclude that it is incorrect and therefore nonsensical. He looks at the narrow context in which Heidegger’s “nonsense” occurs, and at the wider context of the essay in which it occurs, where he finds Heidegger explicitly agreeing that what he says is absurd and illogical. Nor does he stop there. He diagnoses Heidegger’s problem as one of artistic expression taking place in an inappropriate mode, in the guise of argument. This is not far from what Heidegger himself might have said about his work. He does see it as having an affinity with poetry and he does not see it as consisting of logical arguments in anything like a standard or traditional sense. Conant is probably right that Carnap’s “entire analysis stands under threat of failing to make contact with Heidegger’s text,”[16] but it is not the case that no contact is made. This is not to say that Carnap has fully grasped what Heidegger is up to. To make a judgment about that we would need to look more closely at Heidegger’s work itself, which is a project for another occasion.

Instead, we should now consider what Conant is doing. His essay appears in a volume on Wittgenstein, after all, and his main concern is to contrast what he takes to be Carnap’s approach to metaphysics with that of the early Wittgenstein. On the basis of Wittgenstein’s remark to members of the Vienna Circle (including Carnap) that he can imagine what Heidegger means by “being” and “anxiety”, Conant says that, “Wittgenstein’s response to Heidegger’s remarks—in contrast with Carnap’s—is to attempt to imagine what Heidegger might mean by his words.”[17] Carnap does not begin with such an attempt, or he does not present such an attempt first, but he does end with one. He could hardly be guilty of the psychologism with which Conant charges him if he paid no attention to (what he takes to be) Heidegger’s psychology. The reason why he seems so sure of what Conant takes to be a superficial criticism of Heidegger’s alleged metaphysics based merely on an analysis of syntax appears to be that Carnap thinks he knows what Heidegger is really doing. He thinks he understands Heidegger in the sense that he can perceive that he is confused. If we are guessing at psychology here, it is tempting to see the influence of the early Wittgenstein at work. It was he, after all, who wrote that “the method of formulating [the problems of philosophy] rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language.”[18] If we start from the idea that philosophers are all confused, and that this confusion is caused by misunderstanding our own language, then it will hardly be surprising if we do not work too hard before concluding that someone like Heidegger is indeed talking nonsense.

Quite rightly, Conant argues that this kind of approach is wrong, that Carnap has missed Wittgenstein’s point. But it is not easy to see why this is, to see how Wittgenstein’s method is different from Carnap’s. Indeed, it is not clear how well Wittgenstein himself saw the difference. We shall investigate this below. Before leaving Conant I want just to set out his account of the difference. Imagine that Heidegger intends to write a kind of nonsense (which he accepts is nonsense) that nonetheless has some substance.[19] In that case there will be no point in pointing out to him that his sentences are illogical, that they violate conventional rules for forming German sentences. (So far Carnap might well agree: he is concerned with logical syntax, not the grammar of ordinary language.) Rather, the only way to convert someone from error in such a case is to persuade him that he has not given a determinate meaning to some or all parts of his sentences. He knows they are unconventional, but he insists that they still have a meaning, one of a special kind. Assuming that he is wrong about this, the Wittgensteinian aim is to help him to recognize that he has given, not incompatible meanings, but no (determinate) meanings to some of the forms of words that he uses. As Conant reads him, then, the early Wittgenstein would not mock or even necessarily reject what an alleged metaphysician such as Heidegger says. Instead, he would be sympathetic, try to understand, and try to help him out of (what Wittgenstein would take to be) his confusion. Hacker, as we shall see below, is rather critical of this account of Conant’s.

III. Hacker on Conant

Against Conant’s interpretation of one of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Heidegger, Hacker asserts that:

In fact Wittgenstein tries to imagine what misconceived picture underlies Heidegger’s nonsense, which is, he suggests, the picture of an island of Being surrounded by a sea of Nothing (TS 302, 28), and he does so in the belief that bringing that picture into the light of day will free one from one’s confusions (and here, Wittgenstein observes, there is a non-coincidental analogy with psychoanalysis). Far from being sympathetic to Heidegger, Wittgenstein stigmatizes Heidegger’s remarks on Nothing as a ‘free-wheeling cog in the language machine’. A sentence such as ‘Das Nichts nichtet’, Wittgenstein wrote, is in a certain sense a substitute for an inarticulate sound with which one sometimes feels it necessary to preface philosophy when one’s disquietudes are rooted in unclarities concerning grammatical relations within a given domain of language. The difference between Carnap and Wittgenstein on this issue lies largely in the bedside manner.[20]

