Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

It’s worth stopping at this point to take stock of some of the major questions that I’ve avoided addressing in the foregoing. Chief among these are:

What is language? and What is meaning?

As a matter of philosophical methodology I prefer to begin with definitions to fundamental questions such as these that I expect will change over the course of my study, as opposed to setting those definitions in stone from the outset. The implied conviction of the latter procedure is that philosophy should begin with certainty and move logically from set premises to justified conclusions. I am convinced that it is preferable to instead develop ideas from positions that seem reasonable at the outset but that you are willing to reexamine and change in accord with the findings of your argument. It is, after all, the fundmental positions that are of most import to philosophy, and if we truly did have the right views of those foundations at the outset and were certain of those views, the logical movement from those views to further conclusions would actually be trivial. The trick in philosophy is reaching the right starting point, and I believe that we can only do so by continually critiquing where we happen to start in order later to begin anew in another, better place.

With that said, I should acknowledge the difficulty with providing even a provisional account of what language is given the variety of uses to which that term is put. There are empirical understanding of language that focus on the actual production of speech, writing, and other signs (roughly what Saussuere called “parole” and what Schatzki calls “sayings”) and also transcendental understandings that highlight language’s structuring of meaning (roughly what Saussuere called “langue”). Chomskian linguistics studies langue as an aspect of individuals, whereas other approaches such as sociolinguistics are more interested in the interpersonal applications of language.

As some sort of pragmatist, I confess my predilection toward a definition of language that begins with the uses to which language users put words, sentences and the like, and that conceives langue as an abstraction from that prior practice. I make this confession not so that I may atone for it or even in order to ask forgiveness, but to mark my inclinations so that they may more easily be countered later as necessary. For now, though, I will stand by my Wittgensteinian understanding of language as a set of resources (akin to tools in a toolbox) that those who know how to use them can employ in order to perform a number of tasks, including in particular communicative tasks. The various other major accounts of language are all, I believe, ultimately consistent with this perspective, though they will not share its emphases.

As for meaning, that is an arguably even trickier concept to analyze adequately. To keep things simple here I will simply say that by “meaning” I really mean neither of Frege’s terms, neither Sinn (sense) nor Bedeutung (reference), though Sinn is closer. In order to make sense of primal praxis I need a conception of meaning that fits with the non-thematic, concernful coping that Heidegger says underlies the sort of conscious awareness Husserl was concerned with and that has an as yet undetermined relationship with the detached word-world linkages that occupied Frege. This would have to be ready-to-hand meaning, the sort expressed in my taking a dish out of the dishwasher and putting it in the cupboard rather than in the trash or on the floor.

There’s danger here, of course, of serious question begging, but that doesn’t strike me as a problem so long as I’m clear about that very fact and am inclined to keep this presupposition about meaning in front of me as we go forward. If this definition of meaning proves untenable or highly questionable given our further investigations, everything I’ve said here may need to be revised.

So much for primal praxis and the “primitive” language embedded within it. Now we move on to look at two other philosophical traditions for comparison: the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the later Heidegger and the “Pittsburgh Hegelian” school of Sellars, Brandom, and Lance. Greig is the hermeneut among us, so I’ll count on him to supply the Gadamerian ore, while I’m off to the Sellars mines in search of myths of the given. Yukon ho!

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations exhibits a series of what he calls “language games,” which are simple practices in which words and other linguistic units have uses. Many of these games amuzingly involve the genderless, perhaps inhuman “builders” known only by the names ‘A’ and ‘B’. In the first of these activities, presented in paragraph 2, A and B build an unidentifed structure or structures with building stones and communciate solely (at least verbally) with the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam”. With these words A calls for a stone and B responds by fetching an appropriate exemplar. Wittgenstein ends this passage typically cryptically with the injunction that we should “(c)onceive this as a complete primitive language.” Presumably this means that no other linguistic resources should be necessary for this language game to be meaningful to the participants.

The words of this building game play different roles than the stones, but I propose first that they are meaningful in effectively the same way as the stones are, i.e. by having a functional role in the carrying out of the practice, and second that this means of being meaningful is essentially that which Heidegger attributes to the pragmata encountered in transparent coping.

That is to say, Wittgenstein provides here an account of how something that could reasonably be termed “language” could derive its meaning from its elements’ (i.e. its words’) place in the equipmental totality. “Slab” means what it means because it references (in Heidegger’s sense of the term) not only slabs or a particular slab, but also the structure that A and B are building, the walkway on which B must walk to fetch a slab, and so on; and this meaning is effectively of the same type as, though not identical to, the meaning of the slab itself, which also references the structure under construction and the walkway, as well as the word “slab”.

