Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics 9781442665453

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Scepticism, Therapy, and Leaving the World Alone
2. The Primacy of Training in a Shared Form of Life
3. Wittgenstein’s Method of Perspicuous Representation
4. Charles Taylor’s Wittgensteinian Aspects
5. Quentin Skinner: Wittgenstein and the Historical Approach to Political Thought
6. James Tully’s Aspectival Approach to the Study of Politics
Conclusion: Seeing Politics as a Dialogical Science
Notes
Bibliography

Citation preview

WITTGENSTEIN AND THE STUDY OF POLITICS

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Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics

MICHAEL TEMELINI

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2015 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4633-9

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Temelini, Michael, 1966–, author Wittgenstein and the study of politics / Michael Temelini. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-4633-9 (bound) 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951.  2. Political science.  I. Title. B3376.W564T44 2015  192  C2014-908391-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction 3 1  Scepticism, Therapy, and Leaving the World Alone  9 2  The Primacy of Training in a Shared Form of Life  40 3  Wittgenstein’s Method of Perspicuous Representation  68 4  Charles Taylor’s Wittgensteinian Aspects  95 5  Quentin Skinner: Wittgenstein and the Historical Approach to Political Thought  137 6  James Tully’s Aspectival Approach to the Study of Politics  165 Conclusion: Seeing Politics as a Dialogical Science  206 Notes  213 Bibliography  257

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Acknowledgments

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the assistance of so many people to whom I am deeply grateful. At various stages in the drafting of the manuscript, family, friends, mentors, students, participants at various academic conferences, and colleagues at several institutions offered support, encouragement, advice, criticism, inspiration, fellowship, and lively, thought-provoking, and continuing conversation. Too much time has passed since the ideas in this book began to take shape, so I cannot name everyone. That does not mean I am not indebted to many more people than those named below. This book’s ancestry can be traced to my doctoral research undertaken at McGill University under the supervision of Charles Taylor and James Tully, who fostered an extraordinarily rich, interdisciplinary, and unfailingly encouraging learning environment. They introduced me to Wittgenstein’s writings and helped me understand the political implications of his remarks, and they have continued to guide me in this topic and others ever since. At that time I also discovered in their own influential writings, as well as in the work of Quentin Skinner, an authentic dialogical Wittgensteinian political science. The insightful guidance and appraisal of my dissertation, and the replies and criticisms offered by Taylor and Tully, as well as comments from Skinner, and from David Owen at the University of Southampton, were critically important in stimulating and framing the early stages of this project. The book’s journey began in earnest at the Università degli studi di Genova, Research Centre in Canadian Studies, where I was warmly welcomed as a visiting professor on invitation from Luca Codignola Bò, along with his colleagues Elisabetta Tonizzi and Massimo Rubboli. My time there afforded me the first opportunity to review thoroughly

viii Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection viii Acknowledgments

the work I had started some years before. When a draft of the manuscript was completed, Terence Moore requested a copy, and recognized that it merited serious consideration. With the very helpful comments and suggestions from the anonymous readers he commissioned, I was able to identify flaws as well as the potential of this work. I revised the manuscript while I was a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John’s. There, I had the time to contemplate the comments of the earlier readers and to refine, revise, and reconsider some of the ideas and arguments. With their welcoming, friendly, and peaceful way of life, the citizens and my dear friends of Newfoundland and Labrador made it so easy to focus on academic affairs. I received creative inspiration from the province’s majestic natural environment, and in conversation with its eclectic array of excellent writers, performers, artists, musicians, scholars, activists, and journalists. Among the friends, students, and colleagues, I would like to thank Chris Dunn, Evan Edinger, Will Hiscock, Dale Kirby, Meghan Mitchell, and Liam Walsh, as well as Mike Rossiter and his team at CBC St John’s. I owe a special word of thanks to James Maclean and Thom Duggan, and to members of the St John’s Campaign Against War. Their exemplary opposition to all forms of military violence and domination, and their commitment to peaceful and democratic conflict resolution, motivated me to articulate some of the central ideas in this book. I appreciate the support that Memorial University provided, particularly the excellent research services of its librarians. My thanks are also due to many students with whom I discussed aspects of this book in seminars and lectures. I am especially grateful to James Bradley, former head of the Department of Philosophy, and Jennifer Dyer, who invited me to lecture on Wittgenstein and to present aspects of the manuscript to students of the Humanities M.Phil. program. Without any hesitation, Jim agreed to read a revised draft in its entirety, offering numerous suggestions for improvement, and all this with enthusiastic confidence in the worth of this project. I am also grateful to Stephen Tierney and Annis May Timpson at the University of Edinburgh for inviting me to a conference organized by the Centre of Canadian Studies, where I presented one of the chapters in progress. Likewise, I would like to express my thanks to Anna Pia De Luca for the opportunity to present my ideas to master’s students at the Università degli studi di Udine, and to participants at a conference hosted by its Centro di Cultura Canadese. 

Acknowledgmentsix

During the final stages of writing, my affiliation with the Department of Political Science at Concordia University and the University of Ottawa’s School of Political Studies allowed the research privileges necessary to complete the task. I am also very grateful to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for helping publish this book with a generous grant through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program. Throughout all this time, I owe a very large debt to Eugenio Bolongaro of McGill University’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures for reading the manuscript with great discernment and providing detailed recommendations, and for his ongoing encouragement and friendship. Our conversations on the first three chapters in particular helped me properly formulate more clearly what I was trying to articulate.  For the final edit, the University of Toronto Press offered excellent and invaluable editorial assistance and copy editing, and Sarah Schmidt kindly helped with impeccable proofreading. In all their various creative and academic endeavours and in our ongoing conversations, my parents Walter and Louise, and my brothers Mark and Leonard, have always influenced me. I am sincerely grateful to my wife, Stephanie, and daughter Valentina, without whom this project would have long been abandoned. It is no exaggeration to say that without their love, encouragement, and companionship this book would not have been written. Finally, I owe my greatest debt to James Tully, with whom I have discussed this work since its genesis, and who influenced every stage in its writing. I always learn from our conversations, from his insights, and from the unparalleled breadth of his knowledge of the history of political thought. He read several drafts of the manuscript and all along the way was convinced of its importance, even when I was not. This project is inspired by his exemplary practice as a teacher and by his truly remarkable scholarship on Wittgenstein and politics. I offer this book as a token of my sincere appreciation for our many years of friendship and dialogue.

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WITTGENSTEIN AND THE STUDY OF POLITICS

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Introduction

My aim in this book is to explore Wittgenstein’s impact on the study of politics. This task is made difficult by the fact that Wittgenstein himself did not write about politics and was quite enigmatic about what political implications his remarks might have. In spite of this (and perhaps because of it), there has been considerable discussion about what if any political ideas can be derived from his remarks. In this book I contrast two traditions of interpretation: one that draws political implications from Wittgenstein’s therapeutic scepticism, and another that draws political lessons from his practice of perspicuous representation, what I call dialogical comparison. One of the main contentions of this book is that this dialogical dimension of Wittgenstein’s remarks has been too little recognized by other commentators. I begin with a long-standing tradition of interpretation that Wittgenstein’s remarks, while not in themselves offering an alternative theory, constitute a form of therapy whose goal is to cure us of our metaphysical cravings, or to release us from pictures and theories that are holding us captive. In many cases this therapeutic approach either rests on or entails different kinds of scepticism, and all of this in turn licenses political views that are conservative, negative, or contingent. Therapeutic Scepticism My purpose therefore is to survey a kind of therapeutic scepticism that has been highly influential in the study of politics, whether it is called science, theory, or philosophy. But I am not suggesting that therapy necessarily entails scepticism. So it is important to clarify at the outset that there are interpretations of Wittgenstein that are sceptical and not

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therapeutic, or therapeutic and not sceptical. And while there have been many commentaries on Wittgenstein’s scepticism, I am particularly interested in those which have gone on to draw out political implications from various sceptical assumptions. I will employ the words therapy, sceptic, and sceptical following the commentators who themselves have chosen such vocabulary to describe Wittgenstein’s approach. And so the meaning of these concepts will in part be given by their use. In this and other respects, I am just following Wittgenstein’s advice to let use teach us meaning; and in the spirit of that advice, these words are used as family resemblance concepts: so, anyone looking for precise definitions will misunderstand the Wittgensteinian approach employed here. Another aspect of my analysis involves considering how this scepticism is typically connected to a related view, one that emphasizes the primacy of training in a shared form of life. On this view, Wittgenstein’s scepticism entails various tendencies of conditioning, habit, and behaviourism. The many scholars surveyed do not all agree on the value or worth either of therapeutic scepticism, or of its behavioural tendencies, or of the political implications that might be derived from all this. My aim is not to show homogeneity or to suggest there are no differences among them, but merely to point out overlapping aspects. And indeed, these scholars interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks in remarkably similar ways. They have a tendency to describe various kinds of therapeutic scepticism, and the primacy of training, from which a certain politics is presumed to follow, which they all either condemn or praise. One of my principal aims is to consider how or whether Wittgenstein’s remarks give us a better understanding of politics, whether his approach sheds light on political reality. Those who see therapeutic scepticism and training as primary features of Wittgenstein’s thought have concluded that his remarks imply a range of conservative, negative, and contingent political consequences. Each of these terms, whose meanings sometimes overlap and criss-cross, warrants elaboration. Some claim that his remarks promote positively conservative political ideas. These range from an apology for customary practices to a justification for blind obedience to authority. In contrast, others argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks do not endorse any specific politics; rather, they are apolitical, having nothing positive to say. According to this view, Wittgenstein recommends leaving the world alone, or his remarks have dubious utility for politics. I will call this a negative view of politics, in that his philosophical remarks either shed no light on politics or

Introduction5

recommend political indifference or flight from politics. A development of this negative argument is the idea that his remarks entail a contingent view of politics. There are at least two ways of understanding this term. On one view, political contingency means that for Wittgenstein, political actions and ideas are largely the unintended and accidental outcomes of ongoing experimental practices over time. On another, political contingency is taken to mean that since Wittgenstein’s remarks are apolitical, there is no particular politics that necessarily follows logically. But also according to this other view, Wittgenstein’s thought can actually license various (and even contradictory) possibilities of thought and action, because such possibilities are not logically impossible. In the end, then, interesting paradoxical ramifications tend to emerge from the negative and contingent arguments: some see the apolitical argument as an apology for the status quo, which is another form of conservatism, and this is why it is possible for the positively conservative, the negative, and the contingent arguments to converge and overlap. Others say his political silence or indifference allows for various progressive, democratic/liberal, Marxian, or feminist views, along with a host of other politically imaginative possibilities. Put another way, Wittgenstein’s negative and contingent approach opens a space for, or can be complemented with, critically reflexive and transformative ways of thought and action. A Family of Dialogical Wittgensteinians In contrast, I present and defend a family of interpretations that I will call the comparative dialogical reading of Wittgenstein. The writers who have contributed most influentially to this school of thought are Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully. My essential point is that the concept of dialogue and the central role it plays in Wittgenstein’s thought has been too readily and frequently overlooked by commentators who emphasize therapeutic scepticism and training. I employ the adjective “comparative” in order to qualify the concept of dialogue these authors use and to differentiate that concept from the monological approach typically defended in the therapeutic sceptical reading, which makes no room for comparison in its explanation. My position is that there is a line of argument in a number of Wittgenstein’s posthumously published writings – principally The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations – regarding the dialogical conditions of meaning and understanding, and that this argument has had some

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influence in the way these authors study politics. They describe Wittgenstein’s approach as an example not of therapy or of scepticism but rather of comparison in dialogue. They do not see training as primary, and they acknowledge the importance of various kinds of training as aspects of understanding. And they do not endorse any of the politically conservative, negative, or contingent implications suggested by the therapeutic sceptical readings. Rather, each of these authors reads Wittgenstein as a philosopher of dialogue and comparison, who offers us a way of being critical if we want to be so and who helps us figure out how to explain and understand our own and other forms of life – or, if we wish, to change the real world of politics. Surveying Taylor, Skinner, and Tully as examples, this book argues that Wittgenstein’s legacy for politics is therefore different than one might expect from looking at it as merely a kind of therapy that raises doubt or exposes nonsense. These authors interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks in a way that suggests that he need not be defended or rejected for his therapeutic sceptical views, with the primacy they extend to training and their negative, conservative, or contingent political implications. His remarks can be understood differently from this. I will be considering a dimension of Wittgenstein scholarship – with Skinner, Taylor, and Tully as its principal exponents – that gives us a Wittgenstein who avoids scepticism and the antinomy of objectivism and relativism by proposing a practice of comparative dialogue. My aim is to explain this interpretation and to establish its validity as a reading of Wittgenstein. There are other interesting similarities among the authors who defend a dialogical reading of Wittgenstein. They have all taught and written about topics that are conventionally part of the political science curriculum, and they have all written about political science itself – its history, its methods, and its membership in the humanities and social sciences. They have all either distanced themselves from or rejected outright various methods and theories inspired by the modern natural sciences; instead, each has expressed a preferred commitment to approaches traditionally advocated and inspired by the humanities, such as a sensitivity to various historical and interdisciplinary approaches to explanation and understanding. Moreover, each has made the case that the human sciences are irreducibly diverse as well as open to methodological variety and that there are countless ways of studying its member disciplines. Particularly worth noting in this regard is that all of them have rejected the exclusive and privileged status long accorded to causal forms of explanation and understanding;

Introduction7

instead, each has defended the legitimacy of – indeed, the need for – non-causal methodologies and forms of explanation. And in their writings they promote various practices of peaceful democratic dialogue as important aspects of the study of political thought and action. In all of these ways, they have contributed to the study of politics as well as to the venerable tradition of the humanities, and they have done much to reconcile the disciplines of history, philosophy, and political science. Before we begin, I would like to be clear at the outset about my intentions with this survey, so as to preclude unfair mischaracterizations. First, some approaches do not easily fit into either of the two schools surveyed here. But if we understand Wittgenstein correctly, evidence of particular anomalous cases and examples does not refute or falsify the family resemblances arranged here, because I am not proposing a general theory of dialogue. Second, I will not be debunking the therapeutic sceptical reading or denying its legitimacy; rather, I will be pointing out some of its possible limitations and shedding light on another field of interpretation – namely, the dialogical – that we can know and understand through an ongoing dialogue of comparison. Because the therapeutic sceptical account is based on Wittgenstein’s own remarks, it offers important clues about his way of seeing things and helps explain the meaning of the concepts he uses. My concern is that this reading is just an aspect, not the only game in town; we should not be blind to other ways of understanding the political meaning of Wittgenstein’s remarks. My aim is to survey another reading, one that is dialogical, comparative, and realist. Third, regarding both schools of thought surveyed, I will not be claiming that they are united or defined by something either general or uniform; rather, I will be suggesting the possibility of certain overlapping and criss-crossing similarities and family resemblances among the particular examples. Therefore my position should not be misconstrued as a claim that there are no significant differences within the two families. Not all of those who promote therapeutic interpretations uniformly or similarly embrace either the various sceptical assumptions or the political implications that follow. Nor can uniformity be assumed among members of the dialogical school, who do not embrace identical views on dialogue, realism, or politics. Fourth, to avoid the danger of excessive partiality, my approach does not selectively cite only those passages from Wittgenstein that support my case. Instead, I listen to what the authors themselves say regarding which of Wittgenstein’s remarks are significant. This is a survey of the

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remarks and concepts most frequently cited by the authors themselves. So my explanation of the comparative dialogical approach is based on a comparison of the various examples of this approach, evident in the works of Taylor, Skinner, and Tully. By surveying the variety of ways these authors actually employ Wittgenstein’s remarks, the present book is meant to be an example of a way to mobilize Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation. Its promise is that we might learn the various political things that have been said and done with Wittgenstein’s remarks. Adopting this approach, rather than a uniquely textual or conceptual analysis, is the most convincing way of showing how Wittgenstein’s remarks actually have been put to these various political uses.1 Therefore I turn to specific examples of the comparative dialogical uses of Wittgenstein as objects of comparison in order to show that Wittgenstein need not be read as a therapeutic sceptic. In so doing I am merely following Wittgenstein’s insight in Philosophical Investigations, section 208, that the learning we do with others is “by means of examples and by practice.” Fifth, it is not my aim to exaggerate the claims about Wittgenstein’s influence on Taylor, Skinner, and Tully. Each of these commentators has tapped a number of important philosophical sources, which I will not consider here. My aim is merely to remind ourselves what the Wittgensteinian influences are, as well as to present the work of these authors as case studies for a comparative dialogical reading of Wittgenstein. So this survey should not be misconstrued as either comprehensive or inherently incompatible with other expositions that show dissimilarities or that shed light on different philosophical sources. I am not suggesting that the aspects I compare are exclusive or definitive. My intention is merely to offer a reminder of certain differences and family resemblances too little mentioned by others. My aim is to bring to light some of the unquestioned background assumptions, the taken-for-granted aspects underpinning a canonical therapeutic sceptical interpretation of Wittgenstein, and against this to introduce and juxtapose an alternative comparative dialogical interpretation that is equally legitimate. The comparison is meant to rescue Wittgenstein from the therapeutic sceptical picture, with its conservative, negative, and contingent implications – to show that picture to be simply one possible interpretation rather than the only way to sensibly read Wittgenstein. In so doing, this comparison will permit us to identify a progressive, critical, and realist interpretation that is embodied in the concept of comparative dialogue. I will begin by examining the exegetical basis of the sceptical therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein; I will then survey the dialogical readings as objects of comparison.

1 Scepticism, Therapy, and Leaving the World Alone

Ludwig Wittgenstein did not write political science, at least not in the customary way in which this discipline is understood. He did not seem concerned about the impact of his thought on politics. Among his commentaries we find no blueprint for the just constitution or any discussion of conventional modes of political justification such as welfare, rights, or democratic self-government. There is no discussion about what political virtues might cultivate good citizenship, no discussion about what political institutions should be established. He does not propose solutions to any prevailing political difficulties. Wittgenstein’s celebrated short-paragraphed numbered “philosophical remarks” largely ignore customary norms of political legitimacy such as freedom and equality. On politics, then, Wittgenstein remained silent. In his vocabulary we do not find conventional political words like power, legitimacy, or authority. The words to which he normally refers are distinctly not political, and he seems to employ them to shed light on language use as such or its use in philosophical analysis. Nevertheless, there has been a great deal of talk about what Wittgenstein’s remarks might mean for the study of politics, and this has to do with two important themes he typically discusses. One theme relates to Wittgenstein’s approach, method, or form of explanation, which avoids what he calls “the craving for generality” and is expressed in his remark that “there is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.”1 As we will see, many have taken this to mean that Wittgenstein’s own method is itself a kind of therapy. The other theme has to do with the way languages are not just forms of des­ cription but also forms of life that must be understood in terms of their meaning. What implications these two aspects may have for the

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Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics

study of politics has been subject to considerable discussion. In fact, Wittgenstein’s remarks on explanation, and his comments dealing with meaning and understanding, are often cited by a host of scholars in the social sciences and humanities and have helped shape a great number of discussions. My aim here is modest: in what follows, I explore the influence that Wittgenstein’s remarks have had on the contemporary study of politics and how those remarks have been used to give us a better understanding of politics. I begin with an insightful commentary made by the Cambridge University political theorist John Dunn at a colloquium where he discussed this very question. Speaking in 1982 about the political implications of Wittgenstein’s work, Dunn criticized two related tendencies that he considered to be the main obstacles to any Wittgensteinian political science. “Thus far,” Dunn observed, “no one sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s philosophy has succeeded in giving a very convincing account of its implications for social or political philosophy.” He continued: “The view that these are in fact inadvertently and ludicrously conservative has been pressed from an early date by Ernest Gellner; and, on this score at least his arguments have never received a cogent answer.”2 Dunn argued that it is easy to identify the negative implications of Wittgenstein’s writings but that we are left guessing about the presumed positive implications for studying politics. Dunn suspected that this was due to “the extreme scepticism of his philosophical position.”3 In other words, what Dunn observed among a diverse group of scholars4 were certain similar tendencies in their approach to interpreting Wittgenstein’s remarks. They took for granted that he was promoting various forms of either scepticism or non-realism and that these implied either negative or conservative political consequences. These consequences are negative in the sense that they deliberately tell us nothing about politics, or are indifferent to politics, or recommend flight from politics. In other words, Wittgenstein’s remarks can’t or won’t tell us how or whether to act politically. The implications of those remarks as they read them are conservative in one of two senses: his intention is to provide an apology for the status quo and for blind obedience to authority; or, he is recommending leaving the world alone, for we have no alternative to our form of life and only incremental change is possible. In other words, the practical consequences of scepticism are to simply live in accordance with one’s customary practices and way of life without passing serious judgment.



Scepticism, Therapy, and Leaving the World Alone

11

These negative and conservative political consequences follow from Wittgenstein’s epistemological anti-doctrine, which is to say his practice of doubting “the existence of conclusive and wholly extra-human epistemic standards” and his emphasis on forms of life as “the reality beyond which no human appeal can be made.” Like Dunn, many other commentators attribute to Wittgenstein this sceptical practice of doubting what we can know – in particular, doubting whether we can know anything at all outside our own form of life and whether we can criticize and change our form of life. Dunn himself was highly critical of this sceptical politics because “at the core” of social and political theory is the question of whether our practices are appropriate or whether they require “drastic and systematic reconstitution.” So “a simple appeal to the authority of practice” has no content and is “necessarily either evasive, insidious or vacuous.” Wittgenstein’s remarks do not therefore offer “an adequate philosophical approach to the rational critique and prudent revision of human practices.” And the various attempts to explain what Wittgenstein’s remarks might mean for politics “merely represent less than felicitous guesses” regarding the central question of “how to envisage a rational critique of practices in a world in which the authority of practices is the final cognitive authority.” The implications are thus conservative and negative, in that philosophy “leaves the world as it is” and doesn’t give us good reasons to act.5 A principle target of criticism here is what Jonathan Lear once called Wittgenstein’s “doctrine of non-interference.” A dominant theme of Wittgenstein’s work, Lear argued, is that “philosophy should be nonrevisionary,” that is, whatever its value, it should “leave our linguistic practices and, in particular, our theory of the world as they are.”6 This non-revisionary approach is rooted in the fact that we are “likeminded” – in other words, “being minded as we are is not one possibility we can explore among others.” Lear explained that like-mindedness is a condition in which we cannot get a “glimpse of what it might be like to be other-minded, for as soon as we move toward the outer bounds of our mindedness we verge on incoherence and nonsense.” Therefore, the philosopher’s primary concern should not be to try to change our beliefs but to make us aware of “our being so minded.”7 A particularly noteworthy aspect I would like to emphasize, one that Dunn did not mention, is that the kind of non-revisionary scepticism he notices is shaped in part by the idea that “the only task of philosophy is therapeutic.”8 The claim that Wittgenstein’s approach should be

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Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics

understood as a cure or a form of therapy is found within a significant body of secondary literature dating back to the earliest readings of Wittgenstein, and one should not assume a common use regarding the various kinds of therapy construed.9 My aim is not to survey these various uses or to consider the origins of the therapeutic reading but to explore the therapeutic interpretation mobilized in the study of politics, which I will refer to as therapeutic scepticism because of its connection to a kind of scepticism.10 Unlike Cartesian scepticism (and Kantian moral theory), the aim of this therapy is not to reveal unshakeable foundations, nor is it to propose any universal theories or general principles; instead, it is intended solely to detect confusions, unravel tangles, release us from philosophical puzzles, cure our craving for generality, and free us from captivity to any essentialist or representational epistemologies or metaphysical explanations that presume to reveal with certainty the existence of the external world or of other minds or that separate us from ordinary language. So on this therapeutic reading, Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks were not intended to convey any positive theories or philosophical doctrines or indeed anything new at all.11 This therapeutic reading became very influential, and it persists as one of the dominant and unquestioned ways in which political philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists interpret Wittgenstein today. So Dunn’s commentary is a very fruitful place to begin, for he was describing clearly an interpretation that had gained wide acceptance and a considerable hold among Wittgenstein scholars. Perhaps the most remarkable evidence of the hold this interpretation enjoyed is that neither his critics nor his defenders ever questioned it as a way of explaining Wittgenstein’s approach. It is, of course, important not to exaggerate the resemblances among the multitude of commentators who read Wittgenstein this way. My aim is simply to point out that in surveying the scholarship, we encounter a number of striking resemblances in the way Wittgenstein has been interpreted. What is striking is that while they raise different questions and arrive at different conclusions, many take for granted that Wittgenstein’s remarks either entail or rest on or fit within some variation of a therapeutic scepticism or non-realism, and that his remarks suggest that we either cannot defeat scepticism or should not respond to it. When considering the political implications to be derived from this, they tend to arrive at similar conclusions. J.C. Nyíri is typically cited as the paradigm example of a scholar who construed Wittgenstein’s writings in conservative terms.



Scepticism, Therapy, and Leaving the World Alone

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He praises Wittgenstein not just for the conservative implications of his remarks but also for what he sees as his personal conservative beliefs.12 Ernest Gellner’s diatribes against Wittgenstein are equally well known.13 In his sweeping attack in Words and Things, Gellner concluded that Wittgenstein’s remarks “can be described as either neutralist, or conservative, or irrationalist.”14 Based on section 124 of Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI), neutralism means that “philosophy leaves everything as it is,” which means that “to specify the general rules of the game describable as ‘political thinking’ is not to take sides in it or to make moves within it: to specify the rules of chess is not to play chess.” The implications of the rule-following argument are conservative because either “the rules cannot or need not or should not be changed,” or “to change or to specify them is not a move within the game,” or “to change them is extra-philosophical or extra-political.” In Legitimation of Belief, Gellner continued this line of attack, dismissing Wittgenstein’s approach as “the immodest, dogmatic and carte blanche endorsement of all and any ‘form of life’” and as an “uncritical endorsement of each and every little local culture and circle of ideas.”15 Many interpretations of this type are evident in numerous other commentaries published throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including contributions to the edited collections Wittgenstein Centenary Essays,16 The Wittgenstein Legacy,17 The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein,18 and the Italian publication Wittgenstein politico.19 Many of the contributors to these collections continued to take for granted various therapeutic sceptical implications of Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysical claims. But in so doing, they left unanswered, or incompletely answered, questions about exactly what positive implications Wittgenstein’s remarks might have for politics. So Sluga asserted that Wittgenstein came to think of philosophy an “ultimately therapeutic” practice.20 And his attempt to rescue Wittgenstein from anti-realism suggests a profoundly sceptical and conservative picture of socialization. Wittgenstein, he tells us, insisted there was “real knowledge” but that “this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable,” consisting of “things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and our own modifications of this inheritance.” Furthermore, we have “no general reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, in no position to do so.” Garver suggests that Wittgenstein philosophy is “sometimes like pedagogy and sometimes like therapy,” promoting “moderate skepticism” and showing “the contingency of our actual ways of living by inventing crazy language games.”