This is a dense passage that is worth analyzing. Wittgenstein is interested in the picture underlying Heidegger’s use of words, as we shall see, but he does not actually say that the picture is misconceived. So there is nothing in this point that Conant would disagree with. Secondly, Conant would agree that Wittgenstein wants to free people from confusions. That was the stated aim of all his philosophy, early and late. Thirdly, while it is true that Wittgenstein does characterize Heidegger’s use of language as like a wheel in the language machine, he does not state categorically that it is an idle wheel. He considers the possibility that it might engage (eingreift) with other wheels, and does not rule out this possibility. Hacker prefers to translate “eingreift” as interferes, but even if Wittgenstein meant to imply something harmful, it is worth noting that he did not merely declare that the new wheel must be idle, and worth thinking more about what effects it might have. Fourthly, it is again true that Wittgenstein compares “Das Nichts nichtet” (“The nothing nihilates”) with an inarticulate sound, but he is assuming at this point that it is the result of grammatical confusion. That is to say, if the remark has arisen in that way, then it is a kind of inarticulate sound. But Wittgenstein expresses a certain amount of uncertainty about what is going on when a philosopher makes a remark like this. Fifthly, we might wonder whether the difference between Conant and Hacker is really substantive here. Neither denies that Heidegger is confused or claims that Wittgenstein endorses any such sentiment as “The nothing nihilates.” Both draw attention to the fact that Wittgenstein sees a need for something like psychoanalytic therapy. The difference in the material I have quoted seems to lie solely in what each takes Wittgenstein’s attitude to be: Conant emphasizes his sympathy, Hacker presents him as antipathetic. It is again, alas, a question of attitude, which is hard to know at this distance.

The obvious thing to do now is to turn to what Wittgenstein actually said about Heidegger. Before that, however, I want briefly to remark on the main subject of disagreement between Conant and Hacker as regards Carnap. Carnap says of the sentence, “The Nothing exists only because …” that it must be rejected because it uses the word “nothing” as a noun[21] and also because:

even if it were admissible to introduce ‘nothing’ as a name or description of an entity, still the existence of this entity would be denied in its very definition, whereas [the sentence in question] goes on to affirm its existence. This sentence, therefore, would be contradictory, hence absurd, even if it were not already meaningless.[22]

Conant takes this as evidence of confusion on Carnap’s part, in his conception of nonsense. It can be inferred from these sentences that Carnap believes in substantial nonsense, that is, nonsense that nonetheless has a kind of meaning. Carnap would thus be guilty of just the kind of confusion that Conant appears to believe Heidegger, as he thinks Wittgenstein reads him, suffers from. That is, Carnap erroneously tries to talk about the (self-contradictory) meaning that an illicit sentence would have if it were licit. But the license in question is one to make sense. Conant’s position, and, he thinks, Wittgenstein’s, is that nonsense is nonsense. There is no illicit sense. A sentence is only “illicit” in this sense if it simply does not make sense. We cannot then talk about the sense that this sentence would have if it made sense, any more than I can talk intelligibly about the meaning that “jubjubjub” would have, if only it made sense. Conant surely has a point, but Carnap might have saved himself if only he had inserted an expression such as “as it were” here and there in the more problematic parts of his paper. It seems a little rash simply to assume that he did not hope the reader would provide such caveats. Perhaps Carnap was confused, perhaps he was not.

Hacker is more sympathetic towards him, and quotes another paper of Carnap’s, in which, Conant-like, he says that “the logical analysis of the pretended propositions of metaphysics has shown that they are not propositions at all, but empty word arrays, which … arouse the false appearance of being propositions.”[23] Hacker claims, however, that Conant has presented “no evidence whatsoever” that Carnap was confused, so it is possible that he simply does not see the point that Conant makes.[24] In that case, Hacker would appear to be confused. Conant, after all, has identified a possible kind of confusion, and there is at least prima facie evidence, which he notes, that Carnap might have suffered from it. What someone understands is not always easy to discern, but ethics can be more manifest, and it is to these that we turn next.

