Chapter 7

Chapter 7 The Similarity Between Hegel and Wittgenstein

The claim that Wittgenstein actually maintained Hegelian conceptions may appear at first to be pure lunacy. This, however, only shows the continuing misunderstanding of Hegel that this thesis is trying to correct. On close examination, similarities with Hegelianism can be clearly seen in the work of the later Wittgenstein.

Charles Morris notes that "H.S. Thayer and K.T. Fann have investigated the possible influence of Peirce on Wittgenstein through Frank Ramsey."[1] A distinction must be made, however, between the early Wittgenstein and the later. Some writers argue that the early and later positions of Wittgenstein are not essentially dissimilar.[2] But the positions of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations are different and it appears that Dewey was a direct influence on the "Activity School" program in which Wittgenstein participated. This program influenced both Wittgenstein's teaching methods and his philosophy.

It was during the "mystery years," the years Wittgenstein participated in the Activity School program, that the changes in Wittgenstein himself and his work occurred. He trained at a teachers college for a year and then began a teaching career in the countryside towns of Austria. He even published a workbook for the school children. It was during this time that he became engaged in the questions that would eventually form the Philosophical Investigations[3]

One of the basic theories he became acquainted with was that the concept of teaching was intricately associated with the concept of meaning and language learning. He was also concerned with the theory of imageless thought. The theory of imageless thought clashed with his earlier view that thought consisted of images which picture that which they represent. Wittgenstein now seemed to feel that abstract words could not be reduced to atoms or elements, including sense impressions. Against his earlier belief that all theory was derivable from sense data, he now felt theory preceded sense observation and that there were no absolute simples or component parts without particular contexts he now called "language games" and "forms of life." In the new schematic, even the laws of logic were to be considered conventional. Bartley argues that these changes in Wittgenstein's position were a direct result of his experiences in the school program.[4]

Dewey was an educational patron of a group of educators for the Activity School movement. Also, in particular with respect to group work, Dewey's "project method" was used as an important method in the overall program.

...in the afternoon, the pupils take up free group or individual projects according

to John Dewey's principles. It is perhaps the most important part of their work,

that for which we adults need the most tact, and that from which we expect the

most important, the most profound, and the most lasting results.[5]

It is exactly this project method that Wittgenstein's elementary school students remember most about their teacher.[6] It is also this method of teaching that the students who studied under Wittgenstein in England recall as being unlike any of the other professors. "He used no manuscript or notes, but wrestled aloud with philosophical problems, interrupting his exposition with long silences and passionate questioning of his audience."[7] Practically all the teaching tactics Wittgenstein is claimed to have used can be traced to the techniques he learned in the teacher training school as the methods of the school reformers. Since Dewey's early works were used by that school reform movement, it can be concluded that, at least where teaching technique is concerned, Dewey influenced Wittgenstein.

An example of Dewey's writing widely familiar to young teachers in Europe (as well as in the United States) was How We Think. The book was primarily an aid to teacher education and pressed the point that the "learning process is the thinking process, if the child is to learn it must be taught to think."[8] The book presented Dewey's educational philosophy and in chapter six presents the five step act of reflective thought, the "Theory of Inquiry." The book had such a warm reception in its original English version both in the United States and abroad that, for example, in 1910 (thirteen years before it was published in Brussels) Tolstoy sent two of his friends to see John Dewey.[9]

As Dewey's educational philosophy influenced Wittgenstein, so, apparently, did Dewey's Hegelianism. That this is the case can be seen by showing the similarity between Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Berger on their descriptions of the relationship between the collective and the individual.

In making such a comparison, what is most striking in their stress on the importance of language. For all three the meaning of a proposition is its use. Wittgenstein says: "For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."[10] Dewey holds: "Like a chart, indeed, like any physical tool or physiological organ, a proposition must be defined by its function."[11] And Berger says:

Language originates in and has its primary references to everyday life; it refers above

All to the reality I experience in wide-awake consciousness, which is dominated by the

pragmatic motive (that is, the cluster of meanings directly pertaining to present or

future actions) and which I share with others in a taken-for granted manner.[12]

In conjunction with this, they have to cope with the realization that meaning-as-use implies that words and propositions will have as many meanings as uses. This entails that the Pragmatic theory of truth is a judicious combination of the coherence and correspondence theories of truth. The mind-body distinction leads to the correspondence theory of truth. Mentalism leads to the coherence theory. But the collective-individual distinction leads to the combination of the coherence and correspondence theories. Gadamer argues that Hegel tries to demonstrate that both the correspondence theory and the coherence theory must be accepted to explain truth.[13] The conception of reality as held by the collective is what is coherent for the individual. In dealing with everyday life the individual is concerned that his views correspond with the conceptions of his society.

Consistency is therefore based in the collective. Dewey, Berger, and Wittgenstein agree that there is a certain degree of consistency in the use of words and propositions which enables there to be a consistency of meaning making communication possible.

What is central with regard to the consistency of meaning is their concern with consistency in nature and the collective structure of society. For Dewey, "Experience has temporal continuity" and "Organic structures, which are the physical conditions of experience, are enduring."[14] For Berger, "All societies are constructions in the face of chaos."[15] But this is because "It is an ethnological commonplace that the ways of being human are as numerous as man's cultures."[16] Man's biology is characterized by "world-openness" and "plasticity of instinctual structure."[17] The social structure of the individual thus is responsible for the consistency he experiences.

Men together produces a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural

and psychological formations. None of these formations may be understood as

products of man's biological constitution, which, as indicated, provides only the

outer limits for human productive activity. Just as it is impossible for man to

develop in isolation, so it is impossible for man in isolation to produce a human

environment. Solitary human being is being on the animal level (which, of course,

man shares with other animals.) As soon as one observes phenomena that are

specifically human, one enters the realm of the social.[18]

With Wittgenstein too, the basis of consistency in meaning lies in the "forms of life."

It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language

they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.[19]

Wittgenstein's "forms of life" is social to at least the extent that "suggestions throughout the Philosophical Investigations that language and the "forms of life" with which it is associated, or of which it is a part, require the existence of several human beings."[20] But "forms of life" is not simply a term Wittgenstein uses with respect to language. He seems to hold first:

...that a measure, a methodology, must agree with a general feature of

the reality that is measured and explained. The second is that reality

itself is plastic because it in turn, is affected by the manner in which it is

measured and approached, and can therefore be remolded by

language and thought. Both aspects will be seen to come together in

the theme of the form of life to which language refers.[21]

There are several possibilities open as to who first developed the concept of "forms of life." While presenting what he calls the play-drive, Schiller refers the sensuous drive to "life" and the form-drive to "form" with the play drive then being "living-form."[22] Adolf Loos talked of "forms of life" with respect to the functions of architecture and other useful constructs; pointing out that the "useful" should be made to fit the "forms of culture" in which it is used.[23] Also, Eduard Spranger discusses Libensformen in the late 1920's.

Hegel's Phenomenology describes the interaction between individual and collective Geist as life, and life as process, is a process of interacting life forms.

The simple substance of life, therefore, is the diremption of itself into shapes and

forms, and at the same time the dissolution of these substantial differences; and

the resolution of this diremption, of articulating. Thus both the sides of the entire

movement which were before distinguished, viz., the setting up of individual

forms lying apart and undisturbed in the universal medium of independent

existence, and the process of life - collapse into one another.... The entire

circuit of this activity constitutes Life.[24]

The rationality of the real lies in our ability to understand it, and the real is what we understand it to be. This does not mean life, as reality, is some sort of mathematically coherent system. The dialectic, for Hegel, rarely even takes the form usually described as the Hegelian Dialectic. Hegel claims:

...that in the embodied organic existence observation can only meet with reason

in the sense of life in general, which, however, in its differentiating process involves

really no rational sequence and organization, and is not an immanently grounded

system of shapes and forms.[25]

The reason the real is the rational is because what is culturally defined as real for the individual in that culture is what is rational or common sense reality. The Phenomenology is the study of "the system of forms of conscious life...which finds its objective existential expression as the history of the world."[26] It is in Geist, which for Hegel, is life force, the "moving force and essence of life" that the Phenomenology "brings before us - if it does not play with - living forms."[27] Kaufmann argues that:

Geist, in other words, is the heir of the sensuous drive and of the form drive;

it is not - and this is important for understanding Hegel - primarily an

epistemological faculty or organ of knowledge, like "mind," but above all,

though neither Schiller nor Hegel places this most appropriate word in the

center of the discussion where it belongs, a creative force.[28]

Geist as creative force must not be misunderstood, however. This is where the distinction between collective and individual Geist is most problematic. Collective Geist as a creative force is primarily creative only in the sense that it is the collection of rules and objectifications, according to which, the individual is socialized and becomes creative himself. For the individual is act, and though individuals act together, collective Geist acts only through those individuals.

For Wittgenstein the theme of forms of life is what language refers to, but Wittgenstein leaves us hanging with the concept of "forms of life." It is his solution to the problems of consistency. Yet, from it we are only able to come full circle back to language and social life. The similarity between Geist and forms of life is therefore close enough that they help clarify one another.

Through understanding the nature of Geist we can see that forms of life establishes the aspect of consistency in nature without introducing the Kantian "thing-in-itself." Forms of life show how much Geist is that to which language refers.

Wittgenstein's forms of life, Dewey's Organic Structures, an Berger's Socially Constructed Reality, each bear an intriguing resemblance to Hegel's Geist. This is evident, further, in the central difficulty all four have in showing the consistency in these their core concepts of consistency. The nature of these problematic concepts lies in the relationship between the collective and the individual. How they handle it will be examined next.

Contents Chapter 8

[2] Allen Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York, 1973) pp. 216 and 233

[3] William Warren Bartley III, Wittgenstein (Philadelphia and New York, 1973)

[5] Adolf Ferriere, The Activity School (New York, 1927 originally 1921) p. 253

[7] Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Cambridge, Mass. 1973) p. 11

[10] Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations trans. G.E. Anscombe (New York, 1958) p. 20e #43

[11] Dewey. Logic, The Theory of Inquiry p. 136

[12] Berger. Social Construction of Reality p. 38

[14] Dewey. Logic, The Theory of Inquiry p. 245

[15] Berger. Social Construction of Reality p. 103

[20] Jenny Teichman, "Wittgenstein on Persons and Human Beings" Understanding Wittgenstein Royal Institute of Philosophy 7 1972-73 Macmillan 1974 p. 144

[21] C.A. von Peurson. Ludwig Wittgestein, An Introduction to His Philosophy trans. R. Ambler (London, 1969) p. 103