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Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics

And this has decidedly negative political implications, because “Wittgenstein’s philosophy does not help us improve the world (as medicine and engineering are designed to do) or to act well in the world (as moral rules are designed to do) but only to think in a certain way about life and the world – to see things as they really are and in proper perspective.”21 By the turn of the millennium it had become conventional wisdom for most social scientists and many philosophers to frame Wittgenstein’s remarks within a wide range of therapeutic, sceptical, and antirealist possibilities: we were told that Wittgenstein’s remarks entailed the endorsement of irrationality, scepticism, relativism, linguistic relativism, cultural relativism, cognitive relativism, conceptual relativism, paralysing relativism, extreme relativism, nihilism, linguistic idealism, anti-realism, a repudiation of rational foundations, and the primacy of instinct and will over judgment and intellect.22 Bouveresse argues that Wittgenstein’s work could be described as consisting in “putting the world with the infinite diversity that it contains … to one side.”23 Trigg denounces Wittgenstein for his “direct onslaught on the very possibility of rationality,” a view of philosophy that “emasculates it.” 24 No wonder we need therapy. But seriously, what many commentators take for granted – what “makes someone a Wittgensteinian,” as Grayling writes – “is his or her adherence” to an account of philosophy as pathological and, accordingly “of philosophical investigation as therapy.”25 I am not suggesting that these conclusions are universally or uniformly shared. There is no consensus on Wittgenstein’s presumed therapeutic scepticism, or that it is inherently conservative, negative, neutral, or contingent. But even those who try to distance themselves from certain aspects of this picture tend to hold others fast. The most obvious examples of this tendency are the many commentators who have attempted to rescue Wittgenstein from conservatism while remaining firmly anchored in the therapeutic sceptical picture, which they do not question. They argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks promote or concede political indifference and neutrality, or estrangement and alienation. Others, though, have sought to articulate substantive and critical political implications.26 A case in point is Naomi Scheman, who offers an “explicitly political reading” of form of life as a “view of diaspora.” She argues that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can best be understood in light of his unacknowledged politicized identities: Jewish, queer, Austrian expatriate, unconventional philosopher, intellectual and social outsider. Mobilizing a variety of feminist, rabbinical,



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ecological, and queer epistemologies, Scheman claims that a form of life illustrates marginality, “our inability to recognize our home when we are in it.” On this view, the form of life (“home”) is neither a “presently existing location” nor a “true Platonic home,” nor is it something in order just as it is, nor is it “some place of transcendence.” These views entail that there are those who are either “wholly native” to the practices in a form of life (a transcendental view) or “wholly strangers” to those practices (a view from nowhere). But there is another form of life – the “outsider within” – those who are “neither stranger nor native” to the diasporic identity, the view of the marginalized. This innovative interpretation promised to be a reading of Wittgenstein exhibiting “fully robust realism.” But the operating logic of Scheman’s therapeutic approach compromised this pledge, as is clear from her concluding statement, in which she argues that accepting the “unseemly contingencies of being human” has radically subjective and almost nihilistic ramifications.27 Marxian Wittgensteinians Some of the most cogent arguments against Wittgenstein’s conservatism are found among adherents to a tradition of interpretation (sometimes partly inspired by and in response to Winch) that draws comparisons between Wittgenstein and Marx. Perhaps it is not surprising that schisms and tensions abound here: while some dismiss Wittgenstein as a conservative, conformist defender of ruling-class ideology,28 others try to rescue him from such characterizations by emphasizing the concepts of reflexivity and praxis and by attributing to him a method of immanent critique.29 Nevertheless, the tenacity of therapeutic scepticism prevails even among Marxian interpreters, and this is evident with some commentators represented in the edited collection Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics.30 While all of the contributors reject the notion that Wittgenstein was a “purely” linguistic or idealist philosopher, some do not fully deny his sceptical and relativist tendencies. The best reply they can muster, in the words of co-editor Gavin Kitching, is that Wittgenstein is “much less” of a cultural relativist than “sometimes supposed” and “a lot less sceptical about the possibilities of cross-cultural explanation and understanding than is often supposed.” Many commentators take for granted Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach and go on to explore similarities with Marx’s therapeutic tendencies.31 As Read succinctly explains,

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“the reason” that Wittgenstein “can profitably be compared with Marx” is precisely because “our culture, in the deepest sense of those words, needs therapy.” As for the politics of all this, Uschanov explains that while Wittgenstein’s philosophy may have been “largely apolitical,” this doesn’t necessarily lead to conservatism, relativism, “or any other politically or morally undesirable consequences,” although “it can facilitate them if one doesn’t watch out.”32 One of the co-editors, Nigel Pleasants, deliberately endorses these negative implications of his “therapeutic process,” in the sense that “Wittgenstein has nothing substantive to teach about the things which arouse one’s philosophical (and practical) puzzlement”; furthermore, his concepts of language-game, form of life, rule following, and grammar have “no particular explanatory” significance, and his remarks on language and meaning have no “special bearing on how to think about, or see, social, political or moral life other than as demonstration of a fruitful attitude to assume when addressing such issues.” What therapy does produce is a “change in attitude” from which we can learn, and apply to new problems that are necessarily “of personal interest and significance.” So, it is precisely because of its political indifference and its lack of substance that Pleasants finds liberating this therapeutic reading of “Wittgenstein’s approach” (what he calls Wittgenstein’s “attitude”), in that it stimulates a critical attitude that can be extended to social, political, and moral life.33 For the Marxians at least, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic scepticism, with its negative and indifferent politics, saves him from conservatism and opens up a space for radical political thought and action. Cavell and His Legacy I turn now to one of the most important and influential proponents of the therapeutic sceptical reading, Stanley Cavell. I propose the following argument as a friendly amendment for those who would emphasize the central importance of Peter Winch’s conceptual analysis. Winch is widely recognized as one of the first to explore the implications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for the social sciences.34 Pleasants attaches special importance to Winch for establishing the parameters for social and political theorists, as well as for setting the mould for subsequent social scientific uses of Wittgenstein to the extent that “Wittgenstein is almost automatically identified” with his interpretation.35 This might indeed be true for some social theorists (or what Pleasants calls “social



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theoretical interpreters”), and in particular for some Marxian and critical understandings of Wittgenstein, but it is not true for all, and especially not for all contemporary moral and political theorists. In fact, when it comes to the study of politics, whether we call it philosophy, theory, thought, or science, there is compelling evidence that it is Cavell’s analysis, not Winch’s, that has set the parameters for political debate.36 This becomes clear when we survey the myriad commentators and schools of thought paying homage to Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, and especially first-wave Wittgensteinian political theorists like Pitkin and Danford, pragmatists like Rorty, New Wittgensteinians, democratic/liberal Wittgensteinians, and feminists. Cavell introduces us to his therapeutic sceptical argument in one of the most widely cited essays on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” first published in 1962 and reprinted at least twice.37 Citing PI, s. 133, Cavell argues that Wittgenstein’s reference to “different methods” is therapeutic in the sense that it means “methods for acquiring self-knowledge,” and that “knowing oneself is something for which there are different methods,” which is to say “something that can be taught and practiced.” He tells us that Wittgenstein’s method is based on the idea that it is an “illusion” to ignore ordinary language, that is, to think that one knows or equally that one does not know “something as it really is,” what Kant called things-in-themselves. Instead, Wittgenstein’s style is confessional, “deeply practical and negative, the way Freud’s is.” And “like Freud’s therapy,” confessing is a way to acquire “self-scrutiny,” “self-knowledge”; and it is intended “to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change.” Citing PI, ss. 108 and 115, Cavell suggests that both Wittgenstein and Freud “are intent upon unmasking the defeat of our real need in the face of self-impositions which we have not assessed … or fantasies (‘pictures’) which we cannot escape.”38 The therapeutic sceptical activity articulated here is twofold: doubting that we can really know or understand something outside ordinary language and outside the self; and confessing, which is a practice of self-scrutiny. The goal of this therapeutic scepticism is to acquire self-knowledge and to free ourselves from the illusion of extra-ordinary understanding situated beyond the self. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell continues this line of argument that Wittgenstein’s originality lay in making methodical the goals of self-scrutiny and self-knowledge. And this therapeutic method is based on his embracing “the truth of skepticism” in two ways: he “affirms” and takes as “as undeniable” the “concluding thesis of

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skepticism,” which is, that we neither know nor fail to know with certainty the existence of the external world or of other minds; and this implies “an expression of skepticism” that Cavell calls “an argument from or by analogy,” which is, “that we know of others by analogy with ourselves.” Cavell describes Wittgenstein’s scepticism about knowing others and the external world as “an acknowledgement of human limitation” and a picture of “human finitude.” To accept finitude is to admit our intellectual limitations, it is to recognize our powerlessness to know the world and to accept the “precariousness and arbitrariness” and “the utter contingency” of existence. It is to recognize that when we try to speak outside language games, “we no longer know what we mean.” It is to know that “with respect to others,” we can and do live our scepticism. And all of this is intended “to reclaim the human self from its denial and neglect by modern philosophy.”39 In subsequent publications, Cavell reiterates and reaffirms his thesis that Wittgenstein promotes a therapeutic sceptical “argument of the ordinary,” whose task resembles a tradition in philosophy that seeks “liberation from the bonds of illusion, superstition, bewitchment, fanaticism, and self distortion.”40 Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein generated considerable discussion and became highly influential among political philosophers studying Wittgenstein. And while the various commentaries have emphasized different aspects of his interpretation, the concept of therapy is typically mentioned as fundamental. Goodman, for example, describes Cavell as “the first writer,” in fact, “to take seriously the therapeutic nature” of Wittgenstein’s method. And Kuusela concludes his book by paying homage to Cavell’s therapeutic approach.41 Others identify the centrality of his sceptical interpretation,42 although some are reluctant to clearly affix this label to Cavell’s approach to Wittgenstein. Consider, for example, Putnam’s argument that scepticism is “the key” to understanding Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein,43 and Mulhall’s claim that Cavell offers a “distinctive interpretation” of Wittgenstein’s scepticism. The key, distinctive interpretation attributed to Cavell is that Wittgenstein is not trying to solve the problem of scepticism but rather to elucidate its inexorability. On this reading, the sceptic’s arguments do not clearly fail to make sense, but neither do they clearly make sense. Thus, Putnam argues, Cavell‘s Wittgenstein is not out to refute scepticism, but neither does he embrace it. Likewise, Mulhall argues that Cavell‘s Wittgenstein assumes that the sceptic’s challenge must be neither accepted on its own terms nor rejected as



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nonsensical; rather, it must be interpreted as an “undismissable threat, a shadow that ordinary language cannot avoid casting.”44 My reading differs from those of Putnam and Mulhall in a nuanced respect: they emphasize that Cavell’s Wittgenstein doubts scepticism, and on this point we agree, but they also suggest that he concedes our vulnerability to its inevitable grasp; in contrast, I suggest that there is another example of scepticism at play here, regarding which it not accurate to say he is expressing a concession, which is to say grudging acknowledgment. While Cavell’s Wittgenstein doubts a certain kind of scepticism, on the other hand, he readily affirms another kind of scepticism as something to be espoused because it cures, and liberates, and because (as Rorty aptly concludes) this form of scepticism opens our eyes to important aspects of the human condition.45 So Putnam and Mulhall are correct to point out that Cavell rejects as “untrue” the idea that Wittgenstein refutes scepticism, but they gloss over (or cannot see) the particular kind of scepticism that Cavell’s Wittgenstein actually endorses. In other words, there is no unitary concept of scepticism here. Cavell defines scepticism as “the very raising of the question of knowledge in a certain form, or spirit,” and he insists this approach is “affecting that air” in Wittgenstein’s writing.46 Cavell does not accept the sceptic’s challenge on its own terms but does accept the terms of a different kind of scepticism, and he deliberately points to Wittgenstein as a source of this way of thinking. In other words, according to him, Wittgenstein’s remarks do not refute or dismiss scepticism and in fact promote the therapeutic sceptical practices of doubting and confessional self-scrutiny. My argument has been that there is evidence that Cavell sees in Wittgenstein a kind of scepticism about knowing others and the external world, a scepticism that emphasizes our limited capabilities, and that prescribes a therapy that frees us from self-imposed illusions, and that cures our cravings for metaphysical certainty. Because this therapeutic scepticism is, to use Cavell’s own word, “negative,” its aim is to expose illusion and promote “inner change.” Because it is not intended to produce any kind of discernible moral or political alternative, Cavell did not fully explain in these early writings the implications of Wittgenstein’s remarks for the study of politics. But he directly influenced a variety of scholars who have repeatedly acknowledged their debt to his approach to Wittgenstein. Noticing Cavell’s tendency to interpret Wittgenstein in this way, many commentators have taken for granted the validity of this approach and have gone on to infer political implications. The most significant impact of Cavell’s reading has been that

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notwithstanding their differences, it has helped steer these commentators away from construing Wittgenstein in conservative terms. Let us turn to three particularly noteworthy early examples that pay homage to Cavell’s therapeutic sceptical reading: Pitkin and Danford, who were among the first to address directly the relevance of Wittgenstein’s remarks for the study of politics; and Rorty, who praised Cavell’s sceptical construal of Wittgenstein and whose pragmatic and ironic conception of politics is articulated largely within its parameters. Pitkin and Danford: Personal not Political Hannah Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice is where the influence of Cavell’s therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein becomes evident for the first time as a genre of political science; indeed, Pitkin throughout her book acknowledges this intellectual debt to him.47 She repeats Cavell’s contention that “like Freudian therapy,” Wittgenstein “‘wishes to prevent understanding that is unaccompanied by inner change,’” and she reiterates Cavell’s claim that Wittgenstein is like Freud because “he is concerned to liberate us from illusion, from ‘mental pictures’ which ‘hold us captive.’” Mobilizing Cavell’s sceptical interpretation, she proceeds to rebut claims that Wittgenstein’s remarks are conservative on the grounds that they are merely negative or neutral, silent, apolitical, or that they promote political indifference and a focus on the self, saying nothing at all about politics. Wittgenstein, she argues, had nothing “positive and constructive to offer” except this personal therapy, which prescribes “unconditional acceptance” of “what truly cannot be changed” and “withdrawing temporarily from substantive engagement with the world into a kind of introspective contemplation.” in order to improve “self knowledge.”48 So Pitkin is exemplary in promoting an interpretation of political indifference – that Wittgenstein’s remarks promote no politics at all. But she comes to this by way of another argument that seems to advance an idea of language that is inconsistent with Wittgenstein’s own remarks. Pitkin’s reply to Wittgenstein’s presumed conservatism is based on a distinction between language and its use – for example, in political activity – and likewise on a distinction between Wittgenstein’s views on language and his views on politics. While conceding that Wittgenstein’s views on language and forms of life are conservative, she argues that this does not entail a conservative political philosophy, for he was “not a political theorist” and offers no political philosophy at



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all. Compared to that of Oakeshott, Wittgenstein’s view of language is conservative because of its stress on the complexity and plurality of cases and “how individual innovations are deeply controlled.”49 Nevertheless, we “need not apply to politics” this conservative image because “there are important ways that political membership is not like membership in a language group, or a culture, or even a society.” Pitkin cites three areas of difference. First, political action is collective and public, and innovation and change are intentional and deliberate. Second, while politics is defined by “conflict, power and interest,” language is not.50 The third difference has to do with mechanisms of enforcement. The laws, norms, and regulations of a political order are actively enforced, typically through a specialized agency, and carry sanctions to ensure obedience and prevent violation. In contrast, the rules of culture and language are not obeyed, imposed, or enforced; rather, they are internalized.51 Pitkin is correct to point out that Wittgenstein offered no specific views on politics. She is also correct that political language games may differ from non-political ones, since indeed there are important differences between political groups and language groups. But the differences may not be in the ways she suggests. For example, there are varieties of political languages that cannot be reduced to conflict, power, and interest. And Pitkin neglects to mention the similarities between political membership and membership in language groups. For example, as I will discuss in chapter 2, if we take seriously Wittgenstein’s remarks about training (and Pitkin does), the differences between political and linguistic obedience may not be so clearly distinct. Sometimes political practices are also internalized; and, as the case of Quebec clearly demonstrates, sometimes reasonably democratic laws relating to culture and language are legitimately enforced with sanctions, by means of a specialized agency. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s own remarks seem to defy the suggestion that linguistic action is as Pitkin claims. She suggests there is a difference between language and its use – for example, in political activity. Also, her position rests on a distinction between politics and the language of politics. But this distinction is at odds with Wittgenstein’s basic thesis that language is social practice, a form of life, which is to say that the boundary between language and the practice of politics is blurred. These limitations notwithstanding, Pitkin’s main point is that political action is different from language use as such and that Wittgenstein was not a political theorist. His remarks simply tell us nothing about politics; they are politically indifferent. This view, which

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is largely taken for granted by many who try to understand what influence (if any) Wittgenstein’s remarks have had for the study of politics, is evident in the second significant attempt to articulate an expressly Wittgensteinian political philosophy, that of John Danford. Danford’s Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy reached conclusions similar to those of Cavell and Pitkin, whose writings he approvingly cites.52 His survey of PI and The Blue and Brown Books (hereafter BB) is a clear, accurate, and accessible exegesis, and his innovation was to apply these sources to interpreting particular examples of classic texts in political science, such as the writings of Hobbes and Locke, and to draw comparisons with Plato and Aristotle. The aspects of Danford’s analysis to which I want to draw specific attention have to do with his depiction of Wittgenstein in terms that are both conservative and politically indifferent. For example, referring to the cave metaphor as a “linguistic cave,” Danford contrasts Plato, who argued that we must escape from it, with Wittgenstein, who teaches us that the cave “must be accepted as our permanent home.” So, like Cavell and Pitkin, he argues that philosophy can at best help us understand “what is in the cave” and can concern itself “only with coming to understand better one’s linguistic cave.”53 Like the others, Danford attaches special importance to the therapeutic argument; for example, he cites PI, s. 255, when arguing that the task of philosophy is “the cure for intellectual diseases, for tormenting puzzles of the mind.” Following this Cavellian interpretation, he concludes that “if philosophy is useful, for Wittgenstein, it is useful on a personal or individual level.” This, he suggests, might explain why Wittgenstein did not write political philosophy, in that “politics … is a phenomenon we may ignore or not as we please.” Danford suggests that because philosophy is deeply personal, there may be only a variety of caves and “no standard of comparison.” And he concludes with deep pessimism that “political philosophy, which is the name for the enterprise of comparison, is no longer a possibility.”54 Rorty’s Pragmatic Construal of Cavell’s Scepticism In his review of The Claim of Reason, titled “Cavell on Skepticism” (first published in 1981 in Review of Metaphysics and reprinted in Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism and in the edited collection Contending with Stanley Cavell), Rorty ranks Cavell’s work as “one the best books on moral philosophy,” principally because “it helps us realize what Wittgenstein did for us.”55 What he did was give us a kind of scepticism that



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illuminates a knowledge of the self and the human condition. Rorty’s essay acknowledges two connected aspects of Cavell’s construal of sceptical self-knowledge: it realizes the impossibility of a knowledge unmediated by descriptions and language games; and it recognizes human finitude, that is, the precariousness and arbitrariness of existence, and the Sartrean sense of “the sheer contingency of things.”56 Naturally, Rorty’s praise is qualified. He complains that Cavell incorrectly conflates external world scepticism with a narrow, professional, or “textbook” kind of epistemological scepticism taught by philosophy professors. Here, Rorty’s position differs from Cavell’s in important respects. His is not an epistemological scepticism about knowing other minds or the external world; rather, it entails a “suspicion about the pretensions of epistemology,”57 doubt about the use of such vocabulary at all, and the rejection of the whole Kantian project of distinguishing our ideas, our words, our language games, our forms of life, and the way the world actually is in itself. Rorty describes external world scepticism as just another example of a much more general phenomenon, namely, “the attempt to convert the human condition … into an intellectual difficulty” and “to generalize our way out of common sense.” Notwithstanding these complaints, Rorty applauds Cavell’s orientation to finitude because it entails rejecting any quest for binding moral rules, self-evident principles, and foundations of moral obligation. He admires Cavell’s effort “to reclaim the human self from its denial and neglect by modern philosophy” by acknowledging the impossibility of getting outside language games and escaping history, humanity, and finitude. Rorty concludes by praising Cavell for his construal of Wittgenstein as a critic of the moral worth of the discipline of philosophy and as one of the “friends of finitude.”58 One of the clearest articulations of Rorty’s position is a fascinating exchange with Charles Taylor published in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism. Here Rorty argues, like Quine and Davidson, that we ought to drop the “third dogma of empiricism” and suspend any judgment about whether we can find – indeed, should find – a metaphysical language that adequately represents reality or corresponds to the truth independent of our descriptions. Instead we should put “all questions about truth, realism, and correspondence to one side.” Following Davidson, this entails dropping the scheme/content distinction and similar Kantian form/matter metaphors and thereby discarding the idea of the thing-in-itself, the notion that things have “intrinsic, nondescription-relative, features.”59 Rorty proposes that since there is no

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description independence, no way to “step outside the various vocabularies,”60 we should drop “the whole project of distinguishing between what is to be treated ‘realistically and ‘non-realistically’” and “stop trying to say anything general about the relation between language and reality.”61 In other words, there is “no point” to asking whether there is a “truth of the matter” or a “fact of the matter.” Clearly, Rorty is sceptical about the very distinction between realism and anti-realism. He refuses to accept any “description-independent way the world is.” He rejects the labels “non-realism” and “linguistic idealism” as descriptions of his approach because they take for granted that which he is calling into question: the very distinction between language and reality. Instead, Rorty describes himself as a pragmatist and as a “wholehearted naturalist” who avoids reductionism.62 His naturalist sympathies include the venerable form of explanation in the natural sciences – namely, causality.63 He describes this approach as a pragmatism that sees futility in the quest for foundations and conceptual frameworks – a lesson he has learned in part from Wittgenstein.64 There are some important differences between Rorty and Cavell, but there are also conspicuous similarities in the way they mobilize Wittgenstein – specifically, Cavell’s sceptical construal of Wittgenstein figures prominently in Rorty’s own philosophical orientation. He labels the sceptical approach “central” to Wittgenstein’s attitude,65 and he singles out Cavell as a founder of this approach, along with T.S. Kuhn, whose philosophy of science was directly influenced by Cavell. He cites with approval these “Wittgensteinian writers,” whose “Wittgensteinian philosophy” he brands “skepticism about the post-Renaissance philosophical tradition,” which at its best is “pure satire” that avoids constructive criticism.66 Another important similarity with Cavell – something that Rorty tells us he learned from Quine – is that Wittgenstein’s method is construed as therapy. This has prompted Guignon to observe that on Rorty’s interpretation, “the writings of Wittgenstein are primarily therapeutic and negative, clearing away the presuppositions of traditional philosophy and offering nothing new in their place.”67 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty deliberately endorses the therapeutic reading, calling Wittgenstein’s approach satirical, “essentially reactive,” and “therapeutic rather than constructive”; and he characterizes the aim of this therapy as a cure for epistemological delusions.68 He also connects this therapy to the kind of scepticism he has been talking about, placing Wittgenstein among a group of “edifying” philosophers,



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which is to say “peripheral, pragmatic philosophers” who are “skeptical primarily about systematic philosophy, about the whole project of universal commensuration.” This scepticism involves a “distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences”; doubt about progress; the view that justified true belief is merely conformity to the norms of the day; a “historicist sense” that there is little difference between superstition and reason; and a “relativist sense” that the language of natural science is not a privileged epistemology, “but just another of the potential infinity of vocabularies in which the world can be described.” Rorty describes Wittgenstein’s approach as a cure for such epistemological fallacies, as a therapy for the delusion that there are epistemological problems and as a cure for the epistemological obsession with certainty, for a universal final language, for “foundations to serve as common ground for adjudicating knowledge claims.”69 And all of this amounts to a rejection of what Dunn calls the juridical conception of philosophy as a competent judge. In Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Rorty distances himself from words like “scepticism” and “realism.” But he still speaks against foundations, and he continues to mobilize Wittgenstein’s remarks in this campaign, describing his account of language as a cure for such deep metaphysical needs. Wittgenstein is prominent among a small group of philosophers who recognize the “sheer contingency” of language and who promote the view that “everything – our language, our conscience, our community” – is “accidents of socialization” and products of “time and chance.”70 The Political Implications of Rorty’s Pragmatism Rorty tells us that the politics to be derived from his therapeutic approach arise from his practice of radical continuing doubt – what he calls irony – and its related concept, contingency.71 I want to highlight one aspect of this politics that is particularly relevant to the present discussion: the way in which Rorty privileges socialization and accidental consequences and de-emphasizes the role of intended action and reasonable dialogue. He promotes the view that political institutions, beliefs, and practices, as well as changes from one language game to another, are all more the product of habit, historical accident, and random, unintended circumstances than of objective or subjective criteria or reasons or good political arguments. Changes in beliefs and culture, he tells us, do not result from applying criteria or “arguing well.” So whether we speak of “Romantic poetry, or of socialist

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politics, or of Galilean mechanics,” the adoption of such beliefs has been based on the fact that “Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.” Elsewhere he explains that politics as he sees it is “a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms and compromises” that must be defended in nonesoteric terms.72 In sum, Rorty’s orientation emphasizes an unintended piecemeal, gradual approach, one that privileges conditioning, causal contingency, fortunate happenstance, and historical accident as primary explanations for the genesis of political ideas and for changes in political beliefs. My point here is not to provide a general overview of Rorty’s approach but to consider specifically how he reads Wittgenstein and what politics he derives from this reading. It is important to underscore that Rorty always cites Wittgenstein as one of the primary sources of his philosophical orientation. And despite important differences, Rorty’s approach is strikingly similar to Cavell’s in that he describes Wittgenstein’s remarks as a form of therapeutic scepticism. Another important similarity is that Rorty leaves us scratching our heads over exactly what positive implications Wittgenstein’s remarks might have for politics. This he concedes in response to critical remarks from Ernesto Lauclau, who expresses doubts about whether we can derive any particular politics at all from Rorty’s pragmatic approach, and who suspects that the concept of irony cannot adequately describe morality either, because it has overtones of “offhandish detachment.” Rorty agrees that irony does have such overtones. Furthermore, he confesses “doubt that philosophy (even pragmatist philosophy) is ever going to be very useful for politics,” and he grants that whatever utility it may have is likely “a matter of occasional suggestiveness rather than of grounding.”73 I want to return to this point when we examine our case studies: for Rorty, in the absence of a metaphysical foundation, and indeed any grounding, there is only radical continuing doubt, and this is why we are justified in including him among the sceptical school of interpretation. Like Cavell, Rorty sees in Wittgenstein a philosophical orientation drenched in radical continuing therapeutic doubt. Having nothing positive or constructive to offer, its aim is negative and reactive – to free us from metaphysical illusions and epistemological puzzles so that we achieve a kind of self-knowledge. That is, to enable us to realize the sheer contingency of existence and to recognize our finite and limited abilities to know or understand anything outside our descriptions and langu­ age games.



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The New Wittgenstein I have surveyed Cavell’s therapeutic scepticism, its elaboration in Pitkin and Danford, and its resonance with Rorty. On the grounds that Wittgenstein’s remarks have dubious utility for politics, promote political indifference, and do not necessarily advocate any particular politics at all, these commentators avoid jumping to conservative conclusions. Of course we should not lose sight of the differences among these authors, particularly between Rorty and Cavell, but they have a lot more in common than those sympathetic to Cavell’s approach might be prepared to admit. A case in point is Alice Crary and the self-styled “new Wittgenstein” interpretation promoted by a family of scholars, most notably although not exclusively in The New Wittgenstein, a book whose basic premise is that “Wittgenstein’s primary aim in philosophy” is therapeutic.74 In her introduction to that collection, which she co-edited, Crary begins by making Wittgenstein’s remarks about therapy the centrepiece; she then credits Cavell as one of the founders of this therapeutic reading and justifies including in the collection a reprinted version of chapter 7 of The Claim of Reason based on “the forcefulness with which it describes such a reading.” What is supposed to be unorthodox about this reading is that the contributors reject what Crary calls the standard interpretations that speak of a decisive break and discontinuity between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his later writings. Instead they argue that the therapeutic argument is both essential and continuous in Wittgenstein’s philosophy and in all his published and unpublished work – she refers to it as a characteristic or signature “gesture” and as “fundamental” to the Tractatus and all his subsequent writings. Crary’s therapy starts from three related premises. The first is that Wittgenstein’s aim is to get us to see that any attempt we make to survey language from an external standpoint outside our forms of life, or to explain our lives from a metaphysical vantage point, betrays confusion and illusion and is patent nonsense. The second is that repudiating such nonsense, and abandoning such a standpoint, is “without consequences for our entitlement to our basic epistemic ideals.” In other words, we cannot draw any substantive or positive epistemic conclusions, doctrines, or theories from the negation of nonsense. The third is that we should simply pay attention to the ordinary, everyday meanings of indeterminate, non-metaphysical uses and practices of words and linguistic expressions. The aim of Wittgenstein’s approach, then, is to detect and expose as incoherent nonsense any theories or explanations

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based on a fixed metaphysical standpoint, while at the same time “not developing anything that could be properly be described as a philosophical explanation” to replace it. In a nutshell, then, the three aspects that underline Crary’s therapeutic approach are as follows: detect, expose, and repudiate metaphysical nonsense and any unintelligible thesis (such as the illusion of an external metaphysical standpoint); avoid drawing substantive conclusions from the negation of nonsense; and accord primacy to indeterminate ordinary use.75 In her other contribution to the collection, Crary mobilizes this therapeutic approach to address the ongoing debate about the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for political thought.76 Underlying this debate is a core error that she labels “inviolability assumptions” – namely, since there is no external metaphysical vantage point independent of use, it follows that meaning is determined and fixed by use, or by logically necessary linguistic conventions; thus, external criticism of our forms of life is prohibited and impossible (they are immune or inviolable), but internal critical assessment is permissible of our everyday uses, forms of life, and practices. According to Crary, the error here is not the first assumption, which correctly acknowledges the first premise of therapy (no external standard), but rather the two subsequent assumptions. The error is that they flow from a “use-theory” of meaning that presumes to offer epistemic insights on the determination of meaning and on prohibited and permissible forms of criticism. These insights contradict therapy’s two other premises: the injunction against deriving substantive epistemic conclusions, and the primacy of indeterminate ordinary use. With this, Crary turns specifically to ethical and political considerations. She argues that the inviolability assumptions fuel conclusions that are varieties of ethical or cultural relativism and anti-realism, which are associated with two conflicting substantive epistemic and political conclusions – namely, that Wittgenstein’s thought favours conservative and relativist political attitudes, because our critical practices are deeply conventionalist (they are inviolable and logically necessary contexts); or that Wittgenstein’s philosophy can help us understand anti-realist and radical political attitudes because our critical practices are radically contingent (a position that Crary attributes to Rorty). She rejects both conclusions on the ground that they misconstrue Wittgenstein’s view of the limits of criticism, and the limits of sense, which is to say Wittgenstein’s use of nonsense as a term of philosophical appraisal and criticism. These limits do not license inviolability because no



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substantive epistemic conclusions or philosophical explanations can be derived from the absence of a fixed external standpoint. At the same time, such limits don’t preclude criticism of our lives or the lives of others; it’s just that he intends this to apply to something very narrow and restricted – the “limits drawn in language.” This means that Wittgenstein’s sole aim is to expose those occasions when we might think we are engaged in critical assessment of ourselves or others but really have no idea what we are saying, or words fail us. Consequently, the lessons that Wittgenstein’s philosophy offers to political thought are to remind us that our critical faculties are limited to “everyday practices of criticism” and that we should “use our imagination in a variety of ways, to seek new experiences which help us to refine our sensitivities and so on.”77 There are two somewhat problematic aspects of Crary’s argument. A smaller point is that it just sounds like a much more complicated way of reiterating what Cavell and his followers have already said. Crary disagrees with the conservative argument on the ground that you can’t derive substantive political conclusions from Wittgenstein’s therapeutic aspiration. This is more or less the position of Pitkin and Danford, albeit with some differences in emphasis in that Wittgenstein’s therapy is not just negative but apolitical and introspective. What is problematic is that in targeting Rorty’s claims about contingency, Crary seems to be mischaracterizing his position, or at the very least glossing over similarities. Recall that Rorty articulates a position that more or less agrees with Crary’s essential point, which is that Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach has nothing constructive to offer and entails dubious moral or political consequences because it is entirely negative, ironic, satirical, and reactive, illustrating the sheer contingency of the human condition. Remember also that Rorty’s use of the word contingency pays homage to Cavell’s concept of finitude. That is why Crary’s critical remarks seem to mischaracterize Rorty’s construal of Wittgenstein. If my earlier reading was correct, Rorty’s position is very similar to Crary’s in that his Wittgensteinian position simply disqualifies any discussion about, or refuses to take an unequivocal stand on, any such substantial epistemological ideals. In this sense, his intentions notwithstanding, Rorty is an example of what we could call non-realism, and this similarity points to another predicament concerning Crary’s position. The second problem with Crary’s analysis is that she claims her therapeutic reading does not make Wittgenstein anti-realist; she also refutes suggestions that it aligns with contemporary sceptical trends.78 Yet my

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argument is that Cavell – a contributor to the collection, whom Crary repeatedly cites among her sources – in fact does construe Wittgenstein in sceptical terms; indeed, he might be the progenitor of a contemporary sceptical trend derived from Wittgenstein. To paraphrase him, scepticism is the very activity of doubting knowledge in a certain form and of acknowledging the limits we face, indeed our powerlessness, to know the world and others. This much, so he contends, is evident in Wittgenstein’s remarks. So whatever her protests, Crary does not really succeed in explaining how the therapeutic aspiration of abandoning the metaphysical external standpoint of fixed use and replacing it with “nonsense” as a term of appraisal precludes scepticism, nor does she adequately explain how this inoculates her position from anti-realism. At the very least, and by her own admission, detecting nonsense is a practice of non-realism because it refuses a priori to take a clear stand on the roles that the truth and rational arguments play in arbitrating moral and political disputes. As Charles Taylor elegantly reminds us, moral realism is partly a claim about evaluating our own form of life or another that may be strange to us – as, say, erroneous or confused or qualitatively better or worse – and about the possibility of ranking moral positions and arbitrating moral dilemmas that may arise from conflicting practices, and all of this in a way does not bracket the truth. To avoid the charge of anti-realism, we must be prepared to admit some identifiable standard of correctness or error. This does not necessarily mean we will automatically agree on such a standard, or find a ranking, or that we will always dissolve moral dilemmas. But we are never forced to abandon the attempt, to logically stop trying.79 Crary’s position is what I would characterize as non-realism because her claim all along is that Wittgenstein is not interested in such questions. Cora Diamond appears to articulate this same sentiment when she claims that Wittgenstein’s classification does not concern the moral predicates (what is good and evil, brave and cowardly) reflected in a particular group of moral properties (things like rightness or wrongness, bravery or cowardice). He is only interested in different uses. The presence of moral thought may be reflected in language use, she argues, “not in the use of moral predicates, tied to moral properties, but in the ways we use language.” Therefore, what is ethical belongs to the “resources of language.”80 So on Crary’s view, apart from knowing what agents are doing – their ordinary, non-metaphysical, “philosophically innocent” uses – we are not entitled to any substantive explanations or epistemic conclusions,