IV Baker on Wittgenstein on Heidegger

Baker sees an important ethical difference between Carnap and Wittgenstein with regard to their treatment of Heidegger. As Wittgenstein sees it, Baker writes, “It would be a moral defect in us to make fun of [a] statement along the lines that Carnap makes fun of Heidegger.”[25] This is because Wittgenstein says that his aim is to do justice to any given remark that he treats (um ihm gerecht zu werden).[26] For him, there is a moral aspect to getting things right. There might also be a kind of professional responsibility involved. If philosophy is like psychoanalysis, then perhaps a philosopher should no more mock the ‘patient’ than the analyst should.

Baker notes that Heidegger could hardly have failed to notice how unusual his sentences are. There is no point in telling him this. What needs to be done is working out, or finding out, why he produces such sentences. This is a matter of psychological motivation, and only the ‘patient’ can authoritatively confirm that any hypothesis about his thinking is correct. If we take a certain picture to have been at work in someone’s thinking, then we can only be sure we are right about this if that person acknowledges the fact.[27] In this sense philosophy must be ad hominem. Meta-philosophy might be more general, as might methodological reflections about philosophy, but the practice of Wittgensteinian philosophy itself does seem to require the identification of a particular ‘patient’, with whom one must then converse.

This is a point made by Wittgenstein elsewhere. For instance, in the “Big Typescript” he writes:

One of the most important tasks is to express all false thought processes so true to character that the reader says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly the way I meant it’. To make a tracing of the physiognomy of every error.

Indeed, we can only prove that someone made a mistake if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling.

For only if he acknowledges it as such, is it the correct expression. (Psychoanalysis).[28]

If this is correct, then it is hard to see how Wittgenstein could philosophize about Heidegger without Heidegger being there, or exchanging letters with him, say.[29] A similar, and important, remark from Wittgenstein’s lectures says that:

People who make metaphysical assertions such as ‘Only the present is real’ pretend to make a picture, as opposed to some other picture. I deny that they have done this. But how can I prove it? I cannot say ‘This is not a picture of anything, it is unthinkable’ unless I assume that they and I have the same limitations on picturing. If I indicate a picture which the words suggest and they agree, then I can tell them they are misled, that the imagery in which they move does not lead them to such expressions. It cannot be denied that they have made a picture, but we can say they have been misled. We can say ‘It makes no sense in this system, and I believe this is the system you are using’. If they reply by introducing a new system, then I have to acquiesce.[30]

V. Wittgenstein on Heidegger

We now face a puzzle. If there is the possibility of Wittgenstein’s having to acquiesce with Heidegger’s claims, then how could Wittgenstein have said the things that lead Hacker to read him as differing from Carnap only in his “bedside manner” toward Heidegger? Hacker is not simply inventing material, but it is worth bearing in mind that much of what Wittgenstein has written that has been taken to be about Heidegger might not be. That is to say, the name “Heidegger” does not occur in Wittgenstein’s “Diktat für Schlick” (TS 302), which Hacker quotes. It does not, indeed, occur anywhere in the Nachlass. What Wittgenstein discusses with Schlick is “a sentence like ‘Das Nichts nichtet’.” Of course, it is Heidegger who wrote this sentence in the first place, but Wittgenstein also gives Hans Driesch’s “Ich habe um mein Wissen wissend bewußt etwas” (“I have, knowing of my knowledge, consciousness of something”[31]) as an example of the kind of remark that he is interested in. If these remarks are about Heidegger, then, they are equally about Driesch (or almost equally so—he quotes Heidegger’s sentence twice, Driesch’s only once). In fact they are about philosophy more generally, and we have seen reason already to regard Wittgenstein’s general remarks as being about how philosophy should be done, or what philosophy is, rather than about this or that particular person. Which is perhaps why he does not name Heidegger or Driesch here.

An anecdote from later in Wittgenstein’s life might make this clear. O. K. Bouwsma reports that, when he brought up “cogito ergo sum” for discussion, Wittgenstein said: “Of course, if _____ now told me such a thing, I should say: Rubbish! But the real question is something different. How did Descartes come to do this?”[32] It matters to Wittgenstein, that is to say, who it is that makes a given remark. He will not, at least in 1949, treat a remark in isolation, without considering its author. If the author is Descartes, or, presumably, somebody else of similar stature, then the remark will not be treated as it would be if it were made by some student. We should not simply assume, therefore, that what Wittgenstein says about “someone who says something like das Nichts nichtet” is what he would say about Heidegger in particular.

