Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch [Iris Murdoch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Wittgenstein and the Inner Life

MODERN PHILOSOPHY, IN parting company with Descartes, has also rightly disposed of various metaphysical entities postulated by previous philosophers. The removal of these images is to be welcomed on grounds of Occam’s razor and because their shadowy existence could occasion a mystifying agnosticism. (‘Perhaps there’s something in it?’) Locke’s Substance, Kant’s Thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer’s Will. New styles of philosophical argument send them away, and the Zeitgeist does so too. What they represented can be dealt with less picturesquely. The philosopher tends to think there are deep foundations, there must be a source, a cause, a radical reality. But if he cannot credibly explain or describe this he might as well do without it. We no longer think that things are named by God. We have to understand language itself as a subject for philosophical reflection. Yet, for instance, when reading Wittgenstein, we may worry about the ‘inner life’. Can there not be too fierce a removal of entities deemed to be unnecessary and unknowable? In the context of arguing à la Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein that language is telegraphic, we may also agree that memory does not depend on mental images (etc.). ‘Do not try to analyse your inner experience.’ (Investigations II xi, p. 204.) This sounds more like moral or religious advice: do not spend time scrutinising your conscience. But Wittgenstein’s remark must be addressed to philosophers. Others may well say, ‘Why not? It’s up to me!’ Surely Wittgenstein’s attack on the inner-thought-outer-thing dualism concerns a philosophical mistake and is not intended by him to suggest there is no such thing as private reflection, or to support a behaviourist ethics? The revolution occasioned by Wittgenstein and Heidegger most famously removes the Cartesian starting point. We are not ‘most certain’ of our momentary concentration upon our private self-experience. We cannot ‘know’ in a solitary instant. Knowledge involves concepts, context, surroundings. ‘A great deal of stage-setting in the language’ must be presumed. (Investigations 257.) What is primary is an awareness already in the world. Heidegger pictures us as ‘thrown’ into the world, our ‘I’ is a being-there (Dasein), our state is being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein). Heidegger emphasises our contingency. Wittgenstein (Tractatus) pictures a language-user as ‘an extensionless point’ in the centre of its world. The I is its world. Wittgenstein even (in Philosophical Remarks VI) suggests the removal of the concept of Ego or first person. So, ‘it thinks’, ‘it sees’, ‘there is thinking’, ‘there is seeing’. Like, ‘it rains’, ‘there is rain’. It has been suggested that here he has been influenced by the Buddhism of Schopenhauer. The Buddhist removal of the ego is a spiritual achievement, however, spoken of in this sense by Schopenhauer. In Zen and the Art of Archery the master tells the pupil to try to achieve ‘it shoots’. The ‘influence’ is more probably Lichtenberg. An aphorism of Lichtenberg: ‘We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens. To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it as I think.

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