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although she concludes with a curious quasi-empiricist claim that our ability to evaluate the correctness or incorrectness in others’ practices “depends on nothing more and nothing less than our ability to perceive regularity” in those practices. Otherwise, Crary’s whole point all along is to get us to see that reflective understanding will be met not by a language that proceeds from outside our lived experience, but rather “by explanations grounded in the ordinary circumstances of those lives.”81 Even if that were true, her own method cannot adequately explain how contested explanations grounded in conflicting ways of life are arbitrated because this would require admitting to substantive conclusions of the sort her own method disqualifies. Therefore the practical consequence of Crary’s therapeutic practice, unintended or not, is a kind of moral self-denial and political inarticulateness. In this sense it is also a kind of scepticism or non-realism because it logically prevents us from resolving conflicts over the various substantive epistemic or political ideals of which we dare not speak. Democratic/Liberal Wittgensteinians Like the new Wittgensteinians, a number of other political philosophers working within Cavell’s therapeutic sceptical parameters follow his appeal to the ordinary, as well as his emphasis on self-knowledge; but unlike Crary and her adherents, they typically differentiate Wittgenstein’s early and later writings, focusing on his post-1930 methodological orientation, and they are not as resolute in denying substantive or positive political conclusions. On the contrary, they retrieve what they see as Wittgenstein’s critical, creative, and transformative possibilities. These ordinary grammar political philosophers accept two of the premises evident in Crary’s construal of the therapeutic argument: first, that Wittgenstein’s remarks are intended to make visible our captivity to particular political grammars or pictures that mask themselves as abstract, generic, or universal concepts outside language games (the erroneous presumption of a metaphysical standpoint outside forms of life); and second, that those remarks remind us that we can break the spell of such pictures through a therapy of returning political concepts to ordinary, everyday, particular cases and contexts (the primacy of indeterminate ordinary forms of life). Either way, this approach does not logically disqualify positive conclusions. On the contrary, therapy liberates our moral imaginations, makes room for creative, idiosyncratic, and imaginative alternatives, reveals how we become democratic

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subjects, and discloses the possibility of political contestation, resistance, and new and existing political practices shaping our lives that may have been hidden or unintelligible. These conclusions are also due to the fact that these authors draw connections to another idea developed by Cavell – the notion of a “conversation of justice” “in which various political possibilities can be articulated.”82 These productive and robust methodological and political conclusions are reached by many of the contributors to Cressida Heyes’s The Grammar of Politics. Heyes characterizes Wittgenstein’s attitude to politics and social change as “deeply sceptical” and as “characterized by skepticism about what philosophy can do.” Nevertheless, the core themes of her edited collection all entail rebutting readings of Wittgenstein as “a sceptical conservative or hapless relativist” and offering more constructive appropriations. Like Crary, Heyes introduces this book by granting primary importance to Wittgenstein’s remarks about therapy, beginning with a quote from him on curing sickness, and going on to cite as a “remarkably prescient” example of the book’s orientation Pitkin’s “therapeutic stress on the particular case,” which is to say a refusal to be held captive by generalizations or pictures set outside language games and by an emphasis on ordinary particular examples. This Wittgensteinian therapeutic method of political theory includes an emphasis on his “undoubtedly solipsistic” ethics of self-improvement and self-investigation, and an acceptance of plurality and contradiction. Heyes tells us that these themes are shared by all the contributors to her collection. And in fact it is through Wittgenstein’s method of revealing “the structure and complexity of particular grammars“ that these authors see “the contingency of certain ways of thinking about politics” and thereby imagine political possibilities that, they suggest, Wittgenstein could never have anticipated.83 It must be noted that Heyes also acknowledges Cavell’s pivotal role as a “vital progenitor” of this therapeutic orientation. She points to a “Cavellian tradition in political philosophy,” that is, to a shared commitment to his arguments for a return to the ordinary and to the conversation of justice; an affirmation of a kind of heterogeneity that allows political dissent; and a commitment to the imaginative creation and fostering of “immanent yet sometimes oppositional political languages.”84 I mentioned earlier that what differentiates new Wittgensteinians from democratic ones is that the latter are not as resolute in denying substantive political conclusions, so they disagree that nothing positive can be derived. Wittgenstein’s remarks do not license conservative



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implications, but they do reveal a variety of non-conservative ones. Heyes is exemplary in undermining the conservative argument, replying persuasively to those who might claim that since Wittgenstein did not write political philosophy, therefore we can only infer negative (quietistic) political arguments. On the contrary, she argues that “his ideas have long since escaped his governance.” They “have grown up, moved out, and created families of their own,” and indeed, Heyes’ family members typically do not hesitate to show the non-conservative political implications of Wittgenstein’s remarks.85 But there is one area where the democratic family exihibits important similarities with the new Wittgensteinians and indeed with the other schools of thought surveyed here: their non-conservative conclusions are invariably the consequences of or rooted in various kinds of scepticism or non-realism that are essentially taken for granted as essential to Wittgenstein’s method. What these and many other authors describe is a therapeutic practice of doubt that reveals political vocabulary or grammar that cannot be explained, verified, justified, doubted, or falsified and that neither prevails nor changes due to negotiation, bargaining, better reasons, independent criteria or proofs, new truths, or the force of better arguments. This is what Cerbone calls “a certain skepticism”; what Janik calls Wittgenstein’s “genuinely modest skepticism” and his quietistic spirit; what Eldridge (following Cavell) calls “the threat or truth of skepticism”; what Zerilli calls his “impulse to skepticism”; what Pohlhaus and Wright describe as Wittgenstein’s “skeptical voice”; and what Norval sees as a non-cognitive grammar that is not “answerable to the facts” and not “correct or incorrect.” On the basis of these epistemic commitments, these and other democratic/liberal Wittgensteinians rebut conservatism, deducing instead forms of justice, diversity, substantive liberalism, freedom from various forms of racist and sexist oppression, human rights, political dissent, and social criticism.86 And as we will now see, the same holds true for feminist Wittgensteinians. Feminist Wittgensteinians: A Genre of Political Therapy? The variety of commentaries on Wittgenstein that I have been surveying can be divided between those who either praise or criticize him for his politically conservative implications, and those who do neither because they construe his philosophical remarks as apolitical or indifferent to politics and as thus licensing non-conservative possibilities.

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On the other hand, some argue that his remarks have dubious utility for politics and have no substantive constructive political implications at all. Both critics and defenders take for granted either his conservatism or his political indifference or his political indeterminacy. As Janik observes, how “the world really gets changed for the better” is a matter concerning which, “Wittgenstein believed, nobody has an answer.”87 These are among the dominant themes in some feminist readings of Wittgenstein, including O’Connor’s Oppression and Responsibility, Tanesini’s Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation, and several contributions to the edited collection Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein.88 Heyes captures the spirit of these feminist approaches when she observes that Wittgenstein’s “ontological therapy” or “philosophical therapy” constitutes “one of the most profound modern sources of skepticism toward ‘philosophy’ for its detachment from the world” and that this is “a critique of theory that resonates with much contemporary feminist writing.”89 Because it is politically vague, inexplicit, indefinite, or silent or just indifferent altogether to politics, many of these authors argue that Wittgenstein’s approach should be complemented with feminist ones. O’Connor’s position is a case in point: taking for granted what she considers to be the therapeutic aspects of Wittgenstein’s argument, she tells us she must deviate from “Wittgenstein’s approach,” which she characterizes as a view of philosophy and the philosopher that leaves “everything as it is.”90 Tanesini’s account of Wittgenstein’s political philosophy is equally illustrative. In her Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation, we find a lucid articulation of many of the themes I have been discussing. She reiterates Cavell’s contention that Wittgenstein's remarks explore the truth of scepticism about other minds, and that it does not refute scepticism but tries to weaken its grip. And Tanesini describes Wittgenstein’s approach as an “entirely negative” form of Freudian therapy that cures by uncovering philosophical confusions, dispelling metaphysical illusions, unravelling the knots in our thinking, and bringing words back home to their colloquial ordinary uses. So his therapeutic sceptical impulse expresses a truth about the modern condition, which is “the reality of human finitude.” But it does not offer any theories, or discover new truths, or “build anything new.” Tanesini describes this view of philosophy as “above all” a practice of self-examination, self-improvement, and self-understanding. This therapeutic sceptical method does not necessarily entail a conservative uncritical attitude to the status quo. Rather, Tanesini concedes that Wittgenstein’'s philosophy is “best



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read” as expressing a “disregard for” and “rejection of” politics in favour of a concern with “leading a good life” and becoming “a better human being.”91 A Picture Holds Them Captive I have been exploring a tenacious and pervasive tendency among Wittgenstein scholars who are seeking the political implications of his work. Many are held captive by an unshakeable ideal of interpreting Wittgenstein’s remarks in therapeutic sceptical ways. The many examples surveyed here are obviously not uniform, and some have found different ways of deriving positive implications from Wittgenstein’s method. Still, many decades after Dunn’s commentary, remarkably similar assumptions continue to underlie a great deal of scholarship on the political implications of Wittgenstein’s thought. There continues to be a widely held view that Wittgenstein’s remarks offer a therapeutic form of scepticism whose political implications are either conservative, negative, neutral, or contingent, which is to say that they privilege confession or self-knowledge, or that they are useful on a personal or individual level in terms of self-examination and self-transformation but otherwise offer nothing new and leave the world alone, or that they have altogether unintended or ineffable political consequences. In any case, his remarks do not appear to offer any clear direction or advice on how to criticize and revise our practices, and the various attempts to explain what his philosophy might mean for politics appear to be sublime conjecture. The point is that these conclusions are not obscure or marginal. They resonate throughout the commentaries, and they persevere as the dominant and unquestioned ways that political philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists interpret Wittgenstein today. So it is that Christopher Robinson’s non-conservative position takes for granted the Cavellian idea that “being chained to a given picture of reality is the target of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic skepticism” and that the goal of its confessional method is self-scrutiny. And Matthew J. Moore suggests that all scholars should at least agree that Wittgenstein’s philosophy properly understood is a species of moral irrealism, in the sense that its moral values are contingent and context-relative, so it has no normative implications or political consequences whatsoever. And John Gunnell argues that Wittgenstein intended to change philosophy but otherwise leave the world as it is. The philosopher’s “principal” and “typical” role, Gunnell explains, is to “reform philosophy rather than transforming

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its object of analysis,” and this requires a position of “detachment” or an “ascetic” attitude. So, Wittgenstein did not suggest that philosophy can or should become part of what it studied. The only relationship between philosophy and what it studies is therapeutic, radically practical, contingent and historically variable.92 Having said all this, some may still object to using the word “scepticism” to describe what all of these various commentators are doing, or the word “therapy” as an adjective modifying that use. To justify the employment of these terms, let’s clarify what kind of scepticism we are seeing here. Recall that what is evident among these families of scholars is not necessarily a scepticism that simply asserts that we possess no metaphysically certain or guaranteed criteria or absolute standards for determining which of our judgments, theories, or empirical results are true or false. It is not necessarily a scepticism that merely puts all knowledge claims into doubt and then concludes that nothing can be known. Many argue that this scepticism rejects metaphysics. But to be precise, it does so because it is a kind of scepticism that rejects any philosophical conclusions that are too essentialist, determinate, definitive, or dogmatic.93 So it sometimes raises doubt about the very raising of doubt, which amounts to a suspicion about what conclusions can be derived from doubt, because the activity of doubting depends on what we do not call into question. It is therefore a scepticism that promotes an impartial, non-partisan practice of suspending judgment on all such methodological commitments. In this sense it is a therapeutic scepticism that is meant to cure the conclusions of both philosophical scepticism itself and the craving for generality, along with any philosophical, theoretical, metaphysical, or empirical orientation that calls into question our everyday ordinary contexts and ways of living, or that attempts to render problematic our taken-for-granted background practices and forms of life. On this reading, there appear to be strong resemblances between this kind of scepticism and Popkin’s authoritative understanding of Pyrhonnism as the view that all judgment must be suspended midway between the dogmatist view that we do have knowledge and the academic view that nothing can be known. So, scepticism is a therapy against both of these excessively rash assertions – that we know something, or nothing. This comparison to Pyrrhonism helps clarify what kind of scepticism we are seeing among those who derive political implications from Wittgenstein: like Pyrrhonism, Wittgenstein’s scepticism is a therapeutic activity of suspending judgment. Strictly speaking,



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though, it would probably be misleading to affix to these Wittgensteinians the label “Pyrrhonist,” understood in this conventional sense, and doing so would risk legitimate criticism. This is true for two reasons: not all of these sceptical Wittgensteinians reach the same conclusions that the Pyrrhonists did; and some scholars do not buy into this definition of Pyrrhonism, so using the word “Pyrrhonian” to describe Wittgenstein’s scepticism opens up a debate that is not central to the argument I am making here. While they might tend to agree that Wittgenstein’s practice of doubt constitutes an opposition to dogmatism, and calls for a suspension of judgment, the therapeutic sceptics do not typically conclude that Wittgenstein’s goal was ataraxia, which is a calm, unperturbed peace of mind that is no longer concerned with matters beyond appearances, or that entails living tranquilly according to one’s natural inclinations and in accordance with customary practices without judging them. Furthermore, some commentators such as Robert Fogelin, James Peterson, and David Stern do not necessarily accept Popkin’s interpretation as authoritative; they emphasize instead a different definition of Pyrrhonism – namely, a scepticism about traditional philosophy, not to improve it but to end it. As Stern explains, a number of “Pyrrhonian Wittgensteinians” see Wittgenstein’s work as a form of therapeutic critique in this sense. On this reading, Stern argues, “Wittgenstein offers us a form of skepticism that is aimed not at our everyday life, but at philosophy itself with the aim of putting an end to philosophy and teaching us to get by without a replacement.”94 When I use the word scepticism, and talk about a sceptical construal of Wittgenstein, it is in the sprit of both these variations, which some scholars call Pyrrhonism: that one should avoid epistemological dogmatism, or suspend judgment on any substantive epistemological, moral, or political questions; or that we should doubt whether traditional philosophy can teach us anything about ordinary life. This is probably what Diamond means when she says that Wittgenstein’s remarks are “not about realism in any of its specifically philosophical senses,” that “Wittgenstein himself does not have an alternative general account, but none.”95 And this is why Stern characterizes her position as Pyrrhonist. Nevertheless, to properly focus this discussion on Wittgenstein’s approach rather than any Pyrrhonist orientation, I will avoid using the word “Pyrrhonian” to describe his putative scepticism and instead use the word “therapeutic” as a more authentic and charitable way of describing the kind of scepticism evident among the political Wittgensteinians surveyed here.

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Another thing we have noticed about this therapeutic sceptical orientation is that it can also be the basis of a kind of non-realism or antirealism. I use the term “realism” to describe a position acknowledging that it may be possible to identify standards of correctness or error, which may then serve to arbitrate and reconcile moral dilemmas and political conflicts. Conversely, I employ the terms “non-realism” and “anti-realism” to denote a position that denies any such standards exist and holds that such arbitration is logically impossible, or that suspends judgment on the question of reconciliation, or that is indifferent to or refuses to take sides on the question of truth or correct standards. Some variation of this anti-realism appears to be the approach many commentators take to construing Wittgenstein. As Cerbone explains, Wittgenstein’s scepticism regarding the existence of any testable general theory constitutes a disinterest with regard to the relationship between our concepts and the facts – a position consistent with Norval’s claim that grammar “is not answerable to the facts” and with Zerilli’s argument that contestation cannot be based on new truths or better reasons since much of our world is made up of propositions “that are neither reasonable nor unreasonable.” And Eldridge points out (once again citing Cavell) that what we learn from Wittgenstein is that philosophy succeeds when it is “unpolemical,” which is to say, when it refuses to “take sides in metaphysical positions.”96 On the basis of such epistemic commitments, these and many other political Wittgensteinians have asserted or rebutted conservatism as well as inferred forms of social and economic justice, political dissent, social criticism, human rights, diversity tolerance, and freedom from various forms of oppression (racist, sexist/androcentric, heterosexist/ homophobic, anthropocentric). Of course, these political Wittgensteinians are thereby exposed to the kind of criticism raised by Moore: if Wittgenstein’s position is a form of scepticism or non-realism, then these political outcomes, while they may be attractive and possible, are not necessarily derived from Wittgenstein’s remarks.97 Moore’s point is based on one I’ve been emphasizing all along: it is from the fact that his remarks do not necessarily promote any particular normative or political implications at all that some have deduced that they actually license non-conservative and contingent ones. In the following chapters, I consider a very different reading of Wittgenstein by commentators who neither take therapy for granted nor give it primacy. Nor do they assume that Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach is inherently sceptical. They do not take Wittgenstein’s



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arguments to be admitting the truth of scepticism, nor do they accept scepticism as a threat that cannot be dismissed or as a shadow that ordinary language cannot shake. I will be surveying three case studies that do not derive politically conservative, negative, neutral, or contingent conclusions from Wittgenstein’s remarks. These commentators place special emphasis not on therapy but on dialogue as a genuinely new kind of realist epistemology and ontology, and they derive a variety of substantive epistemic and political lessons from Wittgenstein’s dialogical orientation. They agree there is no fixed external metaphysical standpoint; nevertheless, they accept that many non-metaphysical, provisional, and continually negotiated standpoints and standards may in fact exist. But before we examine these case studies, I want to review another set of assumptions attributed to Wittgenstein’s remarks, which give primacy to training in a shared form of life.

2 The Primacy of Training in a Shared Form of Life

In the previous chapter, I described a therapeutic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks that rested on scepticism and that entailed or licensed conservative, negative, or contingent political views. Here I want to look at a related construal, one that emphasizes the primacy of training in a shared form of life. I will explain how this contributes to the sceptical tendencies I’ve been talking about as well as their various political implications. To sketch the textual sources of this interpretation, I will review the Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI)1 as well as the lectures Wittgenstein gave to his class at Cambridge in 1933 and 1934 and to his students Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose in 1934 and 1935. These lectures were later published as The Blue and Brown Books (hereafter BB),2 named after the coloured folders in which his students kept their notes of them. Here Wittgenstein targets an archetypal description – a “picture” – of learning a language attributed to Augustine that purports to offer “the essence of human language.”3 Wittgenstein talks about this picture because he sees it as “one of the big characteristic features in the use of language, or in thinking.”4 Both The Brown Book and PI begin with Augustine’s explanation in Confessions I.8 of childhood linguistic development. By hearing words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, he “gradually learned to understand what objects they signified.” The reference to Augustine is meant to illustrate a conventional explanation of how language is essentially learned, which is to say how we come to understand the meanings of words. What is essential to understanding a word is “learning the names of things” or what Wittgenstein called the “demonstrative” and “ostensive teaching of words.”5



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For Wittgenstein, this Augustinian description misrepresents the kind of learning that takes place when a child learns to talk. First, while Augustine does describe a system of communication, not everything we call language is as Augustine describes. Second, the Augustinian description ignores the fact that “the teaching of language is not explanation, but training.”6 Ostensive teaching brings about understanding only with “a particular training,” and with different training “the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding.”7 This line of argument appears in The Brown Book, where Wittgenstein argues that “one of the big characteristic features in the use of language” is a form of childhood training in which a teacher induces a child, what he calls “inducement.”8 What Augustine’s description misses is that training induces understanding and that the failure to grasp meaning stems from incomplete inducement or from misunderstanding one’s training.9 Another aspect of language learning that Augustine neglects to mention – one that is “an important part of the training” that takes place in the instruction of language – is that “the use of language” is a “practice.”10 That is, understanding the meaning of a word amounts to an ability to act in a certain way, and the purpose of language training is to impart this practical ability.11 Learning is a practice in which “one party calls out the words” and “the other party acts on them,” in which “children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do, and to react in this way to the words of others.”12 The thesis that when we learn language, we “learn the use,” that we understand the meaning of a word by being “trained to its use,”13 is perhaps most succinctly articulated by the famous proposition that “the meaning of a word is its use in language.”14 This “meaning is use” argument is illustrated by analogy to a simple mechanism.15 Because use confers meaning, a word’s function is unclear when separated from its use. Furthermore, human understanding is knowing this use. Knowing how to use a word is what Wittgenstein calls understanding it. Understanding is knowing how to use a word and how to teach others to do the same. And this knowledge is an ability constituted by the customary practice of using it. Understanding the meaning of a word is an ability that comes from being trained into its normal or conventional employment. And practice does make perfect. As Wittgenstein writes: “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.”16 So Wittgenstein employs analogously, because they are family members, the words

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“know,” “understand,” “ability,” “use,” “technique,” “custom,” and “institution.”17 This explains Wittgenstein’s response to Augustine that in order to understand an ostensive definition, you “must already be master of a language” and you need to already be clear on the overall role of the word in that language: “one has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name.”18 In order to understand the meaning of the words defined ostensively, one must be a master of the customary practice of naming objects – of defining ostensively – and have the ability to teach others this technique. Mastering a particular technique is related to understanding and being able to perform that technique and being able to train others.19 Mastering a particular technique is not the sole criterion for meaning, but it is an important one. So if ostensive teaching brings about the understanding of a word, it is because we are familiar with the customary practice of naming objects: “we are brought up, trained, to ask: ‘what is that called’ – upon which the name is given.”20 Ostensive teaching does not bring about understanding the correct use. What is missing from Augustine’s description is being trained and inducted into use.21 Language Games and Forms of Life To illustrate the customary practice of language use, as well as the variety of word uses (a point to which I will return in the next chapter), Wittgenstein compares language to a collection of games. The concept of a “language-game” is introduced in BB22 and explored throughout PI.23 In PI, ss. 7, 23, and 24, Wittgenstein invokes the compound word to highlight “the multiplicity” of languages and the practical nature of language in the sense that “the process of using words” consists of “language and the actions into which it is woven.”24 An important aspect of this concept, he tells us in s. 23, is that the term “languagegame” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that “the speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” Wittgenstein does not clearly define “form of life.” He uses the concept in only three numbered remarks in Part I of PI and in only two brief references in Part II.25 In one of these references, he equates a form of life with mastering the use of language. This and the s. 23 remark suggest that “form of life” is not distinct from but synonymous with the word “language-game” in that both terms denote the correlation of “language” and “use.” These two concepts – “language-games” and “forms of life” – thereby seem to



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be two attempts to establish a relationship between speaking and doing, between language and action. “Words,” he claims in s. 546, “are also deeds.” Following Wittgenstein, I will henceforth use the term “language-games” to mean that language is a practice, and also that it is synonymous with a “form of life.” In this respect, Stephen Hilmy is correct in asserting that there is an identity of language-games and forms of life; that Wittgenstein, by calling language-games “forms of life,” “has simply attempted to stress certain important characteristics of language games”; and “that forms of life are the same thing as language games” in two senses: “(1) they are activities or loci of linguistic practice,” and (2) it is these activities, language-games, or loci of linguistic practice “which are constitutive of the meaning or ‘life’ of signs” and “not psychological accompaniments that lie behind language.” But as I will explain, this does not necessarily commit Wittgenstein to linguistic relativism or to the proposition that linguistic expressions are intelligible “only relative to the specific language games … constitutive of their use.”26 Wittgenstein insists that language-games and forms of life are not necessarily highly developed activities, or complex, specialized forms of communication, or advanced linguistic practices. Nor do these concepts necessarily refer to large groups of language users. Even simple and ordinary languages, such as “a language consisting only of orders” and “reports in battle,” or “a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no,” are language-games and forms of life.27 For example, “we could imagine” that a language of orders “was the whole language” of a linguistic community. And “to imagine a language,” he reminds us, “means to imagine a form of life.”28 It is not hard to imagine a form of life based solely on orders. The military establishment of a state is perhaps the paradigm example of a complex institution founded on a simple language consisting only of orders. “Obeying the rule” Beginning in PI, s. 31, Wittgenstein introduces another important feature of learning a language – namely, rule following. Let’s consider four significant features of this concept. First, the word “rule” is related to the word “agreement.”29 Second, rules are imparted in training. Third, rule following is a form of obedience training.30 Playing the game means knowing how to follow the rules correctly, and correct rule following is blind obedience.31 Fourth, obeying a rule, he tells us in s. 202,

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“is a practice,” which is to say an ongoing customary activity. Together, these four aspects – agreement, training, obedience, practice – imply that we are customarily trained into correct rule following and that correct rule following is a shared ability learned by ongoing regular or continuing activity. These concepts also suggest that the concepts of “language-games” and “forms of life” both signify something social, shared, or agreed. Wittgenstein’s point is that “the practice of use of language”32 is not just a customary practice but a social one, which is to say that language is a game we play with others.33 We are “brought up” to understand the meaning of a shared vocabulary. Such agreement in language and in forms of life is not “agreement in opinions” but “the given” and “what has to be accepted.”34 An example Wittgenstein often employs to illustrate the practice of rule following is the game of chess.35 In PI, s. 31, he says that knowing how to correctly move (use) a piece presupposes that one “already knows the rules of the game.” Knowing the meaning of a word, understanding the meaning of concepts, entails learning the rules for correct application. Correct use presupposes knowledge of the rules and of the customary practice itself. And since rules are standards of correctness, they also function as means for identifying error. Thus the ability to play a game requires ongoing training, and correct play presupposes this training and that we already understand and agree to obey the rules. In normal circumstances, it is not necessary to review the rules every time one plays. One can imagine, for example, how ridiculous it would be during a sports match for the players and the referee to first go over the rule book before the opening whistle is blown. Or how weird it would be for the referee and players to stop, suspend play, and consult on the legality of each move before it is carried out. It is assumed that the players already know the rules of the game, and that assumption is reasonable. Agreement in the rules, or already knowing the rules of a game, means that a player is not obligated to provide reasons or justifications for her actions. If I already know how to play a game, “I shall act without reasons” – “this is simply what I do.”36 Correct Use: A Signpost Another approach to illustrating rule following is to consider how we react to a signpost.37 How do we know how to correctly follow a sign (which is the expression of a rule), for example, an octagonal red sign with the word “STOP,” or a red light displayed on a traffic control



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device, or an algebraic formula, or the gesture of pointing with the hand (a finger pointing in a certain direction)? The steps are not determined by the formula, the device, or the stop sign, and a pointed finger does not tell us which way we are to go – for example, in the direction of the line from wrist to fingertip or in the opposite direction. People know how to correctly follow the gesture, the formula, and various signs, Wittgenstein tells us, because they are “brought by their education (training)” to use them. We know how to react to the gesture of pointing with the hand – we look in the direction of the line from wrist to fingertip, not fingertip to wrist – because we are “so trained.”38 This explains why we obey a stop sign. An octagonal red signpost doesn’t tell us what the word stop means, since it is assumed that we already know the meaning of this word when we approach the sign, so its meaning is not provided. And the sign does not list reasons why one should stop, since it is assumed that one already knows them. And furthermore, even if we do know the meaning of stop – let’s assume it means “cease movement” – the stop sign does not indicate either the precise location or duration, since it is assumed that at a stop sign we know exactly where and for how long to cease moving, and when to resume moving. For example, we are trained to resume movement only when the intersection is clear or, at a fourway stop, according to statutory regulations about yielding the right of way. In normal circumstances the signpost does not need to provide such further information, since the rule-governing authorities correctly assume that those who see the sign will possess a valid driver’s licence and therefore will have been properly trained to obey all traffic lights and stop signs when operating vehicles, and so will not have any doubt as to its meaning. In other words, “the sign-post is in order – if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose.”39 Grasping a Rule Is Not an Interpretation It would be incorrect to say that once we are properly trained into correct rule following, we have been trained to interpret the meaning of a sign, be it a stop sign or a red traffic light. When it comes to stopping at a red light or a stop sign, public safety requires us not to interpret the colour red or the octagon. Normally we know that stopping at a red light or a stop sign is obeying the rule and that running a red light or a stop sign is disobeying it. We know that running a red light or a stop

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sign is disobedience because we know that traffic laws specifically forbid drivers from proceeding through an intersection while a red light is displayed on a traffic control device, or without coming to a complete stop and following right-of-way requirements when a stop sign is posted. In this sense, disobeying does not necessarily mean we have misunderstood or misinterpreted a rule – which explains the colloquialism “running a red light” (we do not say “misinterpreting a red light”). In other words, “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.”40 I have been reviewing Wittgenstein’s remarks about rule following, including the strong connection he seems to make between rule following and training. As will soon be clear, my intention is to offer an exegesis that might charitably account for a family of Wittgensteinians who emphasize the concept of training. My point is that there is an emphasis or focus on training that is based on a particular reading of Wittgenstein – which is to say on certain textual evidence – in which training seems to play a foundational role as a practice that imparts knowledge, meaning, and understanding. I am not suggesting, however, that this reading is above criticism. In chapter 3 and in subsequent chapters I will be proposing another way of interpreting Wittgenstein’s remarks about being trained into use. For now, I want to highlight that in each of the examples he provides, Wittgenstein explains how correct rule following depends on a child or pupil being brought up or trained to use the rule in a particular way.41 On this view, I understand the meaning of an octagonal red sign, or a hand gesture, or an algebraic formula; I know how to obey these expressions of rules because – as he says, for example, in PI, s. 198 – “I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it.” He goes on to say that a person follows a rule insofar as it is customary to do so.42 I understand a sign because of my ongoing participation in a language-game in which that sign has been customarily used. So, correctly following a rule is the result of being educated (trained) in the customary uses of signs, sustained by ongoing rule following. It seems that what Wittgenstein is saying here is that being trained into use means that the rules become tacit knowledge through inculcation or constant repetition. This is why we understand a sign not by having an interpretation for its use, and why we know how to follow a sign even when it doesn’t explain its own application. Understanding the meaning of a word is an ability that comes from being trained into customary rule-governed



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practice. Correct use presupposes ongoing participation in rule-governed social practice. At this point, we should distinguish two very important aspects of learning and teaching (i.e., training). The kind of training to which Wittgenstein refers is not limited to following a system of explicit rules; he also mentions a kind of training that involves learning “correct judgments.” Judgments are not systematic rules, but they do identify kinds of rules that “only experienced people can apply” correctly, and learning such judgments is difficult because it’s difficult to teach “indefiniteness.”43 “To think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule” Learning language-games is learning rule-governed social practices. Because of the intrinsically social nature of such language training, obeying a rule is not something that would be possible for one person to do and “only once in his life.” Rather, “to obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).”44 Precisely because obeying a rule is an ongoing social practice, it is impossible to obey a rule privately; that is why Wittgenstein writes that “to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.”45 To suggest that a rule can be obeyed privately is to say that someone invented a game no one ever plays. The examples of the algebraic formula and the finger pointing illustrate the connection between “understanding” a sign and “being able to” and “knowing” – all of these concepts are related to mastering a technique, not a mental process.46 Understanding is in this sense an ability to use and to explain the use of concepts, which is to say an ability to train others into this use. Training, Conditioning, and Socialization in “Situations of Instruction” I have been surveying Wittgenstein’s arguments about meaning and understanding, which is to say how we learn to understand the meaning of words and languages. This has prompted a discussion about his concepts of language-games and forms of life, and I have emphasized two aspects of these: they seem to place central importance on the activity of training; and the concept of a form of life appears to be the necessary shared social context in which such training takes place. The reason I have devoted so much time to this survey, and why these two aspects are important, is that they shape a considerable amount of the scholarship about