The one thing that we know he did say about Heidegger himself is this, said at Moritz Schlick’s house on Monday 30^th December 1929:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics--whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that whatever definition of the good may be given--it will always be merely a misunderstanding to say that the essential thing, that what is really meant, corresponds to what is expressed (Moore). But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something. St. Augustine knew that already when he said: What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter![33]

This is an ambiguous remark, but it is at least relatively sympathetic as far as Heidegger goes. What he says about being and anxiety might be mere nonsense, but, if so, his saying it is ethics, something other than the “claptrap about ethics” that we find in analytic philosophers such as G. E. Moore.

Relative sympathy, of course, is not the same thing as sympathy itself. Wittgenstein might seem to call Heidegger’s work nonsense, which would imply both that Wittgenstein thinks he understands Heidegger well enough to make a judgment on his work and that the right judgment is a negative one. How could Wittgenstein be sure he has not missed Heidegger’s point? Especially since, if his interpretation is correct, Heidegger is talking nonsense? Might not some more charitable reading be possible?

If we try to be charitable to Wittgenstein, there are three answers to these questions. The first is that Wittgenstein need not be read as saying that Heidegger is talking nonsense at all when he writes about being and anxiety. Wittgenstein might, rather, be putting in his own words what he takes Heidegger to mean. In other words, the passage can be read as one in which Wittgenstein (at least as he sees it) agrees completely with Heidegger. Heidegger also, after all, objects to claptrap about ethics, cites Augustine and Kierkegaard as influences, and believes in the significance of what we might call running up against the limits of language, or running up against paradox. See, for instance, his sympathetic quotation of Count Yorck, who speaks of paradoxicality as “a mark of truth” because it contains nothing of the common opinion that must be dissolved if individual consciences are to become powerful.[34]

Secondly, it is important that Wittgenstein says only that he can “imagine what Heidegger means.” This implies that he is not at all certain that he has got to the bottom of Heidegger’s project. There is one meaning he can think of that would fit what Heidegger says, though, and it is one that has some appeal for him.

Thirdly, even if Heidegger’s meaning is one that Wittgenstein classifies as nonsense, it is a kind of nonsense that he identifies with ethics. The significance of this point will become clearer if we look first at some of what he says about ethics. On 17^th November of the same year, Wittgenstein gave a lecture on ethics, which he concluded as follows:

My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.[35]

It is fairly clear that, at least in the last two months of 1929, Wittgenstein regarded at least some of Heidegger’s work[36] as being above ridicule, even if he regarded it is as being as hopelessly nonsensical as all attempts to put value into words (which, to repeat the point, he might well not have done). Heidegger might, of course, not welcome the kind of respect that categorizes his work as nonsense. But to be fair to both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, it is worth considering whether a different word might capture Wittgenstein’s meaning more accurately. Wittgenstein associates ethical talk with attempts to use words in an “absolute” sense when they really only have meaning in a “relative” sense. For example, if someone tells me that I ought to play tennis better I might reasonably reply that I do not care to. If someone tells me that I ought to behave better, it would not be reasonable for me to make the same reply. This brings out some of the difference between an activity such as tennis and (what Wittgenstein understands as) ethics. It is not supposed to be optional or a matter of merely hypothetical imperatives. Wanting to tell people what they morally ought to do involves wanting to use the kind of words that a tennis coach uses, words such as “ought”, but in a radically different sense. The result, as Wittgenstein sees it, is nonsense.[37] This is a very similar case to that in connection with which he later introduced the idea of secondary sense.

In Philosophical Investigations he writes:

Given the two ideas ‘fat’ and ‘lean’, would you be rather inclined to say that Wednesday was fat and Tuesday lean, or vice versa? (I incline decisively towards the former.) Now have ‘fat’ and ‘lean’ some different meaning here from their usual one?—They have a different use.—So ought I really to have used different words? Certainly not that.—I want to use these words (with their familiar meanings) here.[38]

A few lines on, still speaking of the same example, he writes that: “Here one might speak of a ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ sense of a word. It is only if the word has the primary sense for you that you use it in the secondary one.” He denies that a secondary sense is a metaphorical one, because there is no other alternative that expresses one’s meaning in these cases. Although the examples are quite different, the reasoning seems to be exactly parallel. Some of what Wittgenstein calls nonsense around the time of the lecture on ethics, he later calls secondary sense. We can then stay true to Wittgenstein’s meaning and be more respectful to Heidegger if we say that his work involves secondary sense rather than nonsense. Whether Heidegger would accept this is another matter, of course, but it at least sounds better than having his work called nonsense. If we read Wittgenstein as agreeing with Heidegger then the question does not even arise, of course. My point is simply that even if Wittgenstein meant that Heidegger’s work is nonsense, this verdict need not be taken as being nearly as bad as it sounds.

