Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious by Bouveresse Jacques Cosman Carol Descombes Vincent

Author:Bouveresse, Jacques, Cosman, Carol, Descombes, Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

Reasons and Causes

Psychology belongs to the ratioide realm, and the multiplicity of its facts is not infinite, as the possibility of psychology as an empirical science teaches. The only things that have boundless diversity are psychic motives, and psychology has nothing to do with these.

—ROBERT MUSIL, Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters (1918)

MOORE REPORTS Wittgenstein as saying that the initial confusion of cause and reason had led to the disciples of Freud making an “abominable mess” (“Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33,” p. 316). In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein explains his point on the difference Freud is accused of neglecting:

The proposition that your action has such and such a cause, is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is well-founded if one has had a number of experiences which, roughly speaking, agree in showing that your action is the regular sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement, for acting in a particular way, etc., no number of agreeing experiences is necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypothesis. (p. 15)

For event A to be considered the cause of event B, one would have to verify that in a sufficient number of cases events of the A variety are regularly followed by events of the B variety. Of course, an event of the first type could still happen without being followed by an event of the second type. The relation of causation (Verursachung) is therefore hypothetical in a sense that the relation between a reason and the action it explains (Begründung) is not. A reason is characterized by the capacity to be recognized as such by the person whose reason it is, and not on the basis of an inductive inference. Yet Freud either formulates causal hypotheses, and in this case he must try and verify them by methods different from his own; or he proposes and imposes reasons, and the acceptance of a reason has nothing to do with the acceptance of an explanatory hypothesis of the causal type, or for that matter with any hypothesis at all. During the treatment, of course, the psychoanalyst may be led to propose various reasons in a hypothetical way; he may even be convinced rather soon, sometimes well before the end of the process, that he knows the true reason for the analysand’s behavior and yet fail in the end, despite his efforts, to get the patient to agree that this was his reason. But Wittgenstein maintains that even a reason that is simply possible is different from a supposed cause, in the sense that it is presented as something the agent might in principle recognize; and when it is accepted, what makes it the reason for the behavior in question is essentially the fact that the interested party recognizes it as such.

In fact, the situation is more complicated than it might initially seem, since it is difficult, for example, always to subordinate the perception of a causal relation to a repeated experience of the consecutive nature of the two events.

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