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Wittgenstein’s method. Among commentators who try to explain his concepts of meaning and understanding, there is a widespread tendency to emphasize the primacy and importance of training. From this primacy of training, they derive political implications that are conservative, negative, neutral, or contingent. In the next section, I survey these commentaries and show how they have been bewitched by this tendency. In the preceding analysis, Wittgenstein’s paradigm or central examples of meaning and understanding are pedagogical, disciplinary, and tutelary language-games in which a child, pupil, beginner, or apprentice is expected to memorize a formula, learn an example, master a technique, gain expertise, follow rules, or obey signs. The most prominent examples Wittgenstein offers are simple language-games in which one person who understands – such as a teacher or an expert – gives orders, issues commands, instructs, sets an example, or calls out, and the other person – a child or an assistant – follows, repeats, executes, acts upon, or obeys. These examples suggest that understanding essentially involves being “brought up” and “trained” into a form of life. They also illustrate an unequal relationship, with one person having more knowledge or authority than another. So meaning is usually described as something taught, and understanding is described as something learned through various training techniques and practices of socialization: habit, drill, repetition, or, as Wittgenstein writes, “example, reward, punishment, and suchlike.”47 In this situation, a person who does not know or understand is either taught by someone who does, or is conditioned to know or understand. Meaning and understanding arises in the context of, or against a background of, commonly shared judgments, rules, customs, institutions, or techniques into which we are trained. Understanding is a therefore a matter of learning the correct conventional meaning, or grasping already agreed customs, pre-established rules, and existing techniques; or it involves enforcing common authoritative judgments on someone who doesn’t know or understand. Misunderstanding and the failure to grasp meaning stem from lack of training or poor training, or they involve an inability to properly execute what one is trained to do. Social and Political Implications Keeping this exegesis in mind, the question at hand concerns what firstorder political issues are illuminated by this reading of Wittgenstein. Do these remarks give us a better understanding of politics? When we



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turn to the commentaries, what is apparent is that this picture of training has held many captive, which is to say that much of the thinking has been nourished with the same kinds of examples. These examples, passages, and themes about training are the ones most often cited to illustrate what Wittgenstein has in mind by meaning and understanding in a form of life. They are widely cited by commentators, who typically turn to these passages and themes as proof of the primacy of training. With few exceptions, and regardless of their own particular philosophical inclinations, commentators take for granted this approach to explaining forms of life in terms of various training methods. In fact, the most frequently cited examples illustrating how we learn things focuses on apprenticeship training and early childhood education. Most commentators point to the passages in BB and PI, and in other works, where Wittgenstein describes children or beginners being trained to learn new languages, or they place special emphasis on the contexts in which such learning takes place. The commentaries are learning from these examples. This argument about the activity of being trained is evident among a variety of Wittgensteinian scholars, especially those who seek to derive political implications from his work. Cavell offers a particularly illustrative and influential example of this tendency with his description of forms of life in The Claim of Reason. The examples he typically cites from PI and BB involve the “initiation” of children, apprentices, and beginners, who are expected to project this training onto new or unexpected further contexts. Being trained the right way implies knowing how to apply what one has learned in new situations.48 In the conclusion to his “Declining Decline,” Cavell goes on to grant essential and universal status to this pedagogical and tutelary metaphor. “In the culture depicted in the Investigations,” he tells us, “we are all teachers and all students” and “we are all elders and all children.” And this tendency to grant essential status to training is evident in another essay, “The Argument of the Ordinary.” Here, Cavell concludes that all of PI should be read through the lens of Augustine’s opening words and its “scene of instruction” depicting a child inheriting language and “training its own mouth to form signs” – a scenario that “haunts” the book and “precisely announces” its topics “as a whole.”49 Citing many examples from Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say, as well as an unpublished version of The Claim of Reason, as well as PI and BB, Pitkin reiterates this metaphor of initiation and projection,

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placing special importance on the training technique of “inducing the child to go on,” which sometimes entails correcting mistakes. Learning, she tells us, “is necessarily a matter of training,” and “everything depends on the child responding correctly to the training methods.” Danford agrees with Pitkin, claiming that “the capacity to be projected into new situations” is “an essential characteristic of language.”50 He accepts the premise in PI, ss. 1, 5, and 6, that “the teaching of language is … training,” and he reads Wittgenstein’s account of meaning as essentially comparable to that of a child who is learning and whose mistakes are sometimes corrected.51 Robin Holt argues that “the pupil can see language as an inheritance to be wrestled away from the teacher and re-applied in new contexts.”52 According to Crary, Cavell’s therapeutic understanding of Wittgenstein emphasized the importance of “situations of instruction.”53 In the feminist orientation, the same tendencies are evident in Tanesini, who approvingly cites Cavell as well as Zerilli, who appeals to the remark on training in PI, s. 5, to explain conventional understandings of sex and gender differences.54 And Rorty argues that Wittgenstein promotes “epistemological behaviourism” because rationality, epistemic authority, and understanding the rules of a language-game depend on “what society lets us say.”55 Even those who have no particular allegiances to Cavell’s approach promote the idea of the primacy of training. Winch makes the same types of arguments about the primacy of training in his essay “Certainty and Authority.” Central to Winch’s discussion is the “relation of the child to its adult informants,” which is to say “accepting the adult’s authority.” Winch cites these metaphors from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty to explain this work “from the point of view of certain deep questions in political philosophy,” concerning the state’s authority and the citizen’s obligation to it, as well as the notion of legitimacy and consent. Winch wants to know how the state’s authority is to be reconciled with the notion of agency. His answer is that practical reason itself requires a recognition of authority – which is to say “acceptance of the adult’s authority in the imparting of information” – and that “obedience when told to do something” is necessary in order to make reasoned judgments.56 And O’Connor places training, initiation, education, and socialization among the central themes in her Wittgensteinian approach, which she equates with recognizing the authority others have over us.57



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Forms of Life: Sharing, Attunement, and Internalizing Rules and Judgments Earlier I mentioned two aspects of training – systematic rules, and judgments. Both are discussed in the commentaries. Sometimes being trained entails correctly following a system of well-defined rules, and a form of life is essentially rule governed in the sense of conformity with such rules. Winch, for example, states that rules are “essential to human social activity” and that in order to understand meaningful behaviour we must allot “a central role” to the notion of rules because all behaviour that is meaningful “is ipso facto rule-governed.”58 Likewise, Janik argues that to use language is “to be ruled in the sense of being disciplined” in the sense that to learn “is to follow rules or master a technique that you did not create.”59 But forms of life are not everywhere determined by rules, so being trained into shared judgments, practices, and conventions is also fundamental. In any case, a competent native speaker or a member of society must be trained to internalize systematic rules, formulae, judgments, examples, or norms through various practices of socialization, conditioning, habit, and discipline.60 Whether it is into rules or judgments, the outcome of training is induction into something that is agreed or shared, and this is what is meant by a form of life. There are lots of different ways in which commentators have defined forms of life in these terms, taking as a given what Scheman calls Wittgenstein’s “emphasis on agreement” and what O’Connor labels “deep agreement.”61 Once again, Cavell provides an especially influential version of this reading of Wittgenstein, although there are different opinions as to what he means when he says that mutual understanding and hence language “depends on nothing more and nothing less than shared forms of life.”62 Two well-known passages are particularly noteworthy in framing the discussion about what it means to share. One comes from the essay “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” where Cavell explains that a form of life is not reducible to a complete and coherent set of rules, but “sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humour and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation.”63 Several commentators have reproduced this very passage when explaining what is shared in a form of life. 64 Another influential passage, this one from The

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Claim of Reason, defines sharing as a “background” of pervasive, systematic, harmonious agreement in judgments and criteria, which Cavell calls “attunement,” a concept that means that “nothing is deeper than the fact, or the extent, of agreement itself.” This background of agreement is “being in harmony, like pitches or tones, or clocks, or weighing scales.”65 In other writings, Cavell clarifies that what he (and Wittgenstein) mean by agreement is not like something contractual, but more like being tacitly inducted into shared experiences, the way a child is naturally socialized to master language.66 This idea of attunement resonates with many scholars. For example, Zerilli takes the view that attunement is a shared judgment grounded in a contingent, indeterminate, unquestioned background into which we are trained. Likewise, Pohlhaus and Wright explain that attunement implies mutual intelligibility, which is a kind of agreement in substantive value judgments and a matter of having shared political values. They insist this does not denote “comprehensive agreement about all matters of taste and value,” but any claim to know something about oneself and society “must be shareable with others in a mutually intelligible language.” Tanesini takes mutual attunement to be one of Cavell’s most critical insights about Wittgenstein’s work because it reveals what she calls acknowledgment, which points to the “centrality that emotions play” in our relations to others. Here, attunement does not necessarily entail knowing or judging others, or having things in common, but recognizing the claims that others have on us. So in Wittgenstein’s picture, “the whole edifice of human language and human culture” depends on our capacity for intersubjective empathy, sympathy, or resentment.67 Community, Contextualism, and Conventionalism Some have taken Wittgenstein’s comments on forms of life to mean that he is privileging “community”68 or making “claims to community,”69 that his approach is “communitarian”;70 and this is sometimes understood in somewhat unitarian or conformist terms in the sense that the community is the necessary shared setting into which we are trained and initiated, one that enforces agreed standards of correct rule following. “The goal of linguistic training,” O’Connor argues, “is the initiation of a person into a community that is bound by an allegiance to the rules of the symbolic system.”71 Again, I am not trying to suggest a universally shared opinion in this respect.72 Nevertheless, with this discussion of training into shared



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rules, judgments, or a community, there is sometimes a temptation to describe forms of life as something uniform, as a kind of unitary context in which training and initiation take place.73 Cavell exhibits this tendency with his idea of harmony and his claim that forms of life are “intolerant of differences” and “deeply controlled.”74 Lear, too, implies a kind of uniformity, or conformity, when he describes forms of life as being “like minded” and when he claims there is no “getting a glimpse of what it might be like to be other-minded.”75 Pitkin is more direct about reading Wittgenstein in this way when she follows Cavell in describing a form of life as something fixed and “deeply and rigorously controlled,” which she equates with becoming part of “uniformity.”76 What Crary takes from all of this is that outsiders, or those who “did not share“ our natural reactions, “would not grow into our world.”77 This tendency to see forms of life in somewhat unitary terms is by no means marginal when we consider that a reading of Wittgenstein shaped Kuhn’s sociology of science in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and was the basis for what he famously described as a paradigm, and normal science. One of Kuhn’s central arguments, for which he received some criticism, was that normal scientific communities were constituted by “research training and practice” and that they were highly resistant to change and novelty as well as intolerant of dissenting opinions.78 So far, I’ve been surveying a family of scholars who see Wittgenstein’s concept of form of life as something shared or agreed and as a necessary shared context in which teaching and learning take place, sometimes with unitary and communitarian tendencies. In explaining how humans understand the meaning of words, this interpretation places central importance or primacy on the activity of being trained or initiated into a form of life. I have been suggesting that this interpretation underpins a great deal of scholarship on Wittgenstein. Among the most frequently cited examples illustrating how this training takes place is apprenticeship, initiation, and early childhood education, as illustrated at the beginning of PI and in BB, where Wittgenstein describes children or beginners learning new languages. These opening remarks typically involve an unequal relationship where someone has more knowledge or authority than someone else. So meaning is usually described as something taught, and understanding is described as something learned by means of various possible pedagogical techniques and practices of socialization, upbringing, or conditioning.

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The Limits of Criticism, Comparison, and Change I want to focus my attention on two conclusions that are sometimes derived from these remarks. In these passages Wittgenstein provides a reasonably clear picture of how forms of life or ordinary practices shape the formation of ideas, the correct use of concepts, and the meaning of words. But there are broadly speaking two things about which he is somewhat vague: one is the degree to which forms of life and the concepts that constitute them are open to evaluation or criticism; the other is whether different forms of life can or should be compared or ranked as better or worse. In either case, his remarks raise important questions about cross-cultural understanding and about how political innovation and social change occur, if at all. Because his remarks offer no clear and unequivocal guidance on these questions, some political philosophers conclude that Wittgenstein is promoting doubt about our critical and comparative abilities. Before we examine the doubts about comparison, let’s consider how forms of life are said to frame or situate our critical and rational faculties. In his early published writings, Quentin Skinner referred to this type of approach as a methodology of “contextual reading” and “contextual study,” in which context determines meaning and provides the ultimate framework for understanding.79 Social context is said to cause the formation of and change in ideas, or to constrain individual agents in some way. Notwithstanding the strange motley of political Wittgensteinians surveyed here, there is a remarkable consensus that Wittgenstein either openly embraced some kind of contextual methodology or tacitly took it for granted. The disputes are really about what kind is being promoted. This is true for conservative Wittgensteinians, Marxians, Rorty, Winch and his supporters, and Cavellians of all stripes. In the commentaries, the concept sometimes used to describe this supposedly contextual method is conventionalism, of which two dominant variations are prevalent.80 One is a thorough-going, full-blooded, rule-governed conventionalism, and the other is a weaker form of conventionalism. Despite their differences, both strong conventionalism and weak conventionalism more or less hold fast to the basic contextual assumption that knowledge and meaning are cultural constructs, relative to particular forms of life.81 Strong conventionalism is an austere context-determinism based on a theory of meaning that holds that meaning is fixed by conventional or cultural use and that there is no meaning independent of conventional use. What necessarily connects



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a word to its correct use is a conventional rule (which can be labelled in different ways, for example, as an interpretation, or a set of criteria, or necessary and sufficient conditions). Accordingly, forms of life are reducible to, constitutive of, and (some would say) undifferentiated from their rule-governed linguistic conventions. Because knowledge, meaning, and understanding are determined by the social or convention rules that govern language-games, Grayling describes the form of life as “the ultimate basis for meaning, use, rules, knowledge and the psychological concepts.”82 Because rules are constitutive of language-games, strong conventionalists claim it is impossible to radically break free from our form of life – or, in Rorty’s case, to separate the form of life from its descriptions or to compare it with others that are external or independent. Without independent criteria, or an external metaphysical standpoint from which to judge, conventionalism rules out the possibility of extra-communitarian criticism. Without that proverbial Archimedean point, we simply cannot disengage ourselves from our form of life to criticize or change it, since any attempt to do so will depend on using the very language that is part of the form of life itself. This context-determinism or strong conventionalism abounds among political Wittgensteinians. It is emphasized by conservatives as well as by Marxians. It is evident among some members of the Cavellian tradition, as well as those who are influenced by Winch. It is evident with Pitkin in her claim that “meaning is context-dependent” as well as with Danford when he says that forms of life are fixed foundations and regularities, and with both when they suggest that forms of life are not “subject to renegotiation.” Nyíri exhibits this tendency in arguing that forms of life have “inexorable binding force.” So does Janik when he says that “grasping, let alone altering” the rules “is radically limited by our very rule following activity.”83 Trigg is among the champions of this orientation. He says that Wittgenstein’s “emphasis on context” entails that we are “creatures of our society,” and that as such, we can only learn to use language and to think by participation in it. Accordingly, we cannot abstract ourselves from our social context “in order to reason about it.” So there is only one way to know and understand what is “really going on inside a culture,” and that is to “go native,” which he calls an “absolute precondition.”84 Some Marxian interpretations of Wittgenstein also seem to emphasize the determinacy of social context. So Benton argues that in both Wittgenstein and Marx, language is “intimately interwoven” with social practice and meaning is “dependent on the interpretative context

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of practical life,” which is most clearly illustrated in the concepts of language-game and form of life. Kitching proposes that “if there is a general theory of meaning” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it is that meaning is given by “the context” or “the circumstances” in which we say it; he calls this a “contextual theory of meaning.” Likewise, Vinten suggests that Wittgenstein is similar to Marx because both were “sensitive to the importance of (social) context,” which provides the circumstance in which a sentence makes sense.85 Finally, among those who pay homage to Winch, special mention must be made of Gunnell, who argues that Wittgenstein’s concepts of language-games and form of life exemplify “a theory of social reality” not unlike what is found in the natural sciences – an approach he labels “a kind of phenomenology of conventionality.” Conventions in this sense are theoretical objects, and Wittgenstein promotes their autonomy and irreducibility as well as the impossibility of their transcendence. In practical terms, this idea of conventionalism renders philosophy a distinct and “necessarily interpretive” practice that neither can nor should transform the practices about which it speaks and that includes any ontological or moral claims it studies. Philosophy should not and cannot have an impact on what it studies, he argues; it can only clarify the subject matter using a language that should be different from that of the actors.86 Some of these commentators take this context-determinism to mean we cannot actually explain, justify, judge, or criticize our form of life at all, while others argue that it leaves room only for an immanent critique.87 In any case, our rational capacities to know and understand or create positive or progressive change are either prohibited, finite, or limited either totally or somewhat by our forms of life. So we as individuals are either thoroughly determined by conventions or at the mercy of autonomous, radically contingent, and historically variable conventions operating largely out of our control.88 Weak Conventionalists While strong conventionalists promote varieties of context-determinism that presume severely limited possibilities of criticism, on the other hand there are political Wittgensteinians who have distanced themselves from such views and instead have emphasized either the tangled indeterminacy of forms of life and contexts, or their sheer contingency, or simply the importance of bringing back words to their ordinary nonmetaphysical everyday use. Examples of this weaker form of contextualist



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argument can be found in particular among New Wittgensteinians, democratic/liberals, and feminists, and others who make some room for critical reflection. On this view, our social practices, customary activities, and forms of life, and the way we use words, are all indeterminate in the sense that they cannot be fixed, defined, governed, or spelled out in terms of theories or rules. They are so flexible that they resist being captured by any necessary and sufficient conditions, so they cannot be radically constrained or governed in any way by explicit rules and conditions. Wittgenstein’s examples of signposts not by themselves telling us what to do are meant to illustrate this point. And these Wittgensteinians acknowledge this indeterminacy by reminding everybody to focus not on rules or theories but on what Wittgenstein calls the “rough ground” and what O’Connor calls “felted contextualism,” which is the untidy, dense, everyday uses of words, in our ordinary practices of knowing, criticizing, explaining, understanding, and acknowledging one another. As Zerilli claims, we would notice that our words are not as fixed as they are made out to be if “we paid attention to the ordinary contexts in which they are used.”89 While these political Wittgensteinians endorse indeterminacy, they still do not completely escape the tendency of contextualism. It is because of this tendency that Moore rightly describes this more flexible form of contextualism as “weaker conventionalism,” in that it proceeds as if conventionalism were true. Stern lucidly describes this as a tendency to think of a form of life as some specific thing, like a background that can be referred to with a definite article, the (capital-B) Background, something like the scenery on a stage that makes it possible for actions on that stage to have the significance they do, something that stands behind the use of words and actions, giving them the meaning and coherence they have. Both strong and weak conventionalists exhibit this tendency, the former in their very understanding of irreducible, inexorably binding conventions, the latter in their appeal to the ordinary. Weak conventionalists reject the necessity and irreducibility of an external vantage point, foundation, or a background that determines meaning, but they act as if there is nevertheless some kind of relatively stable, mysterious, invisible vantage point, the hidden hand that stops the infinite regress on which whatever we express has meaning, or that explains meaning.90 So they are still contextualists because they take as a given some non-monolithic, stable but flexible and incomplete architecture, scaffold, resources, background frame of reference, or ordinary context of lived experience that grounds knowledge and meaning.91 In

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other words, weak conventionalists deny the determinacy but not the primacy of context. While they reject the idea that use fixes meaning (because to fix anything reeks of metaphysics), they nevertheless affirm the centrality of shared ordinary use. In this way they assign a privileged role and an (effectively unintended) foundational status to the context of everyday shared practices and circumstances. As Pohlhaus and Wright explain, “Wittgenstein showed that any knowledge that we can claim to have about ourselves must be articulable in a language that we share.”92 It might look like the contrast here between strong and weak is too insignificant to justify making a distinction. But there is indeed a difference, and it is found in the choice of emphasis: strong conventionalists emphasize how we are essentially constituted by context, while weak conventionalists shed light on contingency and the possibilities of creative contestation and liberation, what Robinson calls “freedom from fixity.”93 Nevertheless, it would be unfair to say that all strong conventionalists leave no room for critical reflection, and it is equally uncharitable to say that weak conventionalists avoid contextualism altogether. The former might emphasize the limits of our rational capacities; the latter remind us why change and innovation are not precluded and are possible. But both schools would agree that critical reflection is situated and framed in the context of forms of life. That is, in any given form of life or language-game, critical reflection is generated organically, experimentally; it is a by-product of the resources of language itself, constituted by our forms of life or the result of playful, witty, idiosyncratic possibilities. Incommensurability, Incomparability, Reconciliation I have been exploring how Wittgenstein’s remarks about being trained into forms of life can be seen as endorsing varieties of contextualism. Whether they entail a determining set of linguistic rules, authoritative community-enforced judgments, binding customary traditions, or the taken-for-granted primacy of ordinary contexts, social practices, conceptual schemes, or paradigms in which words are used, many political Wittgensteinians clearly read into his remarks a contextual methodology in which a form of life is the irreducible and inescapable condition that grounds meaning, or that determines correct use, or that frames intelligibility either necessarily or contingently. A related conclusion sometimes derived from these remarks about being trained into



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use is that Wittgenstein is implying that forms of life are incomparable because they are incommensurable.94 Because language is inseparable from social practice and lacks any common, neutral, or culturally invariant standard of measurement or reference point, forms of life cannot be compared or ranked, and mutual understanding among different societies is problematic, and consequently any moral debates that arise from conflicting forms of life cannot be logically arbitrated. So, aside from the question about whether we can criticize our own form of life, may commentators wonder whether we might still be faced with the problem of reconciling different, competing, or contested forms of life. Lear articulates this position most clearly when he argues that on Wittgenstein’s view there is “no legitimate vantage point from which to compare the content of our training.” Many others take incomparability for granted, suggesting, as Danford does, that there is “no standard for comparison” of forms of life and no way of reconciling their conflicting ways of understanding the way things are.95 Because there are no neutral or culturally invariant languages to rationally evaluate contested claims to truth, or to reconcile different moral visions, or to compare competing forms of life, Grayling argues that Wittgenstein is committed to a kind of relativism because we can never have more than an “indeterminate grasp, at best” in trying to understand alien forms of life or even “earlier phases in our own culture’s history.”96 I would like to return to the question about what impact these assumptions have on the study of politics. Earlier I asked whether we have a better understanding of politics with this reading of Wittgenstein. Now that we have examined more closely some of the principles of contextualism and incommensurability, it is easy to see why forms of life are characterized in terms of conservative, negative, neutral, and contingent conclusions. Strong conventionalists are particularly susceptible to conservative conclusions because they tend to deliberately meld an austere version of contextualism and incommensurability into a coherent argument. They argue that Wittgenstein’s philosophy has essentially conservative tendencies because we have little choice but to accept customary practices and that Wittgenstein’s remarks endorse the enforcement of community standards, or the defence of inherited institutions, or imply uncritical or blind acceptance or non-revision. There are many examples of this tendency to derive various conservative conclusions. Winch has interpreted forms of life as a claim that we must accept authority,97 while Janik sees them as a kind of soft despotism of blind obedience to rules and behavioural regularities that one

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has neither created nor necessarily approved; as a consequence, one becomes “what your guardians want you to be.”98 Nyíri presents one of the clearest arguments connecting the contextualist and incommensurability assumptions with the conservative idea that change is gradual and internally generated (a position that has sparked numerous critical replies).99 Nyíri claims among other things that Wittgenstein “saved the neo-conservative position from theoretical catastrophe.” This catastrophe is what Nyíri calls the “neo-conservative paradox”: on the one hand, humans by their nature cannot do without absolute standards and “fixed truths”; but on the other, “all absolute standards have perished” and “fixed truths do not exist.” Wittgenstein solved this problem with the concept of rule following, which supplanted an “anarchistic” conception of human behaviour, speech, and thought with a conservative one emphasizing “training and behaviour, use, custom, institution, practice, technique, agreement.” Rule following is always blind and cannot be explained or justified, and forms of life cannot actually be criticized – they can only be replaced by others. All criticism presupposes a form of life, a language – that is, a tradition of agreements. So forms of life cannot be judged, and “different forms of life have the same value.” On this interpretation, political innovation is not precluded but would to emerge “organically, so to speak.”100 Another clear example of contextualism and incommensurability being joined into a coherent argument with conservative political implications is offered by Roger Trigg. He contends that Wittgenstein’s position is compatible with a Marxist approach, but not for any socially just or revolutionary reasons. His position is Marxist because of “the emphasis on the priority of social arrangements, and the desire for explanations at the level of society.” It is also compatible with a conservative and “traditionalist” approach because “we are the product of the history of our society” and cannot therefore change society “without attacking the very source of our being.” And this politics is grounded in Wittgenstein’s contextual claims, which is to say that reason is “internal to a language game” and that “in rooting reason in society,” Wittgenstein “made it impossible to reason about society.” Since there is nothing left beyond our own society to which we can appeal, we have no way of knowing how we are mistaken, because “no room is left for the notions of truth and falsity” and “there is no scope for upholding or criticizing language-games when they just have to be accepted and described,” so “ethnocentricity becomes inevitable.” These views also entail claims about incommensurability, which is to say that



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“no comparison of different societies is possible”; furthermore, “proper comparison between societies is impossible” because “their concepts are going to be strictly incommensurable.” Trigg sees in this approach a paradox, in that “humility towards other cultures” must “go hand in hand with a blind acceptance of one’s own form of life.”101 So contextualism and incommensurability help us understand why Wittgenstein’s remarks are often interpreted in such conservative terms. These assumptions imply something fundamentally conservative because they presume a limited and restricted ability to create social and political innovation. We are essentially prisoners in forms of life that cannot be radically changed. This kind of conservatism is directly linked to a sceptical attitude (discussed in chapter 1), because the acceptance of forms of life is based on deeply pessimistic conclusions about the limited possibilities of really knowing and understanding the world. Because of the absence of any culturally invariant metaphysical epistemic standards among different forms of life, and given that forms of life are something over which agents have no control – which thereby conditions those agents’ rational capacities – forms of life cannot be judged, criticized, called into question, or compared. Because of this emphasis on doubt about the possibility of critical evaluation, the practical consequences amount to an apology for the existing order. That order is, as Dunn argued, the “reality beyond which no human appeal is made.”102 Some might object to the picture portrayed here, because not all political Wittgensteinians subscribe to contextualism and incommensurability. That is a valid point, and my intention is not to suggest something unitary. But one would be hard pressed to find among these commentators a clear and distinct refutation of such views. Even those Wittgensteinians who do not directly endorse these assumptions cannot adequately explain what establishes mutual understanding between cultures and societies.103 Others commit us to a reading of Wittgenstein that is at best silent or neutral (which is to say sceptical) on the question of comparison, cross-cultural understanding, and intercultural arbitration. Two reasons are typically given, which can be neatly summarized in terms of ability and applicability: we may be unable to criticize or compare forms of life, but it doesn’t matter, because Wittgenstein’s remarks were not meant to help us with such practices of critical reflection. On the first point, the limits of our rational abilities to explain and understand, to draw substantive epistemic conclusions, also limit our ability to rank and compare forms of life, so we must

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suspend judgment on such matters. On this point, strong and weak conventionalists more or less agree, but typically for different reasons. For strong conventionalists, our rational limits can be traced to the fact that they are strictly relative to determining forms of life. Weak conventionalists trace our rational limits to the sheer indeterminacy or contingency of forms of life. But there’s another point raised as well, which is not just doubt about our abilities and about the possibility of knowing our own or other forms of life, but doubt about whether Wittgenstein’s remarks should be used at all as a means to address substantive issues; this calls into question their relevance or applicability. The point of this second argument is that Wittgenstein did not set out to address moral or political concerns and certainly did not intend to interrogate the way we ordinarily or normally live in the world. Rather, his remarks were meant only to criticize a certain way of doing philosophy. So there’s scepticism about the worth of his remarks outside their very strict intended purpose and scope of application, and on this point there are overlapping similarities and differences among strong and weak conventionalists. Some claim that Wittgenstein’s remarks tell us nothing about politics per se because they were not intended to have political implications at all, so whatever they imply is simply conjectural and unintentional; others suggest that Wittgenstein’s scepticism actually licenses various political possibilities. In their stronger and weaker articulations, contextualism and incommensurability are connected to, and provide fertile ground for, a sceptical understanding of language-games and forms of life, which is to say that the emphasis on training helps shape and is partly shaped by a sceptical attitude. In any effort “to speak outside the terms of ordinary practice,” Eldridge argues, “the skeptic at least sees there is something wrong.”104 In other words, those who promote the primacy of training either promote or simply concede a sceptical orientation because our ability to know our own or other forms of life, or establish their truth or falsity, is essentially limited, finite, or doubtful. So Wittgenstein is sceptical not just in the sense that it is doubtful whether we can know and understand other minds (see chapter 1) but also in the sense that it is doubtful whether we can criticize our own form of life, or compare it or the contents of our training with that of others. I have been surveying a family of Wittgenstein scholars who take for granted certain assumptions about the primacy of training and the form of life as the necessary shared context in which such training takes place. Meaning and understanding occur in a context of shared rules,



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techniques, or judgments into which we are trained and which we internalize. A shared form of life, or context of agreement, is therefore essential to meaning and understanding. I have also discussed how these assumptions license various sceptical arguments about contextualism and incommensurability. That is, in emphasizing the primacy of training in a shared form of life, many commentators have concluded that Wittgenstein’s remarks lead us to doubt our ability to know the truth, understand others, criticize our form of life, or compare it with that of others. Forms are life cannot be judged or compared and have equal value. Finally, I have discussed how all of these views shape negative, conservative, and contingent conclusions regarding what politics we can derive from Wittgenstein’s remarks. With its emphasis on training, initiation, instruction, projection, rule obedience, and customary activity, the conservative, negative, and contingent interpretations explain meaning and understanding in terms of socialization, attunement, behavioural conditioning and modification, what society lets us say, internalizing or memorizing rules, finding common agreement, sharing interests, and repeating disciplined techniques. On this account, the only way to explain social change and political innovation is in terms of mysterious, gradually occurring causal forces, or as the accidental, unintended by-products of historical happenstance, or as the inevitable side-effects of diverse, overlapping language-games. Others claim that our critical abilities are restricted to various kinds of self-knowledge or are rooted in the self, and that any kind of political innovation is in some way the result of our built-in psychological or linguistic powers to spontaneously switch, and see objects differently, imagine different possibilities, use words in new ways, reorient our practices, or just walk away from our forms of life. Connected to such explanations, many commentators buy into sceptical or anti-realist conclusions, contending that political understanding and innovation are not based on criteria, evidence, better reasons, reasonable deliberation, new truths, or a more persuasive argument, because political grammar is not answerable to the facts so it cannot be either correct or incorrect. As Cavell remarks, criteria cannot refute skepticism; on the contrary, “they show skepticism’s power.”105 My point is that there is a common way of interpreting Wittgenstein’s concept of form of life in terms of what I have been calling the primacy of training and that this interpretation often goes hand in hand with or licenses two kinds of sceptical arguments around contextualism and incommensurability. This scepticism follows from the claim that

