Doing What We Do and Saying What We Say

Heidegger, Wittgenstein and servility

by David Wemyss (January 2014)

In his early masterpiece, Being and Time, Heidegger begins by introducing an apparently trite but ultimately earth-shattering idea. It’s this: human beings do what they do, and say what they say. They have virtually no capacity to do or say more. Of course imaginative and clever people do and say imaginative and clever things – but still only the things they do and say.

And then there was the notorious speech to ‘German Students’ in November 1933 at Freiburg University:  

Now the thought of Wittgenstein saying that is absurd. His conception of immediacy in speech can never be culturally safeguarded. He would never have meant anything like that.

Or would he?

You’ll want to tell people that you’ve discovered the philosophical holy grail.                                      

For example, I’m very familiar with the feeling of speaking to a committee and thinking ‘this is not going well.’ And the two things happen at the same time. So, clearly, if I can have a thought while I’m speaking that isn’t the same thing as I’m saying, it’s easy to imagine that I can have a thought while I’m speaking that is the same thing.

Possibly non-verbal, possibly not.  

Or if our brains were different?                              

But a lot of things do get rehearsed in our minds. We say ‘I remember thinking that very thing.’ And there’s no reason to doubt it. But it’s just one strand of experience among many.

Heidegger wouldn’t say less human, of course. He’s not even trying to be ‘human.’

Wittgenstein might say it though. He often felt that ordinary people seemed barely human, even disgusting. It’s one of the things that cause people to imagine he might have been a cultural pessimist to the point of active conservatism.

But I think we’re going to have to give up on that one. A separate essay might look more closely at how we could ever have imagined such a thing.

In the meantime, though, we’re talking about a fin-de-siecle Viennese intellectual with an aristocratic background and a crazy upbringing who ended up in Cambridge saying he was going to be an aeronaut unless Bertrand Russell told him he was clever enough to be a philosopher.

Russell of course quickly confirmed that on no account should he be an aeronaut, and the quintessential philosophical genius was up and running. After a world-historical contribution to symbolic logic in a book that ended with a flurry of gnomic quasi-religious remarks, he slowly shifted his ground to develop the kind of questioning outlined in the paragraphs above.

He also fitted in Tolstoyan angst and heroism in the First World War, months in a hut overlooking the Sognefiord in Norway, an attempt at being a country schoolteacher back in Austria, distaste for what he saw as the corrupt chatter at High Table in Cambridge, genuine enthusiasms for American pulp detective novels and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, a bid for anonymity as a hospital porter in Newcastle during the Second World War, and much more besides.

‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’

When he surely hadn’t.  

But then again he did say that we weren’t here to have a good time.

Here are three quotes –

(2) ‘I believe that bad housekeeping within the state fosters bad housekeeping in families. A workman who is constantly ready to go on strike will not bring up his children to respect order either.’

(3) ‘The child is wicked, but nobody teaches it to be any different and its parents spoil it with their stupid affection.’

The purpose of honest work should be able to be explained to anyone. How many of us today can tell our friends and family what we actually do for a living? And how many of us are sure that what we do is fundamentally important?

Wittgenstein could have romanticised Heidegger’s Bavarian farmers too.  

Now. A curio. In 1998 the Australian writer Kimberly Cornish brought out the most widely reviled book on Wittgenstein of all time. The Jew of Linz was a bizarre confection centred on two wild ideas: (1) that Hitler hated Jews because he had first of all hated the 14-year-old Wittgenstein at school in Linz in 1903 or 1904, and (2) that, twenty-five years later, a pro-Stalinist Wittgenstein was the most likely person to have recruited the so-called Cambridge spies.

There was more going on than apolitical Tolstoyan idealism. He was actively interested in whether progress was being made in building a society not based on private property rights and social hierarchies.

As it was for Heidegger.  

So can we still think there’s something exhilarating about one or both of them?

Does either of them still have the potential to inspire a way of looking at the world that isn’t servile? Can either of them still be placed in the service of a strenuously individualistic ethos?

Well, in a way, yes. They are the big two of the twentieth century. No one else comes close. And they remain completely fascinating and exhilarating. I’m extremely grateful to have spent so much time with them.

Not everything is to do with politics.  

But otherwise the answer to the question about a predisposition towards servility is clear: neither Wittgenstein nor Heidegger can be placed in the service of strenuous individualism.

Heidegger was a Nazi.

Meanwhile Wittgenstein had hopes for the Soviet experiment, but he never seems to have imagined that the left would one day be the managerial left. He doesn’t seem to have had any sense that, as I put it earlier, the left would one day define itself in terms of getting the best return on a portfolio of carefully calculated social imperatives, and that social justice would be ‘driven up’ by performance targets to achieve ‘continuous improvement’ in a social democracy.

Even to run just a little bit of it, we need organisational theory. It sounds like a recipe for alienation. But some political theorists think that that’s as much as we can hope for from now on.   

Marcuse was right, though, in saying that public language was becoming impenetrable, that our political culture was becoming impenetrable, and that our very sense of why things happen was becoming impenetrable. And nowadays things are much worse than he could ever have dreamt. And, in de facto terms, none of it can be put right.

Because that’s unimaginable.                   

Marxist thinkers tell themselves that the managerial state impedes ‘real’ political change, but they’re priming the pump with the prior assumption that a cooperative economy that remains capitalist is not authentically egalitarian. Meanwhile conservatives see the managerial state as culturally Marxist through and through, enjoying more and more success every day by winning small but important political battles.

She was unaware that powerful historical and cultural currents (long underway) would allow essentially left-wing people in councils and universities and hospitals to reassert their political assumptions by capturing and redeploying the very weapons she had intended to use against them.

As for me, well, let’s say that I’m trying my best.

 

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David Wemyss graduated in law from the University of Aberdeen in 1977 and worked in local government in that city until he retired in 2011 at the age of 56. He continues to live there with his wife and son. Having been published in a number of journals and magazines over the years, his essays are usually drawn from a mix of middlebrow and highbrow literary interests.

 

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