Wittgenstein and the Phenomenological Movement: Reply to Monk

Abstract

Monk’s ‘The Temptations of Phenomenology’ examines what the term ‘Phänomenologie’ meant for Wittgenstein. Contesting various other scholars, Monk claims that Wittgenstein’s relation to ‘Phänomenologie’ began and ended during 1929. Monk only partially touches on the question of Wittgenstein’s relation to the phenomenological movement during this time. Though Monk does not mention this, 1929 was also the year in which Ryle and Carnap turned their critical attention toward Heidegger. Wittgenstein also expressed his sympathy for Heidegger in 1929. Furthermore, though in 1929 Wittgenstein agrees with the early Husserl on relating logic and science to phenomenology, it is not clear that they mean the same thing by either logic or phenomenology, or that they agree on what the relation between the two should be.

Keywords:

• Wittgenstein
• Heidegger
• Husserl
• Phänomenologie
• phenomenological movement

Notes

1 As Monk points out, very little has been written on the subject. To his list of articles one could add: David Woodruff Smith, ‘Intentionality and Picturing: Early Husserl Vis-à-vis Early Wittgenstein’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 40(1) (Spring 2002), pp. 153–80; Sara Heinämaa, ‘The Self and the Others: Common Topics for Husserl and Wittgenstein’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50(2) (June 2012), pp. 234–49.

2 See Monk, p. 330; Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaako Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

3 Herbert Spiegelberg, ‘Wittgenstein Calls His Philosophy “Phenomenology”’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13(3) (1982), pp. 296–9.

4 Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981).

5 See also J. O. Urmson, ‘Ryle, Gilbert’, in P. Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 269.

6 Other commentators have suggested that Wittgenstein appropriated the term ‘Phänomenologie’ from Boltzmann, not Husserl (Byong-Chul Park, Phenomenological Aspects of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998], p. 12).

7 Gilbert Ryle, ‘Phenomenology vs. The Concept of Mind’, in Collected Papers: Critical Essays, Vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 188.

8 See, e.g., ibid, p. 182. Ryle also disliked Wittgenstein’s tendency to attract disciples; see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 275. By contrast to ‘Continental philosophy’, ‘analytic philosophy’ had, for Ryle, no place for discipleship.

9 L. Beck, J. Wahl, J. O. Urmson, B. Williams, G. Ryle, P. F. Strawson, W. V. Quine, L. Apostel, E. W. Beth, J. L. Austin, and R. Hare, La Philosophie Analytique (Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie, No. 4) (Paris: Minuit, 1962), p. 7.

10 See Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 73.

11 See Amy L. Thomasson, ‘Phenomenology and the Development of Analytic Philosophy’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 40(1) (Spring 2002), pp. 115–42.

12 Waismann, for example, ‘in private recommended reading Husserl’ (quoted in Wolfgang Huemer, ‘Logical Empiricism and Phenomenology: Felix Kaufmann’, in F. Stadler (ed.) The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism: Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003], pp. 151–60, p. 153). Felix Kaufmann and Robert Neumann were considered phenomenologists by the rest of the group; see ibid. Kurt Gödel would later become interested in Husserl.

13 See Guillermo E. Rosado Haddock, The Young Carnap’s Unknown Master: Husserl's Influence on Der Raum and Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

14 See M. M. Van de Pitte, ‘Schlick’s Critique of Phenomenological Propositions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45(2) (December 1984), pp. 195–225; Paul Livingston, ‘Husserl and Schlick on the Logical Form of Experience’, Synthese 132(3) (September 2002), pp. 239–72.

15 Gilbert Ryle, ‘Review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit’, Mind 38(151) (July 1929), pp. 355–70, p. 370.

16 Quoted in Peter E. Gordon, ‘Continental Divide: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger at Davos, 1929 – An Allegory of Intellectual History’, Modern Intellectual History 1(2) (2004), pp. 219–48, p. 229.

17 The idea that this was a battle won by Heidegger is an exaggeration; See Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (US: Harvard University Press, 2010).

18 See Hans J. Dahms, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit in the Architecture and Philosophy of the 1920s’, in S. Awodey and C. Klein (eds) Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena (Chigago: Open Court, 2004), pp. 357–76, p. 369.

19 According to Gordon Baker, these remarks were probably dictated on December 1929; see L. Wittgenstein, F. Waismann, and G. P. Baker, The Voices of Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2003), p. xvi.

20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘On Heidegger on Being and Dread’, in M. Murray (ed.) Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 80–83, p. 80. This sentence was omitted from the first English publication of this remark; see Michael Murray, ‘A Note on Wittgenstein and Heidegger’, The Philosophical Review 83(4) (October 1974), pp. 501–03.

21 But see, e.g., Peter M. S. Hacker, ‘Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians’, The Philosophical Quarterly 53(210) (January 2003), pp. 1–23.

22 Wittgenstein’s later comments on Heidegger (Wittgenstein, Waismann, and Baker, The Voices of Wittgenstein, pp. 69–77) seem to elaborate on this theme.

23 See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 275.

24 See Jonathan Beale, ‘Nonsense Par Excellence: Wittgenstein on the Question of Being’, Proceedings of the Southeast Philosophy Congress 3 (2010), pp. 13–27, p. 15.

25 Andreas Vrahimis, ‘Modernism and the Vienna Circle’s Critique of Heidegger’, Critical Quarterly 54(3) (October 2012), pp. 61–83, pp. 74–5 includes further discussion of this.

26 According to David W. Smith, ‘What is “Logical” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations? The Copenhagen Interpretation’, in D. Zahavi (ed.) One Hundred Years of Phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations Revisited (Dodrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 51–68, p. 52, there are three possible approaches to the issue: (i) the whole of Logical Investigations is about logic (construed in its nineteenth-century sense as a kind of philosophy of logic); (ii) only a small part of Logical Investigations is about logic (construed as what in the nineteenth century would be called Logistik); (iii) in the Logical Investigations, ‘logic as conceived today is integrated with speech-act theory, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology’ (p. 52). Although the twenty-first-century view of logic (what Smith calls the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation of Husserl) is anachronistic when applied to Husserl, it is not completely implausible, given (i), that Husserl may have held it.

27 Ayer, for example, sees it as a study of ‘concepts at work [...] very close in practice to the linguistic analysts’ (Charles Taylor and A. J. Ayer, ‘Symposium: Phenomenology and Linguistic Analysis’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 33 (1959), pp. 93–124, p. 121); see also Amy L. Thomasson, ‘Conceptual Analysis in Phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy’, in M. Beaney (ed.) The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 270–84.