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knowledge, understanding, and meaning are embedded in forms of life, which can mean they are contexts that determine, fix, or trap truth and meaning or (less resolutely) that they limit our critical capacities because outside language-games, “we no longer know what we mean.”106 They are the ungrounded ground of doing not knowing, the ordinary contexts and everyday practices outside of which either we cannot speak or we cannot know whether what we say makes any sense. The logic for contextualism and incommensurability is premised on what it means to establish truth or rationality, what it means to judge or criticize. One premise is that the very activities of criticizing and judging are by definition supposed to establish conceptions of truth and meaning that are to some extent independent of any particular form of life. Knowledge and human understanding in this sense must be culturally or contextually invariant. The second premise is that, at least in the human sciences, culturally invariant methods or theories are fundamentally and irrevocably flawed. If knowing the truth and understanding others are critical practices that always depend on forms of life (language-games, cultures, social practices, or communities), then it is questionable to what extent we can independently verify or falsify anything or understand it in a culturally invariant way. So unless we accept uncritically such culturally invariant methods and theories (an approach almost universally rejected by those inspired by Wittgenstein), two conclusions follow: we cannot criticize our own form of life, and we cannot compare our form of life with that of others. So we have no choice but to adopt a sceptical orientation as explained in chapter 1. This basic logic seems evident throughout the commentaries, particularly for those who wish to draw political implications from Wittgenstein’s work. Monologue, Conversation, Persuasion I would like to conclude by pointing out a fundamentally important but neglected aspect of the political Wittgensteinians surveyed so far. What is missing from these explanations, and what they do not properly account for or clearly explain and in some cases reject outright, is any conception of genuine dialogue – that is, the everyday, ordinary activity of mutually interdependent, ongoing, unconditional conversations and acts of persuasion among interlocutors who might have something to learn from one another. They do not take into account the significance of talking to others who don’t need to be socialized but



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who have already been trained into a different language and who therefore see and do things differently. They can’t explain the importance of listening to what others are saying and how they are saying it in their own terms in actual cases of exchanging reasoned arguments and counter-arguments. They do not consider the possibility of adopting different reasons, other criteria, new rules, or alternative standards of correctness, in light of the actual, normal, negotiations with others who are not necessarily immature; but even if they were, there is still a need to listen to what they have to say. They don’t mention that such conversations always already underpin the everyday real world of politics. For this reason, the emphasis on training, and all its related assumptions around contextualism, conventionalism, incommensurability, and incomparability, holds in place a monological operating logic. The monological operating logic neglects, ignores, or denies the important role of genuine dialogue. Where some type of non-monological practice is acknowledged, its utility or impact is either doubted or already constrained by predetermined norms. The pragmatist position, for example, concludes that from dialogue we might at best expect irony, contingency, and edification, something unintended or unexpected but not anything intentional, the deliberate result of persuasion. Another example of dialogue that is not genuine is a conversation whose topics or permissible terms of debate are already decided or framed by experts or those in authority and within which ordinary citizens must deliberate. Examples of this tendency are evident in the work of Richard Eldridge, as well as in Pohlhaus and Wright. At first glance, these seem to be exceptional or ambiguous cases among the political Wittgensteinians surveyed here. While they appear to be held captive by weak forms of contextualism and by the logic of scepticism, they try to avoid any conclusions about incommensurability by promoting nonmonological orientations inspired by Cavell’s argument of the ordinary, and the “conversation of justice.” Nevertheless, a closer examination reveals that the kind of dialogue these commentators promote is flawed because it is not an open-ended conversation, but one whose terms are already predetermined. For example, Eldridge argues that even though we are continually tempted to speak outside the ways of ordinary life, this is fruitless because in doing so we lose a sense of ourselves as finite, conversational, situated, social subjects; thus, we risk unintelligibility with oneself and with others. Consequently, theoretical idealizations (political theory), empirical generalizations (political science), and interpretations (political judgment) are flawed because these can only

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offer partial insights into ordinary life. Moreover, it is in ongoing ordinary practices “alone” that criteria (of correctness, for judgment) are laid down. Since “there is nothing deeper” than the ordinary, we should not try to speak outside them because we risk unintelligibility when we do, so we should resign ourselves to the fact that there is “no point or possibility of assessing, explaining, or justifying” our practices. Now so far this sounds a lot like some kind of conventionalism. But Eldridge avoids the inevitable conclusion that this leads to conservatism, or thoughtless conformity, by emphasizing that the ordinary practices he’s talking about also include unclear, imperfect, and painful conversations in which “challenges are always possible” between ordinary speakers and ordinary interlocutors. The aim of these ordinary arguments is to seek intelligibility “of oneself to oneself” and “of the community to itself.” He concludes that in order to reconcile ways of life in genuine contention with one another, “talking will often be in order.” To do all this, Eldridge argues, is to take part in “the conversation of justice,” whose outcome is a substantive liberalism that tolerates and respects reasonably contending ways of life.107 A similar argument is offered by Pohlhaus and Wright, who identify two kinds of dialogue. One is seen in Cavell’s argument of the ordinary, which is a therapeutic conversation articulated in a “skeptical voice.” Another is connected to Cavell’s conversation of justice, which is a civic dialogue spoken in a political voice and which assumes that scepticism is inscribed in “the very nature” of a liberal society. The former is a dialogue between the philosopher and the sceptic aimed at building a charitable relationship of intelligibility with the sceptic and at answering her questions; the latter is an ongoing dialogue among citizens aimed at mutual intelligibility about the principles of justice, institutions, and the specific problem of alienation. This conversation addresses the difficulties of maintaining civic relations and encourages us not to evade these challenges or avoid the conversation. On the contrary, such an orientation “presents a conception of justice that puts a conversation about justice at the center.”108 The Dialogical Wittgensteinians These examples appear to offer a clear and deliberate argument in favour of ongoing public dialogue, and in this sense they offer insight into another possible construal of Wittgenstein, one that differs from



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the orthodoxy around training and initiation; they also point to an alternative to the sceptical and non-realist conclusions about the impossibility of arbitrating moral and political disputes. They amount to an argument that we cannot forgo public discussion or exclude potential interlocutors from a conversation about justice and that there is no philosophical reason to declare impossible such a conversation, and there is no excuse to deny our responsibility for fostering it. Whatever conventionalism is implied here does not entail incommensurability. Yet the kind of non-monological approach these authors endorse is still flawed because they have already constrained the conversation within a predetermined theoretical framework or a permissible range of options. The kind of dialogue these commentators promote is already preconceived as a conversation “with the skeptic” and “of justice” and in a “liberal society.” Because they assign priority and privilege to this very particular vocabulary, before it even begins the conversation would already be bound and adjudicated within its inherent norms, and those participating would be required to talk within its terms or (presumably) disqualified from discussion. In the following chapters, I survey a group of authors who place no such restrictions on the practice of dialogue, and I explain how their dialogical orientations are learned in part from an alternative reading of Wittgenstein’s posthumously published works. By pointing to other examples, by emphasizing other remarks, and by interpreting differently his philosophical remarks, these authors have developed a body of commentary that depicts Wittgenstein not in therapeutic, sceptical, pedagogical, and tutelary terms, with either conservative, negative, or contingent ways of understanding politics, but in terms that I will be calling “comparative dialogue.” Comparative dialogue is a form of realism that accepts irreducible plurality and contest both within and among forms of life but also accepts the possibility that such contested ways of life can be reconciled. This is a practice of ongoing, open-ended, imperfect negotiation and comparison aimed at a kind reconciliation among forms of life that is always open to periodic revision and reconsideration. And all of this has positive implications for our understanding of politics. But before we get to the cases of comparative dialogical Wittgensteinians, and their views on politics, in the next chapter I explain why there is textual evidence for my argument. In so doing, I establish its validity as a reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks.

3 Wittgenstein’s Method of Perspicuous Representation

In the preceding chapters I surveyed a family of interpretations which suggests that Wittgenstein is promoting a kind of therapeutic scepticism. His remarks are intended to cure us of metaphysical cravings for foundations, external standpoints, or epistemologically certain explanations, to expose these as nonsense; at the same time, he suspends judgment about any substantive or positive conclusions that might replace those cravings, be they epistemic, moral, or political. We are disqualified from taking a stand on any substantive epistemological or normative claims, and we are allowed only to attend to the indeterminate, non-metaphysical, philosophically innocent meanings of words and linguistic expressions. In the first chapter I explored various opinions about what implications Wittgenstein’s remarks might have for politics. Some claim his remarks promote genuinely conservative political ideas; others, that they promote or concede political indifference and neutrality, or estrangement and alienation. His remarks are said to have nothing positive or constructive to offer; rather, they promote self-examination, self-transformation, self-knowledge, inner change, and liberation from self-imposed constraints. The implications are, in Tanesini’s words, a “rejection of politics” and a “disregard for politics, in favour of a concern with leading a good life.”1 Some writers, however, have tried to glean substantive critical, creative, and transformative political implications from Wittgenstein’s remarks. They presume that his therapeutic scepticism makes all forms of activity and forms of life metaphysicially and epistemologically equal, and for them, this holds a variety of egalitarian, democratic, and participatory implications. Others argue that his therapeutic scepticism does not logically disqualify positive political conclusions; on the



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contrary, therapy liberates our moral imagination, makes room for creative, idiosyncratic, and imaginative alternatives, reveals how we become democratic subjects, discloses the possibility of political contestation and resistance, and brings into view new or pre-existing political practices shaping our lives that may have been hidden or unintelligible. Whatever their particular political orientation, these writers agree that the target of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic scepticism is not ordinary life itself, but philosophical dogmatism and any philosophical orientation that presumes to disengage humanity from unnoticed, taken-for-granted, everyday social and political practices. In their view, Wittgenstein’s scepticism does not simply refute epistemological and metaphysical claims; it ignores such concerns altogether, or suspends judgment on them, arguing neither for nor against, with the goal of teaching us to get by without them. These differences of opinion are not simply political; they rest on divergent understandings of Wittgenstein’s anti-epistemology. Some conclude that knowledge, meaning, and understanding are contingent or ironic by-products of historical circumstances, behavioural conditioning, and our inescapable ordinary social contexts. Others refuse to admit contingency because even that would be saying too much. On this view, Wittgenstein’s approach aims merely to detect and expose as incoherent nonsense any theories or explanations based on a fixed metaphysical standpoint without developing philosophical explanations to replace them. Abandoning the metaphysical standpoint does not entitle us to any basic epistemic assumptions, be they metaphysical or contingent, because we cannot draw any substantive or positive epistemological conclusions, doctrines, or theories from the negation of nonsense. So all we can really do is pay attention to indeterminate ordinary practices. In chapter 2, I took a closer look at the claim about ordinary contexts. I surveyed a variety of remarks in which Wittgenstein seems to be promoting an approach to learning in which we are trained into forms of life that are necessary shared contexts in which such teaching and learning take place. These are examples of language-games in which we play already established games that already have shared rules, judgments, or conventions. In these contexts, Pitkin explains, “the teacher knows the rule” and the child must respond “correctly to the training methods.”2 Some commentators see forms of life in unitary terms as sharing routes of interest and mutual attunement as well as contexts defined by enforced communitarian standards of agreement.

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These remarks point to a situation in which a person who does not know or understand is either taught by someone who does or is conditioned to know or understand. Meaning and understanding occur in the context of, or against a background of, commonly shared rules, customs, techniques, or judgments into which we are trained. Understanding is a thus a matter of learning the correct conventional meaning, or grasping already agreed customs, pre-established rules, and existing techniques, or enforcing common authoritative explanations on someone who doesn’t understand. Misunderstanding and failure to grasp meaning both stem from lack of training or poor training or a failure to project what one is trained to do. I surveyed ways in which this emphasis on training has shaped various assumptions about contextualism and non-comparison, and I showed that this has helped contribute to a sceptical outlook because it leaves us doubting whether we can criticize our own form of life or know anything about that of others. In this chapter I will survey remarks in which Wittgenstein seems to be advancing different views. In subsequent chapters I will explain how these remarks have positive implications for the study of politics: in the way we read classic political texts and the way we understand political concepts, historical contexts, complex political institutions, and diverse political struggles and movements. Training: Its Subordinacy, Non-Determinacy, and Possible Irrelevance I begin by considering remarks that suggest there is no necessary equation between training and understanding. This might mean we should neither exaggerate the importance of training pupils nor privilege explanations that emphasize the initial dependence of childhood learning. What’s missing from this emphasis is what I will call “comparing” and “comparative dialogue,” which might mean that learning to understand entails comparing training, or might mean that understanding has little or nothing to do with training. This explanation of how we learn and understand does not necessarily license the pedagogical reading as it is usually described, because it seems to question whether we need training at all in order to learn a language or to understand one another, and if we do need it, what kind of training this is. Among Wittgenstein’s remarks there is considerable evidence for these views. I focus on two contestations of training raised in Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI): first, the idea that training does not fully explain



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why we correctly follow rules; and second, the claim that we learn in dialogue by comparing examples. In both cases, Wittgenstein is describing a kind of learning that takes place that does not come from being trained, initiated, or inducted.

(a)  The Non-Primacy of Training Let’s begin by returning to one of the passages I cited in chapter 2, which at first glance appears to justify the foundational activity of training but on reconsideration does no such thing. In PI, ss. 198 to 199, Wittgenstein responds to this question about the meaning and understanding of rules (and the expression of rules such as signs): What connects a rule and its correct use? In other words, how do we know how to react to the signpost, or obey the rule? Having rejected the suggestion that an interpretation can by itself determine meaning, he proposes another answer: “I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it.” But Wittgenstein’s own reply to this answer is swift: it provides only a “causal connection,” which is to say that training only explains why “we now go by the sign-post,” not what this “going-by-the-sign really consists in.” Training can only explain how my immediate behaviour has come about, what induces me to act now – my reaction. Wittgenstein is not satisfied with this causal explanation, in part because it can only explain the single agent’s unique actions. Since rule obedience is not something only one person does only once in her life, on “one occasion,” we need another explanation why we always did and now normally do understand how to follow a rule. So Wittgenstein replies that “a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom.” That there is something to be trained into suggests there is already a regular activity or custom. Therefore it is customary regular practice, not training, that explains why we understand signs and normally follow them correctly. In other words, training serves custom. It is subordinate, not primary. So it is custom, not training, that imparts knowledge, meaning, and understanding. Now obviously this reading is very different from the one I offered in chapter 2. There I considered seriously an exegetical basis for the therapeutic sceptical construal, with its emphasis on initiation, inducement, and situations of instruction. The point I am now making is that there is another possible way of interpreting Wittgenstein’s remarks about being trained into use – namely, that training has a limited supporting role.

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To be fair, as we noticed in chapter 2, some therapeutic sceptics do acknowledge the primacy of customary practices (or conventions). But conventions are typically described in somewhat determinate and context-relative terms, and sometimes as habitual ways of thinking and acting that have been acquired by living in a form of life or implanted through socialization and constant repetition. As James Tully has observed, when Wittgenstein talks about customary practice, he’s not using it in this sense of contextualism. On the contrary, customary use means long use and practice, which is another way of saying culture.3

(b) Not Being Trained at All In the first few pages of chapter 2, I highlighted the primacy of training in a shared form of life, and to illustrate I surveyed Wittgenstein’s reaction to a picture of language attributed to Augustine. This picture misrepresents the learning of a language as ostensive teaching. What it ignores, I explained, is that the teaching of language is training and inducement. What I would like to do now is offer a different construal. In the Augustine passages widely cited, Wittgenstein offers another possible explanation for what is taking place, other than training, which is to say he is describing a learning process that is different from what is typically described by the therapeutic sceptics. He says that “Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country” – that is, “as if it already had a language, only not this one.” In other words, someone “coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him.” Elsewhere he wonders how someone “who did not understand our language” like “a foreigner” might understand the meaning of a sentence.4 The situation he seems to be pointing to is not one in which a child or student learns words by training. Rather, he’s describing a learning process that is not like being trained at all in the sense of a pedagogical approach to understanding in which someone who knows rules (a master) corrects someone who doesn’t (a pupil). In these examples the subjects – the child and foreigner – already have language and already can think, that is, they’ve already been trained. So there is a kind of learning that takes place once you are already trained into a form of life. These cases and examples suggest there is a kind of understanding that does not come from being trained into either rules or judgments, in



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which someone sets a proper example you must imitate, or corrects your mistakes, or induces you to go on following clearly defined instructions. Instead, Wittgenstein considers cases in which understanding is more akin to a contested conversation in which the participants “will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions”5 and struggle to understand one another’s intended meanings, and in which there might not be full or complete understanding at all. Understanding might even be elusive. In this case, learning the meaning of words, and the process of understanding, both take place in the context of conversations of comparison with others who see things differently, among people who might have something to learn from one another. And the test of understanding here is not mutual attunement, or agreement in judgment, or correctly following a rule and the ability to project into further contexts, but the ability to change perspectives, and see differently, or perhaps learn something about oneself in light of one’s conversations with others. I will use the term “comparative dialogue” to describe this alternative non-monological approach to understanding, and refer to the training (or pedagogical) model as an example of monological dialogue. First, I will explain the difference between training and comparing. Comparing Particular Examples To illustrate the difference between training (monological dialogue) and comparing (comparative dialogue), I begin by reviewing several remarks in which Wittgenstein responds to an approach to understanding that searches for a rule or definition among the different examples. In this pedagogical approach, someone who presumes to have greater knowledge and understanding takes it upon himself to train and correct someone who does not. The illustration is found in Plato’s dialogues in Socrates’ approach. This example is by no means trivial since Wittgenstein himself cited it as the opposite of his own approach.6 The example of Socrates is important because it highlights an important difference from the pedagogical account of understanding I just mentioned: it shows there are ways of learning that are not like being trained at all into either shared rules or judgments. Rather, we learn by comparing and contrasting different particular examples in conversation. In his various dialogues, Socrates looks for the meaning of a word by looking for a definition that unites all the various examples and cases. As Baker and Hacker note, Socrates’ method “was to take inability to

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define a word as proof of failure to understand it.” When asked for a definition, Socrates’ interlocutor often replies by giving examples, whereupon Socrates responds that examples will not do, that he wants to know the essence of the phenomenon in question. The inability to offer a definition is taken to be, in the words of Baker and Hacker, “a scandalous demonstration of ignorance” worthy of ridicule.7 An example is found in the dialogue Theaetetus. Puzzled by the meaning of the word “knowledge,” Socrates turns for an answer to his pupil Theaetetus, who responds by giving examples of activities and subjects that are kinds of knowledge. For example, he mentions the sciences of astronomy, mathematics, and music as well as “humbler crafts” such as cobbling. Socrates replies that he has not grasped the meaning of the word “knowledge” because he has not found what all the examples have in common. “You are over generous,” he says. “I asked you for one, and you are offering many: I asked for something simple and you respond with complexity.”8 Wittgenstein’s reply to this approach appears in The Blue and Brown Books (hereafter BB). In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein refers to sections 146d to 147c of Theaetetus as an example of precisely the kind of philosophical approach he rejects. “When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?,’” Wittgenstein notes, “he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.”9 The reason why Socrates is puzzled at all is that he “sees a law in the way a word is used, and, trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where it leads to paradoxical results.” Wittgenstein disagrees with Socrates’ suggestion that “there is something wrong with the ordinary use of the word ‘knowledge,’” and his contrasting approach is to compare the cases themselves, to accept that there is “no one exact usage of the word ‘knowledge’; but we can make up several such usages, which will more or less agree with the ways the word is actually used.”10 Wittgenstein describes this tendency or compulsion “to look for something in common” (look for a rule that governs all the uses of a word) as “our craving for generality” and “the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case.” The “contempt for what seems the less general case” compels us to “give a definition” and “draw a sharp boundary” and “find the common element in all its applications” and find “one definite class of features which characterize all cases” of a concept rather than taking seriously what is less general: the cases and examples themselves. Wittgenstein doesn’t hide his contempt for this “attitude towards the more general”; for him, it “leads the



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philosopher into complete darkness” and has “shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term.”11 In addition to the inclination to think “there must be something common” to “all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term,”12 Wittgenstein takes square aim at the dominant disciplines of his time, giving four other examples of the craving for generality: mistakenly inferring something general from what is particular (like mistaking a neighbourhood for the city itself); assuming that the meaning of a word is an interiorized property, like a mental state (the word “pain,” for example);13 our preoccupation with the method of mathematics (unifying the treatment of different topics by generalization); and the method of the natural science (reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws).14 Wittgenstein’s replies to these various examples of the craving for generality are among the most important and influential of his various remarks. Tools, Neighbourhoods, Fibres, and Labyrinths In chapter 2, I explained how Wittgenstein’ s comparison between language and a collection of games, the idea of meaning as use, illustrates the practical aspect of language in the sense that language is not just a description of human action but woven into it. The language-games analogy is meant to free us from the craving for generality by shedding light on the irreducible plurality of languages and forms of life. In PI, s. 65, he begins to consider the objection that he has not explained what makes something “language” or “parts of language,” which is to say that he has not defined “the essence of a language-game” and “what is common to all these activities” he calls language. He replies that “these phenomena have no one thing in common,”15 and he offers the word “games” as an example of the plurality of use. “How should we explain to someone what a game is?”, someone asks, which is another way of asking how we know what the word means.16 Wittgenstein replies: “Don’t say: ‘there must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games.’” He considers board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, children’s games, and then asks what might be the single common or essential feature that unites all the varieties of activities that we call “games”: amusement, winning and losing, competition

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between players, skill, and luck. He concludes that if we “look and see,” we will not notice anything “that is common to all,” no characteristics that all games and only games have in common, and no features that are uniformly applicable to games. Instead, we see similarities, and “multifarious relationships,” and “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”17 As with the word “games,” it is a mistake to assume there is either a common denominator or an essential feature that unifies the various meanings of a word and all the varieties of practices we call language. Rather, it is because these phenomena are related to one another, it is because of “these relationships,” that we call them “language.”18 To illustrate this point that language is characterized not by uniformity but by overlapping similarities and differences, Wittgenstein draws several analogies: language must be seen as a diverse collection of tools with different functions; as an ancient city with a maze of little streets and squares with old and new houses, and a multitude of neighbourhoods; as “the continuous overlapping of many fibres”; as a “labyrinth of paths.”19 These analogies are meant to stimulate diversity awareness, to illustrate the irreducible plurality and non-uniformity of languagegames and forms of life. And he likens the inability to see variety as a kind of pathology that comes from malnutrition. “A main cause of philosophical disease,” he tells us, is “a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example.”20 Watching Others Play: Learning from Example An important theme of Wittgenstein’s remarks is contempt for particularity, for the craving for generality, for the inclination to “draw a sharp boundary,” to look for “something in common,” to search for an essential meaning or definition that “points beyond” the examples.21 His alternative approach to the tendency to generalize begins by taking seriously particular examples of ordinary uses of words. Next, using the style of short-paragraphed numbered commentaries, he guides the reader through a series of seemingly scattered remarks that resemble an open-ended conversation. These remarks are intended to wean us from the craving to generalize by showing us why sometimes there is simply no way we can find a common denominator. He tries to show us why we have no choice but to accept the possibility of the complex and irreducible plurality of languages and then to compare the different cases



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and examples of use. Because the meaning of a word is its particular regular, customary use, and not a rule or definition into which we are trained, Wittgenstein concludes that “our understanding does not reach beyond the examples”22 and that comparing examples is all one really can do. Comparing examples “is not an indirect means of explaining – in default of a better.”23 In other words, comparison is not an inferior, dubious, or second-rate form of explanation. On the contrary, since meaning is rooted in examples and practice, and not in a rule or generalization, it is a superior form of explanation and the most promising way to understand. That’s why he writes: “I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice. – And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself.”24 He does not mean by this that a child or apprentice should internalize the examples; rather, he is saying that to understand a concept is to know how to use it in customary ways, to see connections –similarities and differences – in the various examples of use, to see how other parts of the city are connected to the suburb in which you live. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein describes a process in which “a rule is employed neither in the teaching nor the game itself; nor is it set down in a list of rules.” Instead, one learns “by watching how others play” so that the game “can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.” He advises us to “let the use of words teach you their meanings.”25 In other words, it is a mistake to assume that understanding always involves being brought up to obey orders, or being educated to continue a formula, or being trained to follow a sign. Understanding also consists in acquiring the practical ability to employ examples in particular ways, and seeing their family resemblances; this contrasts with following sharply defined rules or learning formulas.26 In this sense, Wittgenstein agrees with Theaetetus that astronomy, mathematics, music, and crafts are all examples of knowledge and that Theaetetus was correctly using the word “knowledge” in offering these examples rather than providing a definition. That’s because an essential, unifying formula, definition, or boundary is not required to ground understanding. In several remarks he emphasizes that there is no “common thing,” “essential thing,” “one exact usage,” or “deeper explanation” that unifies the variety of cases and examples of word meanings.27 To understand a concept is to know how to regularly use it in a variety of ways and to see the family resemblance in the examples. This does not take the form of finding what the variety of uses has in common; rather, it entails seeing the particular uses in comparison. This

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comparative approach to meaning and understanding is what Wittgenstein calls “perspicuous representation” and the synonymous concepts “survey,” “perspicuity,” and “clear view.”28 Wittgenstein’s Method of Perspicuous Representation Wittgenstein’s comparative approach to understanding – what he calls “perspicuous representation” – appears in his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”29 and in PI, ss. 89–92 and 122.30 Gordon Baker once argued that the most direct route to attaining an overview of Wittgenstein’s method is to address the question of what he meant by this concept, and he cites PI, s. 122, as the strongest textual evidence for this claim.31 And indeed, it is here that Wittgenstein tells us that the concept “is of fundamental significance,” that it “earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things.” He is telling us that this is his preferred method of explanation, so let’s examine what he means. Perspicuous representation is an “investigation” and an “analysis”32 that has two principle characteristics: particular ordinary use (what Wittgenstein calls grammar), and comparison (the survey). Let’s look first at the idea of seeing particular aspects, not generalizations.

(a)  Grammar, Ordinary Particular Use, and “the Phenomena of Every-Day” Perspicuous representation is an approach that takes seriously “usual forms of expression,” the “ordinary vague sentences,” the “actual language,” the “everyday use” of words.33 The ordinary “actual use” of words is what Wittgenstein calls their “grammar”; it is what he means when he describes his “investigation” as “a grammatical one.”34 Analysing the particular everyday use of words is what Wittgenstein is referring to when he says that the purpose of his investigation is not to “learn anything new” or provide “new information.”35 In these and other passages, “new” is synonymous with the craving for generality and antonymous with ordinary particular meaning. He is criticizing methods that ignore everyday particular use and that instead look for “strict and clear rules” and generalizations and that strive after or are “dazzled” by an “ideal” – something essential, of “universal significance,” hidden in “the background.”36 This explains Wittgenstein’s critical remarks about philosophy.37 His target here is not philosophy in general but one of its methods.



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Philosophers are mistaken in dismissing “ordinary language” and ignoring how language is actually used, and presuming that their task consists in describing “phenomena that are hard to get a hold of” or uncovering metaphysical foundations or the “essence of the thing.” Since meaning is “the actual use of language,” we must take seriously how words are ordinarily used and try to understand “the phenomena of every-day.”38 This anti-essentialism renders somewhat problematic the basic premise adopted by the self-styled New Wittgensteinians and by anyone else who equates the method of the Tractatus with what Hilmy and others call the “new philosophical method” that Wittgenstein developed after 1929.39 In actuality, the new position that Wittgenstein adopted was to question the approach of the Tractatus of “logical investigation” with its “urge to understand the … essence, of everything empirical” and to establish “strict and clear rules of the logical structure of propositions.”40 In other words, the new method Wittgenstein adopted was not a kind of therapy per se, but an approach that rejected essentialism and the craving for generality and replaced it with an aspectival approach in which the meaning of words is given by how they are regularly used. According to this new method, the task of understanding the diversity of use – as I will explain further in a moment – is to compare diverse aspects of use. There is no deeper “secondorder” explanation, there are no strict rules, there is no essential logical structure of language hidden beneath the surface that needs to be brought to light. That’s not to say nothing can ever be hidden. In fact, the things that are often hidden are so simple, familiar, and important to us that we take them for granted and so do not notice them.41 This is what Wittgenstein means when he says that “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.”42 This is not a doctrine of non-interference. His point is that it is a mistake to assume there must be some deeper, definitive, philosophical explanation that can explain things in essential or general terms. There’s really no point in looking for some hidden metaphysical foundations of meaning, or trying to construct them, because any attempt to operationalize this type of method will simply fail, leaving everything as it was before it was tried. Wittgenstein often warns us against such a method. But he is not against method per se. He says that having no single definitive method does not preclude employing various methods. This explains the frequently cited remark in PI, s. 133, that there is not one philosophical method “though there are methods,

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like different therapies.” Notice that the nouns here are not singular but plural. As I explained in chapter 1, some have taken this to mean that Wittgenstein’s approach is itself a kind of therapy. But if we look closely, we find that what he’s actually claiming here is that we should not be held captive by one method; instead, we should accept the possibility of a variety of methods for specific purposes. He is not saying that his own method is a therapy, but that there are different methods in the same way that there is not one cure but various cures for all of the various diseases. The analogy to therapies is meant to foster epistemological pluralism or awareness of methodological diversity. I hope it is already clear that one should not conclude from Wittgenstein’s acceptance of diverse methods that he employs none, or that he has no preference. He deliberately tells us that his method is a practice of comparison that takes seriously the actual ordinary uses of language and that compares particular cases and examples. In this way, his goal is to “understand something that is already in plain view,” what “lies open to view,” and “what we have always known,” namely, the normal, everyday particular, and irreducibly plural use of words.43 The consequence of the tendency to generalize, to lay down rules and techniques, and to ignore everyday particular use is that we will misunderstand the meaning of those words. Things won’t “turn out as we had assumed,” and we will become “entangled in our own rules.”44 Rule entanglement, the lack of perspicuity, the craving for generality, is like being held “captive” by “a picture” outside of which we cannot get, “for it lay in our language” and language seems to “repeat it to us inexorably.”45 A picture holds us captive because it can, in Taylor’s words, “sink to a level of unquestionable background assumption” when it organizes and makes sense of so much of our lives that it appears unchallengeable and hard to conceive alternatives to.46 When we are held captive by a picture of the world, we are “dazzled” by an “unshakable” ideal that appears to be the very essence of what we are trying to understand rather than just one picture among many.47 In this situation, a particular explanation of things so captures our imagination that we are unable to conceive of any other way of looking at the world. Wittgenstein characterizes this as “the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”48 Now we should not underestimate the significance of this line of argument. As Wittgenstein himself tells us, it is an explanation of his own method, and it also sheds light on how he uses the concepts of meaning and understanding. The “entanglement in our rules” (what he



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calls “the civil status of a contradiction” or “its status in civil life”) is something he tells us he wants to understand and “get a clear view of” because it “throws light” on his “concept of meaning something,” for example, when we say “I didn’t mean it like that.”49 What it throws light on is how we can misunderstand meaning. Therein lies the point of Wittgenstein’s critical remarks about Socrates misunderstanding what knowledge means because he cannot accept that there are different examples of particular use.