As with my earlier post on Heidegger I am not primarily attempting historical scholarship here, but am instead drawing on resources from a prominent philosopher to sketch a view that he himself would almost surely not have endorsed, at least in full. Wittgenstein’s accounts of language games such as the one above aphoristically echo the early Heidegger’s contributions to the concept of primal praxis while indicating further how language itself might derive its meaning from such praxis rather than the reverse being true. If language gets its meaning by being embedded in practices, just as is true on this view for other sets of objects, then it becomes less intuitive to suppose, as most philosophers since the linguistic turn have, that the human capacity for linguistic meaning is temporally and conceptually prior to meaningful behavior. Perhaps primal praxis comes first.

Using the old Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Being and Time one finds on p. H. 68 Heidegger’s referencing of the ancient Greek term for things (pragmata) which he glosses thus: “…that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings,” which dealings he further denotes as the ancient Greek praxis. So “praxis” refers to concernful dealings with “pragmata,” or things as they figure in those dealings — which is not as they appear to distinterested contemplation.

Heidegger then designates these pragmata as “equipment,” and notes that equipment is always part of a totality, is something one uses in order to do something else by means of further equipment. The relationship of equipment to other equipment is that of Verweisung, translated here as “reference.” Heidegger states that we encounter a totality of equipment, an arrangement, first, and only within the context of such arrangements do we use and become aware of particular bits of equipment. For example, I encounter the road and stop lights and my car and other cars all together as an arrangement, and only within this context do I deal with my steering wheel and the gas pedal.

 Heidegger goes on to stress that our original engagement with such equipment is ready-to-hand and hence non-thematic. That is, equipment such as a hammer appears to us first not as a distinct thing, an object, set over against us as subjects and distinct from other objects, but instead fits in seemlessly as that which is transparently referenced by our activity in the workshop. When we need to hammer, we reach for the hammer. When our coping in this manner works smoothly, we need not even be aware of the hammer in the sense of awareness priviledged by most Western philosophy.

This account reverses the order of meaning presumed by most philosophers since Descartes and even Plato. The more traditional account begins with the individual mind’s representations of that which it encounters, from the sum of which are eventually somehow built up the subject’s valuings of and involvements in the world. In this always already thematized world it is easy to discern where language would fit. Language provides extensive resources for representing entities to subjects (a point not contradicted by those such as Brandom who conceive of language primarily as means of making inferences rather than representations), and thematic thought can easily be understood as language-spoken-to-oneself.

My question here is whether the early Heidegger’s alternative account of being human effectively elides this link with language. As I stated in my last post, clearly Heidegger’s account in Being and Time does give a prominent place to language. So, what I’m asking is not whether early Heidegger actually showed how language is unnecessary for a meaningful existence, but whether he provided resources for making such a case. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that his account of transparent coping with equipmental totalities is basically correct, we can ask whether language is necessary for such experience, and if so, whether such a languageless experience is in fact meaningful. For now, simply to stake a claim without yet supporting it, I will posit that language, in any appropriate sense of the term, is not necessary for transparent coping with equipmental totalities, either proximally (i.e. actually employed in the experience) or foundationally (i.e. providing a prior structure for the understanding at work in such endeavors), and that the hammer and the nails, the steering wheel and the road, are indeed all meaningful to the Dasein engaged with them. And this is primal praxis.

For the article Greig Mulberry and I are writing (tentatively titled “Praxis, Language, Meaning”) we need an account of what we are calling “primal praxis,” by which we mean the field of meaningful activity undertaken in the absence of language, at least language as we know it. We need this account to serve as a foil for two similarly praxis-oriented approaches to meaning that in different ways conceive language as intrinsic to meaning: hermeneutics as developed in the work of Gadamer and the later Heidegger and the “Pittsburgh Hegelian” school as exemplified by Sellars, Brandom, and Mark Lance. Our aim at this time is to draw resources from the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein to create a hybrid position that we suspect no prominent philosopher has ever actually held. Our goals in this endeavor are thus less historical than argumentative.

In his study of Dasein’s transparent coping in the workshop in Being and Time Heidegger sketches the contours of an analysis of primal praxis. Although Rede, which we can gloss here as language, is for early Heidegger an equiprimordial source of meaning, his examination of practical engagement shows how one could describe primal praxis in action. Words and other elements of language play no obvious role in that examination. Consequently, I will follow this post up shortly with an analysis of this section of Being and Time.

I will then complement this reading with a study of some of the many paragraphs in the Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein either argues or attempts to show that the meaning of units of language derives from their place in practices, either on analogy or else by simple comparison with the meaning that various pieces of equipment have in practices. By synthesizing and abstracting from these positions I will work out a rough and ready account of primal praxis.