From the brief, relatively respectful remark that we have just examined, let us turn now to the other, longer set of remarks that Wittgenstein dictated about philosophers who write like Heidegger. Here he is significantly less respectful, but also more ambivalent and ambiguous.

The following is from the relatively neglected[39] set of remarks recorded by Schlick in the early 1930s when he was taking dictation for a book to be co-written by Wittgenstein and Waismann:

If we want to deal with a proposition such as ‘The nothing noths’ or with the question ‘Which is prior, the nothing or negation’, then to do it justice we ask ourselves: What did the author have in mind with this proposition? Where did he get this proposition from?

Our method resembles psychoanalysis in a certain sense. To use its way of putting things, we could say that a simile at work in the unconscious is made harmless by being articulated. And this comparison with analysis can be developed even further. (And this analogy is certainly no coincidence.)

Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and the nothing, and of the nothing as something primary in contrast to negation, has in mind, I think, a picture of an island of being which is being washed by an infinite ocean of the nothing. Whatever we throw into this ocean will be dissolved in its water and annihilated. But the ocean itself is endlessly restless like the waves on the sea. It exists, it is, and we say: ‘it noths.’ In this sense even rest would be described as an activity. But how is it possible to demonstrate to someone that this simile is actually the correct one? This cannot be shown at all. But if we free him from his confusion then we have accomplished what we wanted to do for him.[40]

Between the paragraphs just quoted and the next, Wittgenstein remarks on how deep linguistic confusions can be, or at least feel. The problem is, he says, that we feel uncomfortable with a certain means of expression suggested by language. The depth of the problem is the depth of the feeling of discomfort. He continues:

If someone says ‘The nothing noths’, then we can say to this, in the style of our way of considering things: Very well, what are we to do with this proposition? That is to say, what follows from it and from what does it follow? From what experiences can we establish it? Or from none at all? What is its role? Is it a proposition of science? And what position does it occupy in the structure of science? That of a foundation-stone on which other building-blocks rest? Or has it the position of an argument? I am ready to go along with anything, but at least I must know this much. I have nothing against your attaching an idle wheel to the mechanism of our language, but I do want to know whether it is idling or with which other wheels it is engaged.[41]

The expressions “Very well” [Gut] and “I am ready to go along with anything” [Ich erkläre mich mit allem einverstanden] are worth noting here, and should not be written off as mere sarcasm, however much knowing irony might accompany them. Before we can sarcastically reject a seemingly metaphysical or nonsensical remark, we need to know whether it is genuinely idle (as we might suspect) or whether it has some other, possibly harmful, effect or purpose. Is the problematic remark, Wittgenstein wants to know, something like a polite formality or empty piety, or does it actually make a practical difference? His suspicion seems to be, as Hacker says, that what we have is a mere decorative flourish, resulting from a lack of clarity about the grammar of a certain domain of language. But he does not insist that this suspicion is correct, and we should recall again that he is discussing people who make Heidegger-like comments, not necessarily Heidegger himself (although it is most plausible that he does mean Heidegger). We should remember, also, that Wittgenstein’s respectful comment, the one quoted by Conant, seems to be a reference to Being and Time, while these dictated remarks refer to a sentence from “What is Metaphysics?”[42] We should not rule out the possibility that Wittgenstein valued the former work more highly than the latter, or that he preferred Heidegger’s remarks about being and anxiety to his pressing on the question “Why is there something and not rather nothing?” (Recall that in the lecture on ethics, Wittgenstein says that the astonishment that anything at all exists cannot be expressed in the form of a question.)

Both the sentence from Heidegger (“The nothing noths”) and the sentence from Driesch that Wittgenstein quotes here are linked by him with the attempt to begin philosophy too early, before the beginning. In Philosophical Remarks he writes about wanting to give the most immediate description imaginable, but asserts that:

Instead of a description, what would then come out would be that inarticulate sound with which many writers would like to begin philosophy. (“I have, knowing of my knowledge, consciousness of something.”)

You simply can’t begin before the beginning.[43]

With this we can compare On Certainty §471: “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.” At least here, Wittgenstein seems to be including himself in the ranks of philosophers who struggle to begin at the right point and not too soon, who struggle to be articulate. This struggle was lifelong for him. See, for instance, this, from the Notebooks 1914-1916: “My difficulty is only an—enormous—difficulty of expression.”[44] A desire to get right to the bottom of things, combined with a certain kind of linguistic confusion, leads philosophers to a peculiar kind of inarticulacy. But, in a sense, Wittgenstein says, the problem is also an aesthetic one, one of style:

We would like to begin ph(ilosophy) with something which should be the foundation of everything to follow, of all the sciences, and yet at the same time it is not supposed to be a ‘foundation’ simply in the sense of the bottom course of bricks in a house. […] This dilemma gives rise to the need to begin philosophy with, so to speak, an inarticulate sound. And a proposition such as ‘The nothing noths’ is in a certain sense a substitute for this sort of inarticulate sound. […] The need to preface our enquiries with such propositions or slogans is in a sense really a requirement of style. In certain periods houses and chests of drawers are bounded with a cornice. Calling attention to boundedness is something desirable. […] At other times there is a need not to emphasize, but rather artificially to conceal boundedness. […] And that is just how it is with this argument: it is a desideratum, e.g., to trace back to a creator the coming into being of the universe even though this in a certain sense explains nothing and merely calls attention to the beginning. (This last reflection is of the type of those made by the architect Loos and is certainly influenced by him.)[45]

The final drawing of a connection between what Wittgenstein is saying about people who talk like Heidegger and remarks by Adolf Loos is interesting. Wittgenstein comments that at certain times there is a desire to punctuate, to emphasize the point where one element ends and another begins, whereas at other times, the felt need is for such things to be unmarked, so that one thing merges or flows into another. While it might be true that fashions in tablecloth design come and go, this observation hardly seems very important. But Wittgenstein compares wanting to emphasize the edge of a cloth by giving it a different color with wanting to attribute the beginning of the world to a creator, even though, he says, this in a certain sense explains nothing and merely emphasizes the beginning. Now Heidegger does not offer this (or any other) kind of argument for the existence of God, but Wittgenstein seems to suspect that people who use the kind of language that he does have exactly the same kind of desire as the desire to emphasize limits like this.[46] It is this remark that he says belongs to the same kind as the things that Loos says.

Wittgenstein does not specify which remarks by Loos he has in mind, but Loos famously associates ornament with crime. “If someone who is tattooed dies at liberty,” he writes, “it means he has died a few years before committing a murder.”[47] Presumably Loos knows that this is an exaggeration, but there is an underlying seriousness to the claim nonetheless. His thesis, which I take to be quite without irony, is that: “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.”[48] Loos makes some utilitarian objections to ornament, for instance that it takes time to produce and costs money to buy, but he also makes the more Wittgensteinian-sounding claim that “ornament is no longer a natural product of our culture, so that it is a phenomenon either of backwardness or degeneration.”[49] Ornament does not express our culture because it is not, as it once was, organically linked with our culture. Hence:

The modern man who holds ornament sacred as a sign of the artistic superabundance of past ages will immediately recognize the tortured, strained, and morbid quality of modern ornaments. No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level.[50]

That Wittgenstein agreed is suggested by his one foray into architecture as well as his reference to Loos in connection with his own criticism of Heidegger. Loos’s audience, he says, is the aristocrat, who is distinguished from the peasant and from the revolutionary. The revolutionary attacks the peasant’s religion and ornament (which are closely linked in Loos’s mind) as nonsense. The aristocrat to whom Loos speaks respects the pious decoration of the peasant, whose embroidery is a genuine part of her culture and an expression, at least sometimes, of her devotion to God. Those whose lives are hard fancify utilitarian objects such as shawls and carpets out of regard for non-utilitarian values. But for the aristocrat, as for the revolutionary, there is no such need.

We have art, which has taken the place of ornament. After the toils and troubles of the day we go to Beethoven or to Tristan. This my shoemaker cannot do. I mustn’t deprive him of his joy, since I have nothing else to put in its place. But anyone who goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down and designs a wallpaper pattern is either a confidence trickster or a degenerate.[51]

The implication of Wittgenstein’s reference to Loos, then, appears to be that people like Heidegger are degenerate, lacking in spiritual strength. Alternatively, of course, they could be confidence tricksters, but there is no suggestion in what Wittgenstein says that he thinks Heidegger is a fraud. Indeed, he emphasizes here and elsewhere how hard it is to avoid the type of pitfall in which Wittgenstein suspects that Heidegger lies. If he is a trickster then he has tricked himself and speaks from sincere error. But what is the nature of this error?

Pace Hacker, Wittgenstein does not say that Heidegger’s picture itself is misconceived. If it is nonsensical then it could hardly be a picture at all, not a coherent one. And if it is a picture, then it can be true or false, a good simile or a bad one, but not otherwise misconceived. Philosophy does not judge pictures, although it might point out that something is a picture. Wittgenstein’s objection to Heidegger is not that there is something wrong with the idea of an island of being[52], and so on, or so I am trying to argue. The problem is that this picture is taken, and presented, as something more than that, as the correct picture.[53]

How serious is this problem? If Wittgenstein is right that Heidegger’s work suffers from this problem, does it follow that his work is nonsense? There appears to be an important difference between making an intelligible analogy that cannot be proved correct, on the one hand, and speaking unintelligibly on the other. Wittgenstein himself might seem to make this point when he writes in Culture and Value that:

I can say: ‘Thank these bees for their honey as though they were kind people who have prepared it for you’; that is intelligible and describes how I should like you to conduct yourself. But I cannot say: ‘Thank them because, look, how kind they are!’ – since the next moment they may sting you.[54]

The “cannot” here is not a bit of advice against imprudently assuming something about bees’ behavior. It is contrasted with what is said to be intelligible. In other words, it is not that bees are in fact not always very nice, but rather that what the second sentence is trying to say, something about absolute kindness perhaps, the kind that is in no way undermined by occasional stinging, does not make sense. There is not an absolute sense of kindness any more than there is one of safety.[55] If we feel as though we know what is meant by a reference to “absolute safety”, for instance, it is perhaps because we are responding to these words in what Wittgenstein later called a secondary sense. The primary sense of the words is so plainly false (we can always imagine harm coming to a seemingly safe person) that it is clearly not the intended meaning. But what is? Secondary uses of words cannot be counted on to be accepted or understood. The person who says “Thank the bees because, look, how kind they are!” has offered a kind of invitation to think about the bees in a certain way. This invitation might be accepted or not, but it cannot be justified by objective facts about the bees. Their supposed kindness is not something we can actually see. So it is not clear what “because” could mean here. “This way of looking at things is right because, look (at things this way)!” is not intelligible.[56]

As poetry or metaphor or secondary use of language or whatever we want to call it, this kind of thing is all right, Wittgenstein seems to think (as does Carnap). It is the attempt at justification that fails, and that reveals confusion in the would-be justifier. The passage about the bees makes this point as Wittgenstein writes that, “Rules of life are dressed up in pictures. And these pictures can only serve to describe what we are to do, not justify it.”[57] This is his primary objection to Heidegger, it seems to me. There is, Wittgenstein suspects, an identifiable picture associated with some of his words, even if not clearly articulated by them. One problem is that it is impossible to demonstrate that this picture is one that we should adopt or accept as true.[58] (Another possible one is that the actual words used do not articulate that picture, or any other, nor do they follow from such words. For this reason, of course, Heidegger could simply deny that the picture of an island of being washed around by nothing applies to his thinking at all.)

It might be objected to this claim that mistaking what is merely one possible view for the absolutely correct view is hardly a symptom of degeneracy, as Wittgenstein’s reference to Loos appears to suggest. But when the view in question is of something taken to be deep or of great value, to think one’s own view to be the only true one is perhaps to be guilty of deep or great arrogance. It is worth remembering here Wittgenstein’s great admiration for Kierkagaard, whom he called “by far the most profound thinker of the [nineteenth] century,”[59] and for Otto Weininger. Kierkegaard is relevant because of his irony and his pronounced sense of the importance of subjectivity and point of view. Weininger’s On Last Things is less well known, and less well understood, but was regarded by Wittgenstein’s sister Hermine as a kind of substitute for Wittgenstein himself. From this work, he is known to have especially admired the essay on animal psychology. What he admired about this particular work we do not know, but it is filled with both the kind of remark that one tends to regard as insightful, needing no proof in order to be believed (such as the Freudian-sounding “Because fear and loathing are identical, the criminal always not only fears but also loathes himself”) and with what looks like utter nonsense, a parody of this kind of insight (“Fear of dogs is a problem; why is there no fear of … the dove?”)[60] The kind of claim that we find in poetry and Freudian psychology, the kind of claim, that is to say, that might well be called true, but for which no mathematical or scientific proof could ever be provided, is treated as if it were part of some theory or sequence of hypotheses. This can hardly have been a mistake on Weininger’s part, as the absurdity of puzzling over, for instance, why people are not afraid of doves is evident enough. If he was not just mad then Weininger seems to have been wanting both to set down his ‘poetic’ insights into the character of various animals (as they exist, as it were, for us) and to mock openly the very idea that he might have any authority on such matters. Joachim Schulte has written perceptively on Weininger’s reveling in irony and paradox, but most readers seem to take him as quite in earnest, and hence both reprehensible (because of his perceived sexism and anti-Semitism) and negligible (because of his perceived stupidity). Of course I cannot claim any authority on how Weininger should be read, any more than he could on how dogs should be ‘read’, or Heidegger could on how Being should be understood. All I can do[61] is quote such sentences as this: “The thought came to me (in the spring of 1902) that the deep-sea must stand in a relationship to crime, and I believe that in general I can still maintain that today”[62] and say that the sense of necessity and the self-importance that apparently motivates the dating of the alleged insight, combined with the surreal absurdity of the relationship described, strike me not only as funny, but as funny enough that the author could not plausibly have meant them wholly seriously.[63] I cannot prove that my reading is correct, and that is Wittgenstein’s point about people who put forward similes about how the world is. Someone so impressed by the “saintly” modesty of Kierkegaard and the self-mockery of Weininger would hardly have been very sympathetic to humorless and self-important claims to deep insight. Heidegger is not humorless, and certainly should not be convicted of being self-important without a much closer investigation into what he writes, but Wittgenstein might have thought that he was humorless or self-important.[64] The tone of his remarks suggests this.

Another concern might be how Wittgenstein could have admired Weininger’s “nonsense” so much but not, apparently, Heidegger’s. This is especially so when we recall that Wittgenstein made a connection between Heidegger and Augustine’s command that we go ahead and talk nonsense. Wittgenstein quoted the same remark from Augustine in conversation with Maurice Drury, giving him what he regarded as the correct translation (“And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee [i.e. God] just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense”) and assuring him that he, Wittgenstein, would not refuse to talk to Drury about God or religion.[65] Eli Friedlander notes this connection and concludes that, in Wittgenstein’s view, “The attempt to avoid nonsense by remaining silent … is swinish behavior.”[66] There might seem to be a dilemma, then, on which we are caught, with swinish silence on one side and degenerate nonsense on the other. But issues of context and audience are important to Wittgenstein. He will not insist on being silent when his friend, whom he knows to be serious, wants to talk to him about religion. This is not the same as a philosopher publishing lengthy works on such subjects. Amid this talk of degeneracy and arrogance, though, we should bear in mind that Wittgenstein does not say that Heidegger is guilty of any such thing. I am merely trying to clarify the kind of moral danger that Wittgenstein appears to have associated with the kind of words that Heidegger uses in “What is Metaphysics?”

Recall the quotation given earlier from Wittgenstein’s lectures, about people who say things like “Only the present is real.” People who make metaphysical assertions, Wittgenstein says there, pretend that they have made one picture as opposed to some other picture, but he denies that they really have.[67] He cannot prove this, however. He cannot prove that the picture is unthinkable or ‘unpicturable.’ What he can do, instead, is to describe a picture that he believes represents what the metaphysician (or suspected metaphysician) has in mind. If she agrees that this is what lay behind her words, then Wittgenstein can proceed to try to show that this image does not lead to the expressions she came out with. Doing this, though, depends on recognizing what system of thought the supposed metaphysician is working with. If she accepts that the Wittgensteinian therapist has it right, then we can all conclude that she was indeed confused. If not, and if she can explain what other system is in play, then the would-be therapist can only acquiesce. Wittgenstein might have his suspicions about what people like Heidegger are up to, then, and he might even be slightly cocky about it, but he cannot be certain until a dialogue has taken place. His respect for Heidegger, expressed in the conversation with Waismann and evident in the combination of these remarks with the conclusion of his lecture on ethics, suggests that he would not have been inclined to dismiss any work of Heidegger’s with mere rhetorical sarcasm. Whatever momentary arrogance there might have been in the remarks that Hacker picks from, then, we should be more prepared than he is to play down the apparent irony and take Wittgenstein’s list of questions about a sentence such as “The nothing noths” at face value. What are we to do with this sentence? What is its role? With what other wheels in the machine of language does it engage?

We should turn next, then, to the context of Heidegger’s words. And that means reading Heidegger’s work for ourselves, making the best sense of it that we can. But that is a job that I cannot do here.[68]

Notes