(b)  Seeing and Understanding: Seeing Aspects Not Generalizations Another way of explaining particular ordinary use (and how this is contrasted with general pictures) is the argument about seeing aspects rather than generalizations. Thus in PI, Pt II, Wittgenstein describes the lack of perspicuity as a form of visual defect. “It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off,” and we “predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it.”50 I said earlier that the consequences of ignoring ordinary use are rule entanglement and a failure to understand the meaning of a word. But the consequences are much more profound than simply misunderstanding linguistic meaning. What follows from this myopia is that we lose touch with what is meaningful for us. We fail to notice “the aspects of things that are most important for us.”51 Either we cannot recognize or we neglect what matters in our form of life. This loss of meaning and the failure to see diversity is called “aspect-blindness” and not “noticing an aspect.”52 This concept of seeing particular aspects, and the analogy of meaning and understanding with visual experience, is most fully articulated in PI, Pt II, s. xi. Here Wittgenstein considers a variety “picture-objects”: a box; a duck-rabbit figure derived from Jastrow; a “picture-face” that resembles a human face; a triangle; a convex step (a straight line drawn through the geometric centres of two surfaces, or two hexagons interpenetrating); a double-cross (a white cross on a black ground and a black cross on a white ground); and an arbitrary cipher.53 Wittgenstein uses these puzzle-pictures to illustrate three different uses of the verb “to see”: continuous seeing (or simply “seeing,” which is an ordinary conventional way of seeing); seeing as (an interpretation); and seeing differently (a new way of seeing).

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(c) Understanding Is Not Interpreting: Seeing and Seeing As Customarily we do not see a familiar object as something or take what we know for something.54 To see is not the same to see as. Seeing is “a state”55 and a disposition. By contrast, seeing something as something is an interpretation and occurs in specific cases where our customary way of seeing something is called into question or when we compare our own understanding to an unfamiliar understanding. For example, we do not see a familiar object, such as a table or a rabbit, as a table or as a rabbit. We just see the object, and this is akin to a “visual experience” and to “experiencing the meaning of a word.”56 But suppose I meet someone from another culture, one that has no word for “table” or “rabbit” because they have no use for tables or have no rabbits. If this person called my table an altar and called my rabbit a wallaby in their language, then we could say I see the object as a table and she sees it as an altar, and I see it as a rabbit and she sees it as a wallaby.57 When our way of seeing things changes because it is challenged or questioned, or when some aspect of it is brought to light, the change in perception is what Wittgenstein calls “noticing an aspect” and seeing differently.58 The key difference, then, between seeing and seeing difference is illustrated if we consider the duck– rabbit picture. As Monk explains, the experience of noticing an aspect “only comes at the moment of change from duck to rabbit and back. In between, the aspect is as it were dispositional.”59 To see continuously (or simply “to see”) is a customary way of seeing and understanding. To see differently is to overcome the unique conceivability of the picture and adopt a new or innovative way of seeing and understanding. Seeing differently is not adopting a new interpretation, interpreting what I see differently, or seeing it now as something different. Rather, it is having a different disposition, experiencing a different state, having a different customary way of understanding, or understanding the world in a way that rivals what was previously understood. So this distinction between seeing and seeing as helps unravel the differences between understanding and interpreting and why a change of understanding is not the same as a change of interpretation. This conflation of interpretation and understanding is a mistake Wittgenstein tries to expose.60 They are similar but not synonymous. “To interpret is to think, to do something” he writes, but “seeing is a state.”61



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To gain a better understanding about the meaning of seeing aspects, let’s consider a question Wittgenstein raises about the experience of seeing differently or noticing an aspect: Can the meaning of a word be grasped suddenly? The question is raised because the experience of seeing differently is sometimes described as a sudden transformation such as the “dawning” of an aspect or “the flashing of an aspect,” which seems to suggest that noticing a new aspect means that the whole use of the word can be grasped “in a flash.”62 It would be tempting to interpret this as a claim that our coming to understand and change grammar is a mysterious non-cognitive, anti-realist process of spontaneous conversion done without thinking, not grounded in new evidence, truths, proof, the accumulation of facts, better arguments, or any practices of persuasion involving the exchange of reasons.63 But there’s no convincing evidence that this is what Wittgenstein is in fact saying. On the contrary, he appears to take issue with this way of looking at things. Even though we sometimes describe what we do with expressions like “grasp it in a flash,” there’s “nothing astonishing,” he says in PI, s. 197, “about what happens.” He reminds us that the reason why there’s no mystery or doubt that we understand how to use a word either correctly or differently and in a new way, is that “its meaning lies in its use.” And use, he tells us in PI, ss. 191 and 192, cannot be grasped in a flash. What he’s saying is that “in a flash” is merely an expression meant to suggest that seeing differently, or using a word in an innovative way, appears “as if” we can spontaneously use a word correctly. So Wittgenstein’s position is consistent: the meaning of a word is its regular customary use, and as I will suggest, this is not necessarily sceptical or non-realist because there’s a role for comparative dialogical practices of persuasion. I have been talking about the activities of seeing particular aspects and how this contrasts with interpreting. Since seeing is not an opinion or interpretation but a state, understanding the meaning of a concept is not seeing it as something but understanding its correct use. Understanding is grasping what can and cannot be done with a concept, being able to apply it in agreement with customary ways or following conventional criteria of correctness. But that’s not the end of the story, because the question of how we change our own or someone else’s understanding or state of seeing also needs to be explained, and Wittgenstein does this with the technique of the survey, which is his bestknown practice of persuasion. As Monk splendidly explains, it could be said of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method “that its aim is to

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change the aspect under which certain things are seen” by means of a technique of persuasion he calls seeing connections, or the survey.64 The survey is a technique of persuasion that brings unnoticed aspects to someone’s awareness. The Survey: Rearrangement, Reminders, and “Objects of Comparison” I said earlier that perspicuous representation is an approach that has two characteristics: particular use (seeing aspects not generalizations, recognizing the neighbourhoods not just the city) and comparison. I have been looking at the idea of particular use; now I want to look at the second feature of perspicuous representation, namely, the survey. The survey helps achieve the goal of perspicuous representation by bringing unnoticed aspects of phenomena to someone’s awareness and by comparing the diverse aspects. As Baker so cogently argued, the survey is not a bird’s-eye view. It is not like someone looking down on a city from a height, thereby commanding a clear view of the streets and neighbourhoods below; it is not a view from nowhere.65 Rather, it is a comparative approach based on the fact that you have a point of view, that you actually do live in your own neighbourhood. The survey is actually a range of possible comparative approaches such as “assembling reminders for a particular purpose,” rearranging something that already lies open to view and in plain view, and “substituting one form of expression for another” using “intermediate cases.”66 Wittgenstein uses the term “objects of comparison” to refer to these comparative approaches. An object of comparison is not “a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond” (a hypothetical thought experiment like a state of nature or an original position) but a kind of “measuring-rod.” Objects of comparison are not “first approximations” for establishing the potential generalizations but are meant to “throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities.”67 The survey compares similarities and differences among different language-games and in so doing explores the many possibilities of the phenomena in question. The survey thereby shows how we are trained into certain conventional uses of language, or ways of seeing, and how such training and conventions are part of a variety of possible ways of seeing things, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.”68 In this way a perspicuous representation “produces



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just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’” among the variety of language-games and particular examples of use rather than creating definitions or general theories and applying these to the examples and cases. So there is a kind of understanding that comes from perspicuous representation, which is to say from rearrangement, reminders, the bringing of certain facts to light, and seeing the connections in comparing different aspects of phenomena. These survey techniques are meant to free us from the captivity of one language-game (a picture holding us captive),69 or they might help restore to prominence neglected or forgotten language-games. Rearrangement, reminders, and objects of comparison free us from the possibility of aspect blindness by bringing unnoticed aspects and facts to our awareness so that we can see “differently.”70 This way of “noticing an aspect” can be achieved “by placing side-by side with one system of expression other systems of expression.” In this way we “change the aspect” by perspicuous representation, because it creates awareness that there are other analogies and “systems of expression” that are “equally well justified.”71 Because understanding is comparative, a contest of analogies, aspects, facts, or equally justifiable expressions, the condition of antirealism, non-cognitivism, and dramatic incomparability described by the therapeutic sceptical Wittgensteinians is in fact a rare occasion of severe communication breakdown. Normally, understanding is a situation in which we can and do try in various ways to persuade others in dialogical comparison and contrast: we place other ways of seeing things, or other arguments that are equally well justified, side by side with the thing to be reconsidered. We juxtapose “the aspect of the use of our words” with another system of expression “real or imagined.”72 This method of using objects of comparison – of comparing one aspect with another – does not guarantee the ability to persuade our interlocutor. The process might simply expose a possibility for understanding a phenomenon differently, or it may have the consequence that we actually see matters differently. The point is that there is a way of reading Wittgenstein in which there is a role for practices of persuasion. So it is not necessary to jump to any of the non-realist conclusions articulated by the therapeutic sceptics. The fact of the matter is that we do contest grammars and rules already, every day, and all the time, and this contestation typically involves making better arguments, introducing new facts, uncovering forgotten truths, describing empirical reality, and contesting reasons with better reasons.

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Family Resemblances Perspicuous representation is both a goal and a strategy for achieving this goal; it is both a process and what Wittgenstein calls “the way we look at things” – a way of understanding and acting in the world. To have perspicuity is to have a comparative understanding of particular cases and examples; it is to have an awareness that there may be various possibilities and different aspects. To have a perspicuity, he tells us in PI, s. 122, is to “command a clear view of the use of our words.” Its purpose is to effect not just a change in opinion or interpretation, or to make us “see as” (to see some familiar object as something or take what we know as something). The goal of perspicuous representation is to acquire a comparative analogical understanding so as to free ourselves from aspect-blindness and to expose the variety of ways of seeing a matter at hand; it is to see connections among the similarities and differences in the variety of human practices, to “regard a given case differently,”73 which is to see the variety of concepts or language-games and the different aspects about them. Perspicuity means freedom from the craving for generality and not having contempt for the particular case. Perspicuity also means acquiring a clearer understanding of the assumptions underlying our practices by bringing aspects out into the open. Wittgenstein’s favourite way of describing this process of comparative understanding, in which we look for overlapping similarities with others, is articulated in PI, s. 67: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities,” he writes “than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family … overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – and I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.” A word, he tells us, has “a family of meanings.”74 The point of this comparative family resemblance approach to understanding, the analogy between language and games, is missed by those who emphasize training and therapeutic sceptical aspects. The concept of family resemblances suggests that in language as in various games, comparison is possible in conversation with others. On Boundaries, Foundations, and Flowing Rivers The metaphor of family members with resemblances sheds light on an important aspect of Wittgenstein’s approach that contrasts with the one I have outlined so far in this book. This is not a metaphor of the



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harmonious mutual attunement of pitches, tones, clocks, or weighing scales. The relationship here is not between a student and a teacher, or a therapist and a patient. As for the children of the family, it is not their training, initiation, and inducement that this metaphor emphasizes, but how their resemblances “overlap and criss-cross” with the rest of the family. To see a form of life in such terms is not an expression of scepticism, in either contextualist or incommensurable forms, and it opens up political possibilities other than conservative, negative, or contingent ones. The metaphors that emphasize childhood training don’t help us understand the complex overlapping relationships within and among forms of life, yet it is this very complexity that Wittgenstein continually tries to explain by various analogies. A form of life is like the continuous “overlapping of many fibres,” a “labyrinth of paths,” an “ancient city” with “a maze of little streets and squares,” with “detours” and “sideroads” and “a multitude of familiar paths” that lead off “in every direction.” He uses a variety of boundary metaphors to explore this point. A concept is “not closed by a frontier,” he writes, and a sentence has an “indefinite boundary.”75 A game is a concept with “blurred edges,” it is “not everywhere circumscribed by rules.” Concepts have “vague boundaries,” and “the application of a word is not everywhere bounded by rules.”76 The idea that there are “blurred edges” and “vague boundaries” has at least two senses. One has to do with the playing of a game. There is no sharp boundary between the actual playing of a game and its rules, so a game cannot be reduced to or captured by its rules or conventions.77 The other sense is that there are no sharp boundaries among the variety of language-games and forms of life, so we can compare them. Because of the two ways in which the boundaries are blurred (within and among forms of life), Wittgenstein promotes an idea that forms of life are neither fixed nor clearly demarcated but instead are flexible, overlapping, vague, and varying. In On Certainty (hereafter OC),78 ss. 96–9, Wittgenstein illustrates this picture of a form of life by analogy to a flowing river. He describes the relationship between the river and its shifting bed, which alters “with time” and in which “there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.” And he talks about that river’s bank of hard rock, which alters imperceptibly, and its relation to the bank of sand, which “now in one place now in another gets washed away or deposited.”79 Later he evokes a foundation metaphor: “one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.”80

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A river, its bed and bank, the foundation walls and the foundation, overlapping fibres, labyrinths and mazes, multiple paths, side roads, and ancient cities: Wittgenstein employs these and innumerable other examples to illustrate blurred and complex relationships. His point is that our forms of life are indeterminate, variegated, eclectic, and flexible in ways that resist being captured by generalizations and definitions. There is no sharp boundary between the ongoing flow of our various practices and the languages that describe them. And as Baker and Hacker explain, Wittgenstein shows not just that languages are vague and indeterminate “but that we should not deplore this fact.” The diversity and indeterminacy of use does not make our language useless or imperfect. Moreover, Wittgenstein demonstrates that vagueness is an important characteristic of language and that “far from making communication impossible, vagueness may be advantageous.”81 As Wittgenstein puts it, “elegance is not what we are trying for.”82 The absence of a clearly unifying set of rules is not something that needs to be corrected or overcome, a limitation that needs to be addressed. On the contrary, this vagueness is what explains language as well as forms of life. It is because of our “striving after an ideal” of “a perfect language” awaiting construction, because we ignore the “our ordinary vague sentences,” because we are “dazzled by the ideal,” that we fail to see the actual use of words like “games” clearly and mistakenly assume that “the ideal ‘must’ be found in reality.”83 There are other important implications of blurred boundaries. The variety, overlap, and flexibility of forms of life does not entail either context-determinism or weak conventionalism or incomparability, nor does it force us to accept non-realism or the truth of scepticism. Wittgenstein’s point is not to promote such conclusions but to get us to stop thinking that finding things in common is a necessary aspect of knowledge and meaning. Instead he encourages us to compare the various cases and examples, to find family resemblances, and to see how “one gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular way.”84 Because the boundaries of human experience are blurred, and because conversation is such an important aspect of the human experience, comparison is always possible even if the outcome of that conversation is not necessarily successful. We can know others, and we can learn a lot about the world, even if we cannot know with certainty “the existence of the external world (or of other minds.)”85 So it is important not to underestimate the extent to which understanding and persuasion can realistically take place in conversation with others who see differently.



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Another significant implication of the idea of overlapping and blurred boundaries is that it renders problematic the concern some might have about the absence of an external vantage point. A more realistic understanding of forms of life is that there is no clear-cut distinction between what (or who) is inside and outside, external and internal. A more realistic understanding of human social relations is that they are always already blurry, overlapping, criss-crossing, and interwoven. And this undermines the very idea of incomparability. Even if there is no one thing in common, even if there is no external vantage point, there is always a comparative and dialogical vantage point. What all of this points to, as well, is that Wittgenstein leaves room for foundations, rules, and boundaries. He acknowledges that they do have a place in the explanation, as long as we see them as blurry, shifting, and for particular purposes rather than clearly defined, permanent, and general. There may be boundaries even if they are vague or unclear, not fixed or general. So, he says, if “you wish to give a definition” or “to draw a sharp boundary,” then “you are free to draw it as you like” as long as you understand that “this boundary will never coincide with actual usage, as this usage has no sharp boundary.”86 Again, “to repeat, we can draw a boundary – for special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose.)” And likewise, it may be for various kinds of reasons “when one draws a boundary.”87 As Tully writes, of course we can always construct a theory or a generalization if we wish, “as long as we remember that it serves the limited and heuristic purpose of throwing light on a small number of features of the phenomenon at the expense of obscuring all others.”88 This reading agrees to some extent with Rorty’s view that Wittgenstein’s later work was a therapy against a particular definition of the foundation, only if the foundation is understood in an essentialist or universal way, as “the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and thus for all culture.” Remember that Rorty’s long-standing claim is that there are no such “foundations to serve as common ground for adjudicating knowledge-claims.”89 This may be true, but Rorty’s account is not sensitive enough to the ways in which Wittgenstein’s method of explanation affirms the importance of boundaries and various types of foundations, be they philosophical or other.90 Wittgenstein’s position was indeed directed against a specific type of foundationalist perspective, defined in terms of law-like

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causes and general theories, which is to say culturally or historically invariant explanations to ground understanding. But not everything we call a foundation fits this definition. So perspicuous representation is not just a form of anti-foundationalism, and it is misunderstood if seen in this way. Rather, Wittgenstein actually defends the idea that there are many possible foundations. As he says in a remark in Culture and Value (hereafter CV), “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.”91 Wittgenstein also talks about the “real foundations,” which he tells us in PI “are the aspects of things that are most important for us,” which is to say the things that “are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” So the work of the philosopher is indeed to survey the foundations in this sense, if we see that this work “consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”92 As we see with Quentin Skinner, one of these particular purposes could be to survey the foundations of modern political thought. Understanding Other Cultures In this concluding section of the chapter, I survey situations in which Wittgenstein is not describing people who need therapy, or dependent untrained children, or students and apprentices learning from teachers, or assistants helping their masters. Instead, I turn our attention to people who are already well trained in their own language, who are struggling to understand one another, and who encounter confusions and misunderstandings over interpretations, rules, judgments, motives, and intended meanings. He speaks of those who “already had language” and who “come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions” and try to understand those traditions.93 In such cases, being trained – that is, mastering the foreign language – is not enough to understand, and understanding is acquired not by training but rather in a conversation where intentions and motives are discussed. Such conversations might begin with phrases like “I didn’t mean it like that,” and intended meanings might be explained by offering different examples and clarifying the meaning of these examples by exchanging questions and answers or simply by guessing.94 It follows from this that we understand the meaning of words perspicuously in conversation. Only by regularly talking with others can you compare and contrast your forms of life, acquire the ability to



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understand one another, and try to live together. This is the sense in which Wittgenstein promotes a dialogical ethos; it is also the sense in which meaning and understanding are dialogical. To know the meaning of a word is not simply to have a rule or definition that we train others to use correctly, or to be conditioned by what society lets us say, or to be able to project the word in new circumstances; it is also something acquired in a practice of conversation with others who already have their own language and are part of an established form of life, and who may not be immature interlocutors. These others may not want to have a “conversation of justice,” for example, within liberal democratic parameters, as the starting point of dialogue. Here understanding won’t be achieved by forcing others into a conversation whose norms and vocabulary are already predetermined. Here the ability to see differently and to acquire a different disposition may be the result of an open-ended comparative dialogue. What this all points to is that Wittgenstein’s approach is not just therapy, and it’s not just talking about training, and it doesn’t really seem to express scepticism about criticizing ourselves, knowing others, or comparing different forms of life. This approach might, however, help us figure out aspects of ourselves and understand other, unfamiliar complex forms of life. This is Wittgenstein’s lesson in his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” (hereafter RF), in some passages of PI, and in OC. He describes situations that do not involve learning formulas or rules or being trained into forms of life. Instead he asks us to consider, for example, a case in which “two principles” cannot be reconciled and where there is no agreement on a “good ground.” In such cases of cultural irreconcilability and disagreement, a faulty tendency is to declare the other “a fool and heretic” and “primitive,” or to use “our language-game as a base from which to combat theirs.”95 He criticizes this tendency to describe unfamiliar practices and ways of life as errors and “stupid actions” and “done out of sheer stupidity.” As an example of this tendency, he offers the anthropologist James George Frazer, who was unable to “conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time.”96 For Wittgenstein, it is an error to assume that those who disagree with us are simply stupid or foolish. On the contrary, we should assume that the reason for disagreement might actually be that there are other forms of life with different ways of seeing and doing things that cannot be fully explained by culturally neutral descriptions.

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Wittgenstein acknowledges that there may be forms of life different from the ones with which he is familiar and from whom we might have something to learn. In RF, he seems to suggest this very point – that even if we aren’t completely sure what others are doing, we are capable nevertheless of learning something about them. “The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy sticks his knife through a picture of him,” he writes, “really does build his hut of wood and cuts his arrow with skill and not in effigy.”97 To have a perspicuous representation is to accept the possibility that we might have something to learn about those who really do build huts out of wood, or cut arrows. This is a claim about the possibility of knowing aspects of others. Dialogue: Neither Training nor Therapy but Comparison What we find in these passages is a Wittgenstein whose paradigm or key examples of meaning and understanding are not games like chess or tennis, or unequal pedagogical relations into which a pupil is trained to follow a rule, but contested ways of seeing things and encounters of equally justified language-games and different forms of life. These are cases in which understanding is not based at all on initiation, inducement, or inculcation into dominant social values. These examples suggest that “mutual attunement” is not essential to understanding forms of life. Understanding is not necessarily based on agreement or on sharing routes of interest; it can occur in situations where we meet others who have no word for “interest,” or who have been trained into other equally justifiable and legitimate political values, or who see things differently, or with whom we strongly disagree and have nothing in common, but from whom we might still have something to learn. In such cases, understanding is rooted in contested meanings, disagreements over formulae, conflict over good grounds, and conversation with different forms of life. Here the meaning of a word is not necessarily determined by the checks and tests on my conformity to a practice provided by my linguistic community; rather, it is given by a comparison of its contested uses. What these passages lack are any arguments for contextualism, and they clearly oppose incommensurability. The absence of a common natural horizon does not render impossible the “enterprise of comparison.”98 It is possible to compare aspects and to notice family resemblances.



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Conclusion An important lesson of this survey of Wittgenstein’s remarks is that training and therapy are themselves aspects of understanding and that understanding might also be something like an ongoing conversation with others. Understanding is not just the outcome of the pedagogical activities of initiation, inducement, or training someone who doesn’t know; it is also the activity of struggling to make sense of different and unfamiliar cultural practices, which may entail comparing overlapping family resemblances as well as differences. This is not a scepticism about other minds; it is a normal way of understanding the world around us. The variety and flexibility of forms of life does not condemn us either to non-realism or to paralysing scepticism. Because boundaries are blurred, and because conversation is already such an important aspect of the human experience, comparison is always possible, indeed inescapable, and understanding is in this sense comparative and piecemeal. We should have no trouble accepting that we can know aspects of the truth or reality and more or less understand one another, as long as we also accept that this knowledge and understanding is a work in progress, achieved in conversation with others. This is to say that understanding is not the monological activity of being trained into a language-game, either its rules, conventions, or judgments. It is not the activity of imposing an authoritative explanation on someone who does not understand. The dialogical “family resemblance” or perspicuous representation approach to meaning and understanding can be summarized as follows: Meaning is the particular example of use. Understanding is comparing examples and particular cases of use, which is to say surveying the practices of use. The aim of comparison (survey) is to find family resemblances. Looking for family resemblances does not take the form of looking for what is common, the single essential feature that unites the variety of uses; rather, it involves comparing the “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing.” Family resemblances are seen in conversation. Therefore, meaning and understanding are grasped in conversation. In the next three chapters, I describe three examples of Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation, in particular how this approach I explained here – namely, the dialogical explanation of meaning and understanding – gives us a better understanding of politics by explaining a wide variety of political languages, practices, and struggles.

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It helps us understand classic political texts, political concepts, ideologies, historical contexts, diverse political institutions, and various complex political struggles over recognition. These examples will teach us that Wittgenstein need not be either defended or rejected for his therapeutic or pedagogical views with their varieties of scepticism and their negative, conservative and contingent political implications. His remarks can be understood differently.

4 Charles Taylor’s Wittgensteinian Aspects

In the first two chapters of this book, I surveyed two related tendencies among Wittgenstein commentators. One is the suggestion that his remarks promote a kind of therapeutic sceptical orientation directed at either epistemological or philosophical dogmatism. Connected to this is a view that emphasizes the primacy of training in a shared form of life, in which there is a necessary equation between training and learning – a reading we could call pedagogical or disciplinary. I argued that this pedagogical reading helps constitute therapeutic scepticism. I also suggested that these tendencies cannot account for the practice of genuine dialogue or do not allow such a practice in any substantive way; indeed, Wittgenstein is a monological philosopher. On these readings he is promoting non-realism. I considered the variety of ways in which the therapeutic sceptical and pedagogical or disciplinary readings have been too often taken for granted by those who have sought to draw political implications from Wittgenstein’s remarks. The politics that necessarily derives from this is conservative, negative, or contingent. This means it is doubtful that we can understand or know, judge or criticize, our own or other forms of life. And it is doubtful that we can compare our own forms of life with others. Since all we know comes from being trained into a form of life, we cannot just stand outside our training, so we must resign ourselves to the order of things and more or less leave the world alone. In the previous chapter I suggested that there is another way of reading Wittgenstein, one that takes into account the practices of conversation and comparison. This way does not privilege or emphasize either therapy or training, with its scepticism and its conservative, negative, and contingent political implications. On this construal, Wittgenstein is

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a philosopher of comparative dialogue. In the next three chapters, I survey three examples of this second reading and consider how it has been promoted. We will begin with Charles Taylor, whose work is exemplary. Taylor takes Wittgenstein’s most important lesson to be a new form of realism that promotes dialogical agency and an argument about the conditions of intentionality. I want to examine these two aspects in some detail. I will begin by reviewing Taylor’s distinction between monological and dialogical perspectives; then I will look at the “background” and how its aspects are retrieved and articulated, and conclude by examining the language of perspicuous contrast. Taylor on Dialogue The “crucial feature of human life,” Taylor argues, is “its fundamentally dialogical character.”1 Taylor has a privileged place for dialogical explanation and understanding, and one of the authors he credits as a principal source of this view is Wittgenstein. These dialogical aspects illustrate how, as Guignon correctly observes, Taylor’s reading of Wittgenstein stands in contrast to therapeutic interpretations, such as the one promoted by Rorty.2 To be sure, there are other commentators who have noticed that Wittgenstein is promoting dialogue, but my argument is that it’s a different kind of dialogue than the one Taylor is talking about. The kind of dialogue they typically describe is within the Cavellian framework of therapy or training. As Pitkin suggests, this is “a dialogue between a guide and a seeker” or “between teacher and student” that aims at “selfknowledge.”3 Stern offers another example of this tendency to depict Wittgensteinian dialogue. Cavell’s legacy, he argues, is to interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks as a style of dialogue whose aim is not to lead the reader to any idealized or theoretical philosophical views “but rather to help us see through such ways of speaking and looking.”4 Mulhall succinctly articulates this way of thinking when he writes that for Wittgenstein, “philosophical dialogue is always therapeutic in it purposes.”5 And following Cavell, Peterman has claimed that the kind of dialogue Wittgenstein’s therapy promotes is confessional. “The text is dialogical,” he writes, “but the dialogue is between Wittgenstein and himself.”6 I think these and other depictions are partly correct, but to borrow a phrase, not everything they describe is Wittgenstein’s approach. They exaggerate the importance of therapy and misrepresent training, and



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they don’t convincingly or clearly explain what intended positive purposes dialogue might have other than freeing us from nonsense or embedded metaphysical pictures, or conditioning us to see the world in a certain way. And it is in this respect that Taylor’s position is different. Taylor does not depict Wittgenstein in therapeutic and disciplinary terms with all of the ensuing sceptical implications about context-relativity or incomparability and conservative, negative, or contingent ways of understanding politics; instead, he reads Wittgenstein as espousing what I will call “comparative dialogue.” The adjective “comparative” here is meant to contrast this concept of dialogue with the therapeutic and disciplinary forms of dialogue. My claim is that for Taylor, dialogue is not always therapeutic, nor is it exclusively disciplinary. And Taylor’s approach is relevant to our discussion because he specifically singles out therapy and training as particular examples of monological agency. The Commentaries: Neglected Wittgensteinian Aspects Before we turn to Taylor’s arguments, let’s consider what others have said about the Wittgensteinian and the dialogical aspects of Taylor’s thought. There are certainly many commentators who have appreciated the influence of Wittgenstein on Taylor’s thought.7 Many scholars have also noticed the importance of dialogue in Taylor’s approach.8 What I would like to bring to this discussion is only a reminder, if you will, that too little attention has been devoted to explaining how Taylor’s dialogical aspects have some Wittgensteinian heritage. And my reminder is not only with respect to dialogue. More attention should be paid to the way Wittgenstein helped to shape Taylor’s views in other respects as well, particularly on the background, articulation, and the method of comparison. These commentators correctly point to Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Herder, Humboldt, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Gadamer as Taylor’s philosophical sources, (and on dialogue, Fraser suggests comparisons between Taylor and Marx9). But most do not clearly explain the importance of Wittgenstein, if they mention him at all. Nicholas Smith, for example, offers only a brief reference to Wittgenstein as an early influence on Taylor and downplays the importance of what he calls the “linguistic method” with its therapeutic and sceptical implications.10 And he places far greater importance on the Romantic and expressive/constitutive philosophies of Hegel, Herder, Humboldt, and the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger and

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Merleau-Ponty.11 Karl Smith agrees that Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty are among Taylor’s “more significant influences.”12 Thompson argues for Hegel’s importance “as the most profound influence on Taylor’s thinking on recognition.” Redhead concurs that Hegel had “the most significant influence on Taylor’s thought,” for example, concerning the concept of dialogical agency. In explaining the inspiration for Taylor’s concept of dialogue, Markell emphasizes the importance of both Hegel and Herder, while Braman argues it is something Taylor learns by “drawing upon Heidegger.”13 These commentators are not unique in downplaying, overlooking, or omitting Wittgenstein’s influence and in emphasizing the importance of other philosophers – there are lots of other examples. Some might be tempted to conclude from this that one should not exaggerate Wittgenstein’s influence on Taylor’s thought. My point is that it is no exaggeration. And I’m not trying to suggest that Wittgenstein has more importance than these other philosophers. All I’m saying is that this comparison merits closer scrutiny, especially given that in the very same places Taylor cites these other widely recognized philosophers as sources, he also cites Wittgenstein. What is curious about the neglected Wittgensteinian aspects of Taylor’s approach is that we are not given convincing arguments about why philosophers like Hegel, Herder, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty are important and influential enough to merit citation while Wittgenstein is not; at the same time, we are not offered persuasive reasons to ignore Taylor’s own explicit endorsements of Wittgenstein. This neglect is apparent when it comes to dialogue as well as to other aspects of Taylor’s work. For now, I will consider dialogical agency. Even when commentators recognize the significance of dialogical agency, they do not mention it as something that Taylor inherited in part from Wittgenstein. Five cases illustrate my point. Elshtain astutely reminds us that the “starting point” of Taylor’s position is “his insistence on the dialogical character of human life,” and Smith, Schaap, and Maclure speak about the importance of dialogical identity in Taylor’s approach. All four of these authors cite as evidence of dialogicality Taylor’s concept of “webs of interlocution.”14 Another notable example is Thompson, who devotes a section of his book to Taylor’s ideas of dialogical identity, citing as important the concept of “partners of discourse.”15 Maclure and Thompson specifically point to the Hegelian language of recognition as the key source of this vocabulary of dialogue, while Schaap identifies both Hegel and Gadamer.16 What is



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striking here is something that none of these commentators mention or explain, which is that Taylor uses the terms “web of interlocution” and “partners of discourse” in the context of a long conversation with two important references to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI). When we turn to Sources of the Self, where Taylor mentions these terms, we find that he draws inspiration not from Hegel but from “Wittgenstein’s dictum that agreement in meanings involves agreements in judgments,” referring to “Wittgenstein’s celebrated argument against the possibility of a private language.” For Taylor, both references point to an important feature of the self, which is that it exists in the context of its surroundings and other selves.17 It is not clear why these obvious and deliberate citations are ignored. Thompson goes so far as to suggest that Wittgenstein’s approach is an agonic contrast to Taylor’s view.18 And there are many other commentators who likewise do not appreciate or do not bother to mention at all the influence of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Taylor’s thought, particularly with regard to (but not limited to) dialogical agency.19 What these accounts do not satisfactorily address is that Taylor intentionally includes Wittgenstein among a select and prominent group of philosophers who bring out “nonmonological facets of human agency”20 and that these facets are central to his own approach. We can gain a much richer understanding of Taylor’s work (and Wittgenstein’s) by understanding how this distinction between monological and dialogical perspectives is partly influenced by a reading of PI and how dialogue is related to other aspects of Taylor’s approach, such as the “background,” its articulation, and its perspicuous representation. The importance of Wittgenstein’s remarks and their connection to dialogical agency are aspects of Taylor’s approach that he himself repeatedly and deliberately discusses in his books, particularly in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age and in at least eight essays published between 1980 and 1995, one of which is titled “The Dialogical Self”21 and three of which specifically address Wittgenstein’s approach.22 It is to these specific sources that I will now turn in explaining which aspects of Wittgenstein’s approach are important and influential for Taylor. Monological Epistemologies and Ontologies Since his earliest writings, a central aspect of Taylor’s approach has been to criticize the epistemologies and ontologies of monologue, although it would be more accurate to say that on Taylor’s view, this

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distinction is problematic because, as he puts it, “epistemology dictates ontology.”23 Taylor uses the word “epistemology” in at least two senses: one refers to a field of philosophy concerned with theories, construals, and methods of knowledge, truth, and justification. In this sense, epistemology refers to different notions of what it is to study certain phenomena.24 Taylor also uses the word to refer to a specific construal of knowledge – what he calls naturalism – and its rationalist and empiricist varieties, be they representational, instrumental, mechanistic, or causal. This points to a wider meaning of the term, in the sense that it refers to a long-standing philosophical tradition. Monological explanations are epistemological in both of these senses: they are a method of knowledge and understanding in general, and a naturalist one in particular.25 A particular example of naturalist monologicality against which Taylor’s approach is principally framed is the intellectual tradition he calls “representational” epistemology. An important part of Taylor’s argument is that this epistemological tradition promotes not just a set of theories of knowledge but a model that has become “an underlying picture,” or a structure of which we are not conscious but that allows us to make sense of the world. And the strength of this picture is based on powerful anthropological beliefs as well as a moral ideal of self-responsible freedom.26 This tradition, whose proponents range from Descartes to the positivists, espouses a “disengaged picture of the mind” and an idea of non-integrated individual human agency in which the self is defined as a detached observer, as a radically subjective being whose interiorized experience is foundational and whose thinking is disconnected from its body and from others. This tradition sees language as something residing “in the minds (or brains) of the individuals who speak it”; it construes knowledge about oneself and about others as captured representations or ideas in the mind; and it depicts the host human agent as a mechanistic, reified, “disengaged first-person singular self” processing and framing them. Accordingly, monological subjects are defined “independently of body or other.”27 Monological Ontologies Monological perspectives are not just epistemological; they are also ontological, which is to say a language or conception of reality, of what is, or an understanding of self, society, and the human condition.28 Ontology typically says something about what human beings are like,



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but it can include things beyond human nature.29 Ontological questions concern “what you recognize as the factors you will invoke to account for social life” and “a model of the way we live together in society”; or, more formally, “they concern the terms you accept as ultimate in the order of explanation.”30 An example Taylor cites is a debate dividing holists and atomists (methodological individualists), where the latter believe that constituent individuals are primary in explaining social actions, structures, and conditions, or social goods as the concatenation of individual goods. To further illustrate what Taylor means by monological ontologies, let’s consider two other examples he cites, which are particularly relevant to the present discussion about Wittgenstein: subjectivism, and a behaviourist form of monological agency he calls “introjection.”

(a) Introjection One example of the monological perspective that Taylor describes is a theory or model of “introjection,” which is a view that behavioural conditioning shapes identity. The introjected self is a self “socially constituted, through the attitudes of others, as a me.” It is an “I” that has no articulated nature, identity, or content of its own but reacts to environmental stimuli and external demands. The introjection in this sense comes from training, upbringing, what “I internalize from my social world,” and my response to “the demands of the community.” Taylor argues that such introjective models “abound in the human sciences” because of “the hold of the monological perspective.” He gives as examples Mead’s theory of the self as taking the attitude of another towards oneself, as well as the Freudian idea that the conscience is the introjected voice of the parent that gets internalized in children. In both cases, introjection describes an original situation of dependence, how we are initially shaped by our surroundings, how children need recognition, confirmation, and love “to grow and be inducted into adult life.”31

(b) Subjectivism Another example of monological ontology is the modern unprecedented primacy attached to the individual – something described in Modern Social Imaginaries and A Secular Age as “The Great Disembedding.”32 In The Malaise of Modernity, Taylor describes this emergence

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and prominence of individualism as one of the malaises of modern society, in that it is an achievement, owing to its contribution to modern freedom, while at the same time contributing to a loss of purpose or meaning and freedom. It contributes to a loss of purpose or meaning due to its slide towards a radically anthropocentric form of subjectivism and the fading of moral horizons, and also due to its connection to the eclipse of ends in the face of rampant instrumental rationality. And it contributes to a loss of freedom in a form of soft despotism. In the conclusion to Sources of the Self, Taylor links subjectivism to the emergence of “the triumph of the therapeutic.” This refers to the importance given to methods of therapy, and to the sciences that “supposedly underpin them,” which are mobilized in the hope that personal fulfilment and self-realization can be promoted. Taylor is critical of this outlook, because it encourages a shallow understanding of the self, and because on its view only subjective anthropocentric goods constitute self-realization, with the consequence that there is no place for moral and political languages, and because it does not allow for the fact that self-realization normally presupposes that “some things are important beyond the self.”33 Taylor on Dialogue Taylor’s reply to these various monological ontologies and epistemologies is to defend the idea of the dialogical self. And my argument is that Wittgenstein is not just some minor player in shaping this idea. Taylor includes Wittgenstein among a select group of authors including Hegel, Herder, Humboldt, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Bakhtin, and Gadamer, some of whom he singles out as “the most important” critics of epistemology and as “the founders of the most influential forms of critique” in that “they offer new construals of knowledge.” Their innovation was a new dialogical alternative that put the primary locus of understanding and agency in practices, not representations or theories. And among all of these authors, Taylor singles out PI as one of the key sources for the idea of dialogical agency, as one of the “prominent” works that “famously” tried “to get out of the cul-de-sac of monological consciousness.”34 In contrast to the idea of a single monological agent defined independently of body or other, dialogical actions are effected by “integrated, nonindividual” agents who are always socially embedded, irreducibly embodied, and inescapably engaged in inarticulate social practices that impart certain goods and purposes. Therefore, human



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life is not monological, which is to say it is not something each person experiences “on his or her own.” Rather, it is intersubjective, reciprocal, embodied in shared, meaningful public spaces, and shaped in practical exchanges with others.35 So dialogicality has the epistemological and ontological aspects I just talked about in the sense that the dialogical language of reality, incorporating engaged conceptions of agency, constitutes a valid way of knowing. As a method of knowing ourselves and others, the dialogical perspective sees the agent “not primarily as the locus of representations, but as engaged in practices, as a being who acts in and on a world,” and this extends “an inescapable role to the background.”36 It also involves an ongoing practice of comparative conversation. I will explain these two points later. For now, I just want to look at Taylor’s dialogical perspective and his claim that languages and the mind are not “interiorised” capacities but “irreducibly social realities.”37 Knowledge is practical wisdom, meaning is social, and understanding is intersubjective. This is a dialogical view of understanding that is engaged in practices and patterns of action and embodied in unarticulated bodily know-how that exists in an ethical public space, “for us together” or entre nous.38 The emphasis here on practices is important. Taylor consistently champions the primacy of practices that are irreducibly plural, contested, and negotiable. And the kind of dialogical orientation characterizing these contested practices is constitutive in that the abilities to explain, recognize, understand, and reconcile are shaped in ongoing conversations. Taylor identifies two kinds of dialogical agency: actions having common or shared rhythm, and those having non-common rhythm. By “shared” or “common” rhythm he is contrasting actions that are integrated with actions that are either coordinated or caused. The “paradigm examples” of such integrated actions, he tells us, are those where rhythm, cadence, flow, and identical purpose are important, such as in dancing, singing in unison, and chanting political slogans, and in easy and intimate conversations.39 What makes these actions dialogical is not just coordination and rhythm (which are important) but that they are shared and integrated. As an example of dialogical agency, Taylor also mentions actions of non-common rhythm. These are actions that are not coordinated into something uniform or identical. The paradigm of this kind of action is a type of conversation in which “there is always a difference in role,” in which “one speaks and the other listens, then the roles reverse.”40 In

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this example, agreement, uniformity, and harmony are not necessary features of dialogical agency. These examples illustrate that human life is dialogical in the sense that we speak and listen and in the sense that knowing and understanding are not things we accomplish on our own, as individuals; rather, our knowledge and understanding of self, society, and the world is carried on with others “in practices consisting of dialogical actions.”41 So, some dialogical actions are intimate, shared, and harmonious, while others are negotiated, contested, and discordant. Both types expose the “utter inadequacy” of the epistemological tradition’s view of the subject as a monological vehicle of representations. We cannot understand human life uniquely in terms of individual subjects who react to others as they frame representations about them, because many human actions only take place inasmuch as agents understand and constitute themselves as “integrally part” of a “we.” So Taylor concludes that the “genesis of the human mind is in this sense not ‘monological,’ not something each person accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical.” Whether we call it social, shared, common, integrated, engaged, embodied, or entre nous, Taylor’s point is that there are actions that are not definable independently of body or other but that must be understood in terms of a socially embedded, non-individual “we” whose “foci matters for us.” This makes his approach neither communitarian nor essentialist, but dialogical because the kinds of we-actions about which he tries to raise awareness are the “much more important and pervasive” practices such as conversations where participants must speak and listen to one another. His examples illustrate that the self, society, and the world are understood through dialogical actions.42 “Life,” Taylor tells us, “is a continuous conversation.”43 The idea of a socially embedded, integrated, embodied, dialogical self also explains the place of training and what kind of practice it is. And indeed, an important difference with the other Wittgensteinian commentators we have reviewed so far is that Taylor reads Wittgenstein’s comments on training in light of dialogical agency. He does acknowledge the importance of being trained into forms of life. “We are inducted into language,” he tells us, “by being brought to see things as our tutors do.”44 He also argues that “we are introduced to the goods, and inducted into the purposes of our society much more and earlier through its inarticulate social practices” than through explicit rules or formulae.45 But he rejects the “impoverished behavioural ontology” that depicts such training in introjective terms, particularly the sug­ gestion that this is a causally contingent process of conditioning.



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He cautions against exaggerating the “original situation of dependence,” or the “initial dependence of the child,” because “it fails perspicuously” to notice that one gradually finds “one’s own voice as an interlocutor.”46 And it does not explain the ways we challenge normalizing practices, for example, through historical retrieval, creative redescriptions, and democratic contestation.47 What’s more, as I will explain momentarily, Taylor does not even see this behavioural view of training as an accurate interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks.48 II.  The Background: Transcendental Conditions of Intentionality I have been reviewing Taylor’s dialogical approach, how it is influenced by Wittgenstein, and how it avoids epistemological and ontological forms of monologue. Taylor’s argument is that understanding is established not by representations but in ongoing conversations and negotiations with others, which is to say in practices that are not in accord with empiricist or rationalist variations of epistemology.49 This explains Taylor’s view that the human sciences are practical sciences, which is to say we need to understand the practices of politics. Such was Wittgenstein’s point as well with the concepts of language-games and forms of life. Understanding resides in practice. Practices, not interpretations, are primary. It is “our acting” that “lies at the bottom of a language-game.”50 I want to turn my attention now to another way that Taylor avoids representational epistemology and the “ontologies of disengagement,” which is by emphasizing the idea of a background, to show how he draws on the writings of Wittgenstein. So far, Taylor’s point has been that we understand in dialogical practice. There is another way of putting all this: “to come to see that our understanding resides first of all in our practices,” Taylor writes, “is to attribute an inescapable role to the background.”51 Our beliefs, our sense of things, our understanding of ourselves, others, and the cosmos, exist always within a tacit, unformulated framework, “a background of what is simply relied on and taken for granted.”52 There has been considerable discussion about what Taylor means by the tacit background understanding, and it is not my intention to rehearse the arguments here. What I would like to do instead is continue the line of argument I’ve been developing and consider how Taylor’s understanding of the background takes some inspiration from Wittgenstein, for example, with the concept of a form of

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life. In fact, one of his principal conclusions is that the “Wittgensteinian slogan turns out to be completely true: to understand a language, you have to understand a form of life.”53 Taylor distinguishes between a background understanding that cannot be completely represented, and how we use language to explain aspects of this background for specific purposes.54 This crucial distinction between the background and the languages we use to explain, criticize, and evaluate it is perhaps one of the most complex and important aspects of both Taylor’s philosophical approach and Wittgenstein’s. According to Taylor, evoking the concept of a background is a form of argument pioneered by Kant that might be called “the argument from transcendental conditions” or “conditions of intentionality” or the “context conferring intelligibility.”55 These concepts are meant to describe something that makes certain things intelligible to us. Arguments about conditions are ones in which “the adequacy or inadequacy of an explanation is argued from what is shown to be the indispensable conditions of there being anything like experience or awareness of the world in the first place.” Taylor discusses various examples of this style of argument, which is carried on, for example, by Hegel, MerleauPonty, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. These different philosophers tried in different ways to characterize reality. Kant for example, called it “experience,” and the Brentano-Husserl tradition called it “intentionality,” which refers to what our ideas are about, what the speech-act theorists called the purpose or point. Heidegger called it Lichtung, and Wittgenstein coined the phrase Lebensform, or forms of life.56 Taylor has his own way of characterizing the indispensable conditions of intentionality or experience – he uses the concept of the “background of distinctions” or simply the background. In the introduction to his two-volume Philosophical Papers, and in Part I of Sources of the Self, he argues that a fully competent human being, agent, or self not only has some understanding (which may be also more or less misunderstanding) of herself but is partly constituted by this understanding. And even more crucially, our self-understanding essentially incorporates our seeing ourselves against a background of distinctions between things that are recognized as of categoric or higher importance or worth, and things that lack this or are of lesser value. The proposition that understanding incorporates or is constituted by a background of distinctions or strong evaluations, or by a framework of the taken for granted, is made throughout Taylor’s writings, and he cites Wittgenstein as a principal influence. Consider A Secular Age, notably the



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Introduction and chapter 15, in which there are numerous references to Wittgenstein’s concept of background, particularly his claim in PI, s. 115, that “A picture held us captive.”57 So, once again let’s be clear that Wittgenstein is not a marginal player here. On the contrary, when he singles out Wittgenstein as one of the most important critics of epistemology, and as one of the founding members of the “most influential forms of critique,” he’s referring to the argument about the background conditions of intentionality, which he calls a famous and “classic” feature of Wittgenstein’s thought.58 Taylor cites PI, praising Wittgenstein’s argument about the impossibility of purely private language as an “excellent” example of an argument that explores the conditions of intentionality “and shows their conclusions to be inescapable.”59 He says that “Wittgenstein’s is the most celebrated formulation” of a thesis that our words have the meanings they have only within a lexicon and a context of language practices, “the ‘language-games’ we play with them,” which are “ultimately embedded in a form of life.”60 On this connection between meaning and background forms of life, Taylor writes that “its most powerful application in philosophy is in the later work of Wittgenstein.”61 As Nicholas Smith has noted, some have taken Taylor’s use of “transcendental” to mean something essential or definitive, but this is to misunderstand how Taylor is mobilizing transcendental arguments. Smith suggests that what Taylor is doing is describing the “essential features of human reality in a non-essential way.”62 But I think it would be more accurate to say that transcendental arguments, which is to say conditions of intentionality, define contested features of human reality in a comparative and dialogical way. Taylor’s understanding of the background is comparative in the sense of a perspicuous representation of particular aspects, not essential or universal. In fact, Taylor tells us that one feature that distinguishes the dialogical philosophers like Wittgenstein from the monological ones is that they allow some place for the concept of a background.63 So the background must be understood in terms of non-individual agency, in a way not definable independently of body or other. This dialogical idea of the background is apparent in one of Taylor’s earliest references to Wittgenstein, namely, his “Theories of Meaning,” published in 1980 following its presentation to the British Academy in London.64 One of the main questions Taylor asks here is how is it that we understand the meanings of words, or understand other people? The standard answer is that we understand language by representing.

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Taylor’s reply is to offer the “triple-H theory” of meaning, in reference to Herder, Humboldt, and Heidegger, a group in which Taylor considers Wittgenstein “an honourary member.”65 What’s significant about this group is that it argues that knowledge is not monological and that we cannot come to an understanding of language as “monological observers.” Instead, Taylor defends a brief excerpt from the PI, s. 19. “Wittgenstein put it very well,” Taylor writes. “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”66 This Wittgensteinian influence is also clear in “To Follow a Rule,” in which Taylor explores the place of rules and conventions in human life. He cites PI to illustrate and endorse the concept of a background as explained by Wittgenstein but also to call into question a prevalent interpretation of Wittgenstein on this issue. 67 Since it offers insights into Taylor’s views on Wittgenstein, let’s review this essay in more detail. The “Unarticulated” Background First, Taylor remarks on the “largely inarticulate” and “unarticulated” nature of understanding, a practice that “always occurs against a background of what is simply relied on and taken for granted,” and in explaining this view, Taylor cites PI.68 What is being expressed here is something dialogical in that our understanding of the self and others is not based on representations or theories, but is shaped by our social practices, what he later calls a social imaginary. So Taylor turns to the concept of a language-game to help explain the complicated connection between correctly following a rule, or understanding the correct meaning of a sign, and the inarticulate background of use. Taylor’s claim about language-games and forms of life is that they must be understood non-monologically, which is to say that human agents are “not primarily the locus of representations” but are “engaged rather in practices” as beings who act “in and on a world.”69 The point being made here about action, and the crucial distinction from the Wittgensteinian perspective, is that Taylor is situating “the primary locus of the agent’s understanding in practice” and that to do so is to see knowledge and human understanding as neither reducible to representations nor fully captured in explicit theoretical terms. It is closer to something like phronesis, which is to say tacit, inarticulate, and implicit in our activities. Taylor’s fundamental point is that this non-theoretical, tacit understanding is “more fundamental” than explicit representations and theories because “it is always there, whereas we sometimes frame



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representations and sometimes do not” and because whatever representations or explicit theories we actually do form “are only comprehensible against the background provided by this inarticulate understanding.” The background is thereby dialogical because “the practices that encode this tacit understanding are not instantiated in acts performed by some isolated or single agent.”70 This connection between understanding and background entails that our understanding is “embodied,” so the role of the body appears in a different light, in that “our bodily know-how, the way we act and move, embraces aspects of our understanding of self and world.”71 And these observations about the embodied nature of understanding are consistent with a remarkable exchange between Wittgenstein and his Cambridge colleague Piero Sraffa, as reported by Norman Malcolm. It is well known that Wittgenstein had many discussions with Sraffa about his ideas in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Malcolm reports that one day “when he was insisting that a proposition and what it describes must have some ‘logical form,’ the same ‘logical multiplicity,’ Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’”72 According to Malcolm, this question had a very important role: he claims it was one reason why Wittgenstein abandoned one of central ideas of the Tractatus, namely, that a proposition is a picture of the reality it describes, or the meaning of a sign is its logical form.73 Whether or not the exchange occurred, it does nicely introduce the contrast between Wittgenstein’s earlier monological orientation and his later dialogical approach. And in any case, Sraffa’s significance is undeniable. Wittgenstein himself readily admits this in the Preface to PI, where he writes: “I am indebted to that which a teacher at this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.” The Monological and Causal Readings of Wittgenstein So far, I have reviewed Taylor’s crucial essay, “To Follow a Rule,” and his first important point is that we understand in the context of a dialogical form of life and that this understanding is largely unarticulated.74 The second important aspect of this essay is the distinction he makes between the dialogical Wittgensteinian view he is advancing and

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another school of interpreting Wittgenstein that corresponds to a very different way of understanding the phenomenon of the unarticulated background. Taylor considers two distinct ways in which commentators have interpreted Wittgenstein’s rule-following arguments, such as the remark that “when I obey a rule ... I obey blindly.” One school of thought stresses the contingency of understanding and, connected to this, the role of training and conditioning in shaping understanding. This school suggests that the yardstick for correct understanding, following a rule, entails agreement with or conformity to the behaviour of the majority of one’s linguistic community (reflecting the conventionalist views outlined in chapter 2 of this book). On this view, when Wittgenstein refers to rule following as a customary practice, he means conformity to community standards. When he refers to being “trained into use,” he means we are conditioned to follow rules in the correct way because they are imposed by our society. Therefore, this school’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s claim about rule following ranges from a causal claim about learned patterns of behaviour to the claim that community agreement establishes correct rule following (that is, human understanding). But Taylor subscribes to neither variation of this community agreement school, rejecting its monological and determinate orientation as an incorrect reading of the rule-following argument. In fact, Taylor turns to Wittgenstein’s understanding of rule following not to justify such a causal understanding of human agency, but to help him defend a dialogical conception of the self and human understanding. Taylor’s argument is that the monological tradition interprets the claim that “I act without reasons” as an expression that reasons cannot be given, because this view regards the rules residing in our background understanding as not susceptible to justification, as being “simply imposed by our society.” Thus, the connection between a rule and its application is “automatic,” one we are conditioned to make, or the connection is somehow causal because the rule is “wired in,” like blinking.75 But citing PI, ss. 193–4, 198, 199, 202, and 289, Taylor rejects the view that there is a mechanical or brute causal connection between a rule and its correct use. Rules do not come with their applications, they are not “self-interpreting.” What establishes the connection between a rule and its correct use (or the sense of a rule) is “standing social usage.” That is, the regular use of a concept “actually gives my response its sense, a meaning or significance that is embodied rather than represented.”76 Human understanding is ultimately embedded in practice, and the connection between a rule and application is ongoing



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customary use. But this connection between understanding and use cannot be seen as merely causal. Social practices do not merely impose correct rule following. Drawing a comparison between Wittgenstein and Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom, Taylor argues that rules and practices have reciprocal relations: “the rule exists in the practice it guides,” and “the rule, at any given instant, is what the practice has made it.” Rules are “transformed through practice.”77 There is therefore “a crucial phronetic gap” between a rule and its enactment. The gap between a rule and its application is neglected by explanations that give primacy to either community standards or representations.78 What these explanations miss is that correct rule following requires not simply an ability to project, but practical wisdom, an ability to act in each particular situation in dialogue. Why Backgrounds Are Not Unitary I have been arguing that Taylor situates this concept of a background within a tradition of philosophy he calls an argument from transcendental conditions. I have also been explaining why the concept of “transcendental” should not be mistaken for anything essential or monological. There are reasons why it should not be seen in unitary terms either. First, the background is fundamentally constituted not by a universal principle but by the irreducible plurality of our practices.79 Second, just how to characterize the background, the conditions we are trying to define, “can itself be a problem” because the activity of trying to understand what is the background is itself part of a practice of giving reasons in a conversation.80 As he puts it, what is taken for granted “is not itself the locus of resolved questions.”81 The third reason why Taylor’s conception of background cannot be understood in unitary terms is illustrated when Taylor compares his view to Nietzsche’s notion of a “transvaluation of values.” Taylor agrees with Nietzsche’s view that the background of distinctions is not definitive or final because a transvaluation is not necessarily a “once-for-all affair.” Instead, the “older condemned goods remain; they resist; some seem ineradicable from the human heart. So that the struggle and tension continues.”82 The background of distinctions is contested, not the locus of resolved questions but a collection of conflicting diverse public goods. What this all means is that Taylor’s idea of the background is neither private, nor essential, nor unitary, because he employs the concept as

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an argumentative strategy for the same reason as Wittgenstein, namely, to steer us off the dead-end streets of monological consciousness so that we instead see an engaged human agent as part of a maze of crisscrossing dialogical paths, as “a being who acts in and on a world.”83 The term “background” is used in this engaged sense: not as a fixed essential ontology but as an intersubjective condition of experience, an engaged and deeply normative ontology that renders our lives intelligible and that gives meaning to human experience. The background is a dialogical context that confers intelligibility. Our background forms of life are not fixed or essential but are indispensably dialogical. So Taylor’s idea of background gives us richer insights into what Wittgenstein means by forms of life. It is not a “route of interest” or a “feeling of naturalness” or a “mutual attunement” of harmonious agreement. Rather, it is what gives our lives meaning and what we rely on to make any sense of the world. Before I explain what this implies for politics, I will consider another aspect of Wittgenstein’s influence. III.  Drawing Boundaries: Articulation and Retrieval What I’ve discussed so far is that Taylor’s argument is like Wittgenstein’s in that “to understand a language, you have to understand a form of life.”84 What I’ve been expressing so far has been that the background form of life cannot be understood monologically, that forms of life are dialogical, not shaped in crudely pedagogical or disciplinary relations. I want to consider now other ways in which Taylor parts company with the therapeutic sceptical Wittgensteinians, specifically with how they derive from forms of life certain conclusions about context-relativism and non-comparability, or various political doctrines of indifference or non-interference. In contrast, Taylor draws on further Wittgensteinian insights that with language we can articulate, retrieve, or explicitly spell out aspects of our forms of life “in a philosophically formulated ontology or anthropology.”85 The distinction here is that we can also compare and contrast aspects of these ontologies. These practices of articulation, retrieval, and comparison are inherently acts of corrigibility and give positive insights into politics. Just because we are trained into the rules or judgments of our forms of life does not entail that we cannot criticize or change our own form of life or that we cannot compare the content of our training with other forms of life. Even though there is a given inarticulate condition to forms of life, we can and do articulate



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aspects of it when challenged, we do offer explanations, and we are critical. As with the other aspects I have been surveying, there has been much discussion about what Taylor means by articulation and retrieval.86 My aim is simply to compare Taylor’s remarks with similar ones made by Wittgenstein, to look at the practices of articulating, retrieving, and comparing and see the Wittgensteinian sources. Taylor argues that language lets us “bring to explicit awareness what we formerly had only an implicit sense of,” which is to say we can bring something to “fuller and clearer consciousness.” And this activity is called “articulation,” where the word “articulate” is used “both as an adjective and as a verb, but the first is derivative of the second.” That is, “we can speak of someone who can express himself as ‘articulate’ because he can articulate and lay out the contours of what he has a sense of.”87 And this is a lesson Taylor learns in part from Wittgenstein, in the sense that articulating what we are concerned with allows us to “draw in however rough a fashion its boundaries.” Language plays an important role here because it “enables us to draw boundaries, to pick some things out in contrast to others,” so it is through language that we “come to have an articulated view of the world.”88 In other words, Taylor’s description of the practice of articulation is similar to Wittgenstein’s claim in PI that we can “draw a boundary – for a special purpose.” As Wittgenstein explains in PI, s. 87, articulation serves a specific purpose, which is “to remove or to avert a misunderstanding – one, that is that would occur but for the explanation.”89 Taylor’s point, like Wittgenstein’s, is not that drawing boundaries is essential, but that language is indispensable if we want to draw boundaries. Articulation is not the essence of human understanding, nor is it the fundamental way in which we understand the world around us. As Wittgenstein says, “Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! (Except for that special purpose).”90 As I have been saying all along, Taylor’s point is that the fundamental way in which we acknowledge, distinguish, or discriminate the things that matter to us is not through explicit theories, but through social practices.91 Such social practices “can be largely inarticulate” in the sense that the practice incorporates our discriminations: “the good, the value embodied in a practice, its point or purpose, may not be formulated.”92 The valuing we do is not always or necessarily a conscious, explicit, theoretical activity. What is important and valued is implied in our background, and our lives may be entirely structured by

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important unarticulated background distinctions and moral ontologies.93 In this sense he agrees with Wittgenstein’s contention that forms of life are simply given and that “to understand a language, you have to understand a form of life.” And forms of life involve agreements in judgments.94 Blurred Edges and Assembled Reminders Preclude Contextualism This relationship between the background and the language we use to describe it is complex. To say that this boundary is undifferentiated would probably be inaccurate. It’s more like what Wittgenstein calls “blurred edges,” as with the relationship between a river, its bed, and its bank.95 So perhaps we should say there is a blurred connection between our background form of life and the boundaries we draw or the language we use to describe it. This makes the background paradoxical, in that it is something we aren’t completely unaware of as well as the context that makes experiences intelligible, but it can also be made explicit and capable of being articulated. The background makes intelligible “what I am uncontestably aware of,” and it is what I am capable of articulating, that is, “what I can bring out of the condition of implicit, unsaid, contextual facilitator.” What I bring out to articulacy is “what I ‘always knew’ or what I had a ‘sense’ of, even if I didn’t ‘know’ it.”96 This paradox can be appreciated because for engaged agents, total articulation is incoherent, which is to say that to bring to articulacy is to render explicit some of, not all of, the background.97 This line of argument constitutes an important break from the sceptical and contextualist conclusions of the therapeutic and pedagogical reading because Taylor is neither denying the constitutive role of conceptual schemes and frameworks nor assuming that such frameworks trap us in a stultifying hegemonic contextualism that limits or precludes our critical capacities. In articulating, we are also critically reflecting on aspects of the background form of life. So this idea of articulation shows a nuanced understanding of forms of life neither as a fixed foundation nor in terms of the strong or weak forms of conventionalism examined earlier. On the contrary, articulation is ongoing, aspects of boundaries are always open to revision, and the practice of articulating can alter what is being articulated.



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Articulation as Historical Retrieval Taylor and Wittgenstein broadly share the idea that when a picture of the world becomes so embedded that we become blind to alternatives, the picture’s presumption of uniqueness or primacy can be challenged by bringing out aspects of the background required to expose the picture’s presumption of uniqueness. Taylor refers to this as being “imprisoned in a model,” or captured by a picture. To be captured by a picture is to be captured “within the terms of a received ‘common sense’” that holds us in virtue of being embedded in our practices. This model can “sink to the level of an unquestioned background assumption,” thereby distorting, hiding, displacing, or discrediting alternatives, making them “look bizarre or inconceivable.”98 One thing that differentiates Taylor’s idea of articulation from Wittgenstein’s idea of drawing boundaries is the added emphasis that this process is inherently historical.99 That is, Taylor’s concept of articulation entails “a further retrieval which sends us further back in history” and that revives displaced or marginalized earlier frameworks “relegated to the trashcan of history,” against which the prevailing dominant framework was defined.100 So Taylor argues that if we want to notice genuine alternatives to any kind of dominant way of seeing things, then we need to recover the “previous articulations that have been lost,” and this means “undoing the process of forgetting,” which entails “rearticulating” our actual practices.101 Again, this exercise is not meant to suggest that historical retrievals are more essential or fundamental than practices. On the contrary, escaping the “presumption of the unique conceivability of an embedded picture” involves “taking a new stance to our practices.”102 So the action of “undoing forgetting” is one in which, instead of just living in our practices and taking their implicit construal of things as the way they are, “we have to understand how they have come to be, how they came to embed a certain view of things.”103 The practices of articulation and retrieval are explained in Sources of the Self in similar terms. Taylor argues here that “the moral ontology behind any person’s views can remain largely implicit [and] usually does, unless there is some challenge which forces it to the fore.” Our qualitative contrasts are embedded in our practices, not in our theories. When challenged, when we are “forced to spell out our claim to rightness,” or “when we have to defend our responses as the right ones,” we

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articulate a part of the background that “we assume and draw on in any claim to rightness.” We articulate what we “already implicitly but unproblematically acknowledge” and what our commitments really amount to, the “ontology that is in fact the only adequate basis for our moral responses, whether we recognize this or not.”104 As Taylor warns us in A Secular Age, it is of course important not to mischaracterize the relationship between the articulation of ideas and our practices, to suggest that “practices always come first, or to adopt the opposite view that ‘ideas’ somehow drive history.” Rather, there is a reciprocal relationship between shared practices and shared ideas, articulations, and background self-understandings. A term Taylor coins to explain all of this is the “social imaginary,” which is the complex relationship between the inarticulate, shared, normative, background ontology of a society, or how we imagine our social existence, and its articulation in images, stories, and legends. The social imaginary helps us make sense of our practices and enables us to carry out a repertoire of collective actions that constitute social life, ranging from a general election to “knowing how to strike up a conversation with a casual group in the reception hall.”105 Keeping this reciprocal relation in mind, the point is that freedom from a hegemonic picture entails retrieving some of the background assumptions embedded in our practices. And this articulation retrieval is an inescapably historical exercise because the original formulation of the practice and the background reasons (the language constitutive of the practice) may be widely neglected or forgotten. The purpose of articulation in this case then is to challenge or escape the primacy of a practice. When the dominant self-understanding (or language-game) is challenged or called into question, the activity of liberation involves retrieving some of the background distinctions, either to justify or to challenge the practice under attack. This liberation by retrieval has been a major aim of Taylor’s philosophy, particularly against naturalism and representational epistemology. Particularly in Sources of the Self and in the essay “Overcoming Epistemology,” Taylor retrieves the background of strong evaluation underlying this tradition, namely, the ideal of the self defined by the powers of disengaged reason with its associated ideals of reflexive self-given certainty, self-responsibility, and self-responsible freedom. To loosen the presumption of uniqueness of the naturalist picture, Taylor then compares these strongly valued goods to other, equally valued forms of life.



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Notwithstanding that the form of life is a condition of intelligibility, we can be critical of aspects of it. Escaping a picture’s grasp, challenging a picture’s claims to uniqueness, entails seeing it not as the essence of phenomena but “as something one could come to espouse out of a creative redescription, something one could give reasons for. And this you get by retrieving the foundational formulations.”106 It entails seeing the picture as one of a range of alternatives “rather than the only way you can sensibly see things.” This is a practice of challenging the primacy or hegemony of a conventional understanding by getting clear on unnoticed aspects of the language out of which the practice is woven, recovering articulations that have been lost, retrieving “to articulate the unsaid in present practices” and to go back to “the last … perspicuous formulation of the good or purpose embedded in the practice.”107 Now that we can see how articulating and retrieving are like drawing and changing boundaries, we can also see why they can’t be characterized as forms of therapeutic scepticism; it is because these practices are not merely negative or reactive. The point of articulation and retrieval is not merely to detect metaphysical nonsense, and these practices certainly do not automatically disqualify normative and political conclusions, intentions, underpinnings, and judgments. Challenging the primacy of a practice, and freeing ourselves from hegemonic pictures, can be inherently political actions motivated by strongly held moral convictions. And exposing the nonsense of hegemonic pictures may very well lead to substantive political and moral conclusions. Of course, I am not suggesting that therapy cannot be a goal of articulation or retrieval. My point is that it would be absurd to reduce these practices to fit into the singular purposes of the specific language of therapy. Taylor’s concepts are mobilized for a variety of purposes, and they themselves are diverse practices. As Steele has pointed out, we have a range of “articulatory options,” which may include images and stories of art and culture, and these articulatory options may have very different aims.108 So we are free to articulate and retrieve in different ways, and the goals of articulation are diverse. I’ll mention just two other aims of articulating, although we are free to find others in Taylor’s work. One is that he talks about articulation/retrieval in order to restore a practice. That is, the purpose of articulation/retrieval is neither to wholly endorse nor to completely reject a way of life but to identify the higher ideals behind more or less debased practices and then to criticize those practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideals. In other

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words, instead of dismissing practices altogether or endorsing them completely, articulation/retrieval is meant to “raise [a] practice by making more palpable to its participants what the ethic they subscribe to really involves.”109 An example in Taylor’s work of this type of retrieval is his attempt to identify the higher ideal behind the individualism of self-fulfilment and the politics of universal dignity. In Sources of the Self, The Malaise of Modernity, and “The Politics of Recognition,” he criticizes these practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideal, namely, the “ethic of authenticity,” and he restores the practice of authenticity from its debased manifestations. This task is achieved by retrieving some of the historical assumptions underlying this ideal such as the affirmation of ordinary life and the Romantic expressivist ideas of nature as an inner moral source. Another example of articulation pertains to the concept of secularity. In his magisterial A Secular Age, Taylor’s goals are to retrieve a deeper explanation for living in a secular society and the inspiration for understanding one’s life in a secular way, and to restore a richer understanding of the moral and spiritual dimension. This entails looking at belief and unbelief “not as rival theories” but as different kinds of conditions of lived experience. So Taylor describes his effort as “articulating the conditions of experience,” which is to say the “largely unfocussed background” of our moral, spiritual, or religious experience.110 A further goal of articulation/retrieval is to negotiate reconciliation, understanding, or agreement. When misunderstanding occurs as a result of, for example, being brought up in different cultures, the practice of articulation can play a key role. In “To Follow a Rule,” Taylor argues that “if misunderstanding stems from a difference of background, what needs to be said has the effect of articulating some aspect of the explainer’s background that may never before have been articulated.”111 That is, when reconciliation is sought, the steps include articulation. This also must be process of comparing and contrasting the aspects of the background so articulated, which is something I will talk about next. IV.  Comparison: “A New Form of Realism” So far I have been discussing the concept of articulation, how it helps achieve the goals of criticizing forms of life or identifying motivating ideals. I have explained why in so doing this approach avoids sceptical and contextualist conclusions. Next I consider another example in



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which Wittgenstein’s orientation plays a particularly prominent role in Taylor’s approach, and once again this influence is something Taylor himself openly and clearly acknowledges. This has to do with the way we approach strange or incompatible forms of life. For both Taylor and Wittgenstein, we come to understand others and learn from them, and sometimes reconcile differences with them, not only or necessarily by being trained or conditioned in some way, but sometimes “in comparisons or contrasts” with others who are trained differently, because “other understanding is always in a sense comparative,” comprising “vocabularies of comparison” and “a willingness to be open to comparative cultural study.”112 Taylor describes this comparative dialogical approach as a “language of perspicuous contrast,” and what is remarkable is that he calls this “a form of realism” that has learned from “non-vulgar Wittgensteinianism.”113 These comments were made in “Understanding and Explanation in the Geisteswissenschaften,” first published in 1981 in a collection of essays on Wittgenstein’s concept of rule following. Since this is another of the places in which Taylor intentionally offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein, it is worth close scrutiny, particularly because one of the aims of this essay is to distinguish between two schools of Wittgensteinianism, one of which he considers vulgar and the other not. Let’s review what he means by this distinction and how he sees Wittgenstein’s remarks as heralding “a new form of realism.” In “Understanding and Explanation,” Taylor asks what “kind of understanding” is required for “an adequate explanatory account” in the social sciences.114 For example, how are we to explain and understand other societies or forms of life we are studying that may be very different from our own? He considers two typical answers that lead to a “hopeless impasse”: one is a kind of relativism offered by a school of thought he calls “vulgar Wittgensteinian” (or VW); the other is a kind of neutralism that corresponds to a mainstream objectivist scientific approach.115

(a)  Vulgar Wittgensteinianism/Relativism The relativist approach is based on the idea that “understanding is necessary for explanation.” It begins with the assumption that we cannot avoid the value/ontological commitments of languages of understanding, which is to say that we must take seriously, and sui generis, the language of the agents or form of life we are studying. What does the explaining here (the “explanans”) is the agents’ own normative

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ontology, which is to say the agents’ own language or form of life (the form of life of the agents sui generis), and this language or form of life is incorrigible. Following this approach, an adequate form of explanation in the social sciences must therefore satisfy two requirements: that the language of social explanation “be, or at least include that of the agents themselves,” and that “the agents’ self-understanding be regarded as incorrigible.” This “vulgar” reading is characterized by kinds of nonrealist claims about either the suspension of judgment or its impossibility. Each way of life is incorrigible, and since we cannot understand societies in some common explanatory language, all we can do is admit that other forms of life are doing something different that cannot be judged. All we can say about the actions of a different society is that they are incomparable, or incommensurable.116

(b) Neutralism Because of its presumed vulnerability to endless interpretive dispute (its lack of replicable findings), and because it is not value-free, the VW approach is a problem for those seeking a “science of society,” who recoil from such approaches.117 So many theories in the social sciences adopt instead a neutralist approach that assumes we can “finesse” understanding with a general theory that dispenses altogether with an understanding of an action in the agents’ own terms.118 With neutralist approaches we need neither affirm nor deny ontological/value commitments, because they cannot be either true or false. So we can remain neutral on these matters and revise the agents’ self-understanding or translate it into a “cleaned-up,” canonically transposed, purely descriptive, common, transcultural, or neutral explanatory language.119 In this case, the explanans is some neutral or culturally invariant language.120 Taylor is critical of both these approaches. The incorrigibility thesis simply ignores the fact that we can and do criticize and judge others. The neutralist approach is hopelessly ethnocentric because it entails redescribing others in our own terms or “projecting our own gamut of activities on to the agents of the other society.” And its explanations are insignificant – they “can only lead to sterility” because, while the theory may be true in some senses, it won’t explain the significance of an action, which is to say its meaning, for “most of what we want to explain in a given society may lie outside the scope of explanation.” So, Taylor wants to “plead for a third approach.”121



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Taylor’s Realism: A Language of Perspicuous Contrast What interests me about Taylor’s third approach is that it is informed by a reading of Wittgenstein, one he calls “non-vulgar.” But first he accepts one of the basic premises of the vulgar reading, which is that understanding is necessary for explanation and that we simply cannot avoid the agents’ value/ontological commitments if we want to give a convincing explanation. While this is difficult, we must resist the temptation to finesse understanding, something that so many theories do in the social sciences. Taking a page from the vulgar Wittgensteinian approach, Taylor argues that any attempt to finesse understanding is futile. A neutralist explanation carries the price that we avoid understanding. So if we want to give a persuasive explanation, “there is no way to finesse understanding.” Evaluations cannot be separated from descriptions, so the very use of language has “evaluative commitments,” which are “in turn inseparable from ontological commitments.” Understanding a society very different from our own requires that we understand these commitments, “what they see themselves as doing.” If one wants to give a proper explanation, one has to show that one understands “what the agent is doing” in her own terms; in other words, the agent’s actions or feelings or aspirations or outlook is the explanandum, what we have to explain. What does the explaining here is not an independent variable (an antecedent causal condition) but a language that sheds light on the meaning and purpose of the action – what speech-act theorists call the point, or illocutionary force – which is not something antecedent or causal.122 So the non-realist construal is not the only available language to explain the meaning of an action. Veering from the vulgar Wittgensteinian approach, Taylor adopts a language of explanation that does not accept the incorrigibility thesis. He adopts a realist language because the identification of error is “essential to the task of explanation.”123 Taylor accepts that there are right and wrong normative ontologies. What distinguishes Taylor’s Wittgensteinian approach is that he denies that we cannot or do not criticize or judge other forms of life. The distinction here is the suggestion that we must find ways to criticize and judge that do not finesse understanding. In explaining error – for example, in describing what happens when “we explain the actions of people whose ontology we do not share” – Taylor is careful to differentiate a simple, “unsophisticatedly realist construal” from a new kind of realism. According to simple or unsophisticated realism, other languages

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might be full of value/ontological commitments “which we consider wrong, or confused, or distorted, or inadequate in some way.” So, for example, an atheist will not suddenly convert to Catholicism in explaining such religious forms of life, but instead will describe religious activity, and its language of self-understanding, as a kind of error. This simple realism suggests how we can be committed strongly to the thesis that understanding is necessary for explanation while at the same time treating the rival understanding as corrigible “for we are claiming that it is wrong.” In the case of simple realism, when we meet people whose ontology we do not share, the actual explanation of their form of life will be in terms of our ontology, not theirs.124 As Taylor correctly suggests, we tend to be uncomfortable with this kind of realism, particularly those who are relativists who do not accept that we can say we are right and others are wrong, and those who promote the scientific tradition of the social sciences, who want to stay neutral concerning normative ontological commitments. Taylor, by contrast, wants to hold on to realism – the idea that there is such a thing as correct and incorrect values – while avoiding its ethnocentric tendencies. He does this with a language of perspicuous contrast. So he proposes “a new form of realism.” Following this form of realism, “the adequate language in which we can understand another society is not our language of understanding, or theirs, but rather what one could call a language of perspicuous contrast. This would be a language in which we could formulate both their way of life and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both.” Furthermore, Taylor adds that this would be a language in which “the possible human variations would be so formulated that both our form of life and theirs could be perspicuously escribed as alternative such variations.” What’s new here is the way this approach deals with the identification of erroneous views in a way that avoids arrogance and ethnocentricity. Taylor argues that just because we take languages of understanding seriously with regard to their normative ontologies, we should not automatically assume that “ours is correct in its commitments and that foreign languages are wrong.” On the contrary, we can begin by assuming that “we may learn something more about ourselves as well in coming to understand another society.” Such a language of contrast, Taylor explains, might show that another alien language of self-understanding is distorted or in some way inadequate, or it might reveal that ours is flawed, or we might discover that both are limited. In any case, we might find that understanding others leads us to change



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our own self-understanding, “and hence our form of life,” which he adds is not an “unknown process in history.”125 Understanding someone else or some other culture requires understanding what they see themselves as doing, which means explaining their concepts the same way they do. But just because we cannot do without the agent’s selfunderstanding, we do not have to therefore accept that the agent’s selfunderstanding is central to understanding or that is it incorrigible. And we don’t have to accept that just because their form of life is different than ours, “their activities will be incommensurable with ours, and must somehow be understood on their own terms or not at all.” On the contrary, this new kind of realism enables us to search for “a language of perspicuous contrast in which we can understand their practices in relation to ours.”126 Taylor’s realism is based on the fact that we can and do speak of truth and valid claims to knowledge even in domains where “interpretive disputes are ineradicable, where inadequacies of understanding or insight may make it impossible because of deep differences of moral vision.”127 He mobilizes Wittgenstein as a philosophical realist in the sense that practical reason can arbitrate potential ontological conflicts inherent in contested forms of life. Taylor’s philosophical orientation stands in contrast to views that suggest we cannot criticize or compare alternative or conflicting forms of life, or cannot establish whether one language-game is truer than another or more faithful to reality. A Wittgensteinian Realism of Comparative Dialogue I have devoted significant attention to Taylor’s argument in “Understanding and Explanation in the Geisteswissenschaften” for two principal and related reasons: because it clearly outlines the contours of Taylor’s realist explanatory approach, and because, simultaneously, it helps us understand Wittgenstein in a way that does not resemble the therapeutic sceptical approach I discussed in earlier chapters. This is not an exercise in sharing routes of interest, or in being in harmonious mutual attunement. And instead of finding a reading of Wittgenstein that is consumed by scepticism, we find instead a realism of comparative dialogue. Comparative dialogue is a form of realism that enables us to understand others in a way that avoids the hopeless impasse of either redescribing their form of life in our own terms or uncritically accepting their language and way of life in their own terms. The language of explanation here is neither that of the agents themselves nor a translation of their

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self-description or form of life into neutral, culturally invariant explanatory language. It admits there is a truth of the matter concerning values and beliefs, so the agents’ self-understanding is corrigible. By this form of realism, we can understand others, avoid ethnocentricity, and be just to the society we are studying, by adopting a language of what Taylor calls “perspicuous contrast.” This language of contrast sees irreducible plurality and contest both within and among forms of life; it also allows for reconciliation among different or incompatible forms of life and lets us avoid ethnocentrism without relativizing goods or rival moral ontologies. In this respect, Taylor’s language of perspicuous contrast allows the kind of cross-cultural understanding where both sides can feel that their forms of life are not being distorted, ignored, or undermined. The language of perspicuous contrast can be viewed as a negotiated, conditional, intercultural reconciliation, as a means to see similarities and differences in comparison. Taylor also characterizes this as an effort to find a language for “alternative modernities” or “a way of understanding modernity which makes room for these alternatives.”128 And all of this might help us “avoid political and military conflict” and see “the immense gamut of human potentialities.”129 Taylor points out that this language of perspicuous contrast “is obviously very close to Gadamer’s conception of the ‘fusion of horizons’ and owes a great deal to it,” and he is clear that his way of thinking has been strongly influenced by Gadamer.130 I hope it is clear how this language of contrast is also a particular example of Wittgenstein’s concept of a “perspicuous representation.” Taylor admits as much when he states that his form of realism “has learnt from VW, or perhaps from non-vulgar Wittgensteinianism.”131 In fact, in these and other respects, both Wittgenstein and Taylor employ remarkably similar strategies. Even if Taylor did not acknowledge that his realist approach is Wittgensteinian, the family resemblances are striking. Recall that in PI, Wittgenstein describes how a particular way of looking at things can become an unshakable ideal that we can never get outside of.132 The failure to see anything other than the picture (what is seen) is described by Wittgenstein as being “held captive” by a picture, as aspect blindness, and as the failure to “notice an aspect” of the picture. When we are held captive by a picture, we express our way of seeing in general terms, as an insight into the essence of the phenomenon.133 Captivity means having no awareness of other possibilities, being blind to other aspects, not seeing differently. “It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at.



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It never occurs to us to take them off.”134 Likewise Taylor has argued that sometimes a picture can “sink to a level of an unquestionable background assumption” and organize and make sense of so much of our lives that it appears unchallengeable and hard to conceive alternatives to.135 As I explained in chapter 3, Wittgenstein’s preferred approach to free us from the captivity of hegemonic pictures, his way of weaning us from the craving for essence and generality, is summed up in the concept of “perspicuous representation.” The method of perspicuous representation is an effort to bring hitherto unnoticed aspects of phenomena to our awareness, to change our “way of looking at things,”136 not just to effect a change in opinion but also to free us from the craving for generality, to encourage us to see the variety of aspects of a word and the variety of words and language-games. The survey’s goal of perspicuity is achieved by means of objects of comparison and by “arranging what we have always known.”137 The role of the philosopher, he argues, is not to uncover the hidden general or essential features or rules of language but to assemble “reminders for a particular purpose”138 and help us “understand something that is already in plain view ... something we need to remind ourselves of,”139 something that “lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement.”140 Against the conventional understanding of philosophy as a study of the most general and essential features of things, Wittgenstein challenges us to see the heterogeneity and variety of language-games related by overlapping similarities and family resemblances rather than by common principles. Taylor employs strategies similar to these. Like Wittgenstein with his concept of forms of life, Taylor refers to a background of distinctions and a social imaginary; like Wittgenstein with his concept of drawing boundaries, Taylor speaks of articulation and retrieval; like Wittgenstein with his concepts of objects of comparison and perspicuous representation, Taylor employs a language of perspicuous contrast. And Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation has influenced others as well, including Quentin Skinner and James Tully whose work I will survey in later chapters. The Politics of Identity and Struggles over Recognition I have been discussing Taylor’s dialogical method and how it has a place for the concept of a background. One of the principal ways Taylor mobilizes this dialogical approach is to explain the politics of

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identity and struggles over recognition, and among his principal concerns is to understand the tendency to describe such struggles inwardly. In this regard, he explores how identity is historically and morally constituted, negotiated, and sustained in continuing conversation and “remains dialogical throughout our lives.”141 For Taylor, we “become full human agents capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.” And we learn these languages “in exchange with others.”142 So the way we see and define the self is dialogical because it is something we acquire not on our own, or automatically in training, but in the give and take of everyday conversations. Identity is a “we” that “does not pre-exist all conversation,” nor does it arise through introjection “as in the old monological view.” Even relationships that might at first glance appear to be one-sided or unequal – between child and parent, for example, or student and teacher – are reciprocal because the conversation becomes a constituent of all the participating interlocutors, who inevitably learn something from one another even if it is not at first obvious. Learning is mutual because what gets internalized is “the whole conversation.”143 Even when the training appears to be unambiguously monological or one-sided – as with a coach imparting fundamental skills to her team, or Wittgenstein’s various examples of early childhood education regarding the learning of new words or the repeating of algebraic formulae – it is important not to take these particular examples as essential or universal. That’s because human beings are constituted in conversations that do not always take place in what some Wittgenstein commentators call “situations of instruction,” but among those who are already educated, with previous training, and who might have something to learn from one another. My point is that the paradigm or key examples of meaning and understanding that Taylor typically cites, and the problems he usually raises, are real-life interpersonal conflicts and ongoing political struggles, such as the Québécois demand for self-rule and recognition in Canada, and the ideal of authenticity. These examples show us that the problems Taylor identifies are not usually between a master and an apprentice, or those seeking therapy, but among those with equally justified moral and political positions who are trying to talk to one another. This is clear when we examine Taylor’s concept of recognition, which is both intimate and public.



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Intimate and Public Recognition I’ve been talking about identity. Let’s review more closely Taylor’s well-known argument about recognition, in particular how the need for recognition is “fulfilled in a certain form of conversation itself.”144 Taylor talks about how dialogue shapes recognition at two levels: the intimate sphere, where identity formation takes place with significant others, and the public sphere, with the politics of recognition. Both levels are characterized by “continuing dialogue and struggle.” At the intimate personal level, people do not acquire on their own the languages they need for self-definition. Rather, “we are introduced to them through interaction with others who matter to us,” like our parents, and love relationships, in other words significant others. Here, dialogicality is not an end state, nor is it the original state of identity formation, which can be ignored later on. Our identity is defined “always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us,” and this is true, Taylor continues, even after we outgrow some of these others and they disappear from our lives, because “the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.” So “even when it is provided at the beginning of our lives,” the contribution of significant others “continues indefinitely.” On this view, one does not discover one’s own identity in isolation, nor primarily in situations of instruction. Rather, “I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.”145 Public recognition has come to mean two seemingly contradictory goals: a politics of equal dignity, in which what is recognized and accommodated is meant to be universally the same; and a politics of difference, in which we must make distinctions the basis of differential treatment.146 Taylor writes that with the collapse of social hierarchies and the ideal of authenticity, the modern preoccupation with identity and recognition has been articulated in distinctly individualized and inwardly generated terms – that is, in monological terms. His reply to these tendencies is that in order to properly understand the “close connection” between identity and recognition, we must see identity in dialogical terms, which means as something negotiated, contested, and socially derived. He argues that the modern identity cannot be understood outside a “continuing conversation” of “interchange” with others because such conversations help us shape our self-interpretations. In the intimate and public spheres, one’s identity is formed in “open dialogue, unshaped by a predefined social script” and ongoing conversation;

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it is socially derived in negotiation and defined through exchanges with others from whom we might have something to learn.147 Taylor’s claims about public recognition seem to be similar to Wittgenstein’s point – for example, in his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” and in PI, ss. 32 and 206–7 – which is that sometimes learning takes place among strangers who have already been trained and who already have a language. Like Wittgenstein, Taylor is describing situations in which the process of learning is not comparable to being trained or conditioned, but something that comes out of a contested conversation, not just with significant others, or people in our own form of life, but also with members of another perhaps strange society whose ontology we do not share. In this situation, learning cannot be reduced to something caused by training and then later projected. To exaggerate the importance of training, and to describe what we do with it as projection, is to ignore the other kinds of ways we can and do learn and to misunderstand what happens after training occurs. It doesn’t explain how learning takes place among those with mature moral ontologies.148 And it neglects the extent to which we learn in contest and conversation with others who have such fully formed ontological commitments. Otherwise put, knowledge and understanding are contested and dialogical, not introjective and pedagogical. So understanding is not something we are trained and conditioned into. What we know and understand is not wired in, imposed in training, or conditioned by society. Understanding is shaped in contested conversations with others. Provisional Reconciliation in Comparison: “la lotta continua” In Taylor’s approach, struggles over identity and public recognition, over meaning, over cultural conflicts, over diverse goods, or over democratic self-government are never definitive, but always continue in conversations. So Taylor typically describes modern cultures and civilizations, and contemporary democratic societies, in terms of “deep differences of moral vision” from which arise worries, tensions, conflicts, and disputes that are constitutive and “ineradicable” and for which there can never be “a definitive solution.”149 This explains the “need” to negotiate and compromise and to avoid the temptation of absolute and unchallengeable solutions or “once and for all” constitutional settlements.150 Talking is the best way to



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understand others, and in trying to understand others we might also understand something about ourselves, or we might become a little like the others or be transformed in talking to them.151 Such acceptance of the plurality of moral sources and the diverse struggles those sources generate explains why Taylor rejects monism, essentialism, and other reductive, polarized, all-embracing, unitary, universal, “single canonical principle” orientations, including forms of liberalism, nationalism, and communitarianism. This means that political practices cannot be captured by definitive catch-all categories.152 “Human beings and their societies,” he says, “are much more complex than any simple theory can account for.”153 This means, as I argued earlier, that we understand complex political practices in terms of their background motivating ideals or purposes. It also means there are no ready-made solutions. Rather, political solutions “have to be tailored to particular situations,” which means they have to be “worked out, negotiated, and creatively compromised between peoples who have to or want to live together under the same political roof.” And political solutions “are never meant to last for ever, but have to be discovered or invented anew by succeeding generations.”154 In light of its contested dialogical nature, reconciliation is always negotiated and periodic, never definitive. In political contests, “neither side can abolish the other, but the line can be moved, never definitively.” In a sense, “‘la lotta continua’ – the struggle goes on – in fact forever.”155 All of this points to the fact that just because struggles are ongoing, this does not preclude genuine reconciliation or mutual understanding. In his explanation of the politics of recognition, for example, Taylor offers a particular example of how this reconciliation might occur. In so doing, he retrieves certain normative background self-understandings, as evident in his essays on the Canadian constitutional conflict, where he draws out the underlying normative ontologies of Quebecers and Canadians outside Quebec in an effort to reconcile those differences.156 Taylor’s aim is not to find universal principles or to appeal to any uniform agreements such as a Charter of Rights or other constitutional or institutional arrangements. His solution is to search not for likeness or uniformity, for some global or overarching formula or purpose, but rather for intercultural comparisons and contrasts. This approach does not preclude finding mutual understanding and common purpose among people recognized as different.157

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An Example of Dialogue: The Bouchard–Taylor Commission Taylor’s promotion of a comparative dialogical approach to conflict resolution is not merely academic. In fact, this form of dialogical reconciliation was adopted by the Government of Quebec’s Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles.158 We might even say that Taylor’s approach to dialogue was officially endorsed by the Quebec government when it appointed him co-chair of the commission, whose final report was subtitled “Dialogue Makes a Difference.” Taylor and his co-commissioner Gérard Bouchard promoted what they called the “citizen route” to harmonization, as a complementary approach to the “legal route” of reasonable accommodation. Their dialogical approach, what they called “concerted adjustment,” emphasized a “contextual, deliberative and reflexive approach” that took into account “the unique nature of individual situations.” This approach to dialogue, they explained, has a “reflexive dimension” that allows participants “to engage in self-criticism and mend their ways when necessary.” The “main strength of this approach” is that it emphasizes “the interlocutors’ accountability in a spirit of mutual respect and dialogue,” and “relies on negotiation, and the search for a compromise.”159 The commissioners defended this approach because “it is good for citizens to learn to manage their differences and disagreements.”160 Minority Nationalism and Multinational Federalism As the Bouchard–Taylor Commission reveals, Taylor’s dialogical approach has a variety of important political implications for contemporary democratic thought. Among these, it encourages intercultural dialogue and discourages monological ideas of identity. Another implication of this dialogical orientation is that it questions long-standing conventions about political institutions such as the state and federalism. Taylor has consistently called upon us to see these institutions as multiform, contested, and irreducibly plural rather than uniform, fixed, and centralized. He has argued against any kind of politics that promotes homogeneous, universal, and uniform self-understandings. In chapter 7, I will explain that James Tully teaches us similar political lessons. Since the family resemblances between these two authors are so important, I want to say a few words about a specific area of similarity where their dialogical approaches have made a positive contribution



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to politics, which is the question of minority nationalism. Both Taylor and Tully call upon us to reconsider our traditional definitions of nations and states and to appreciate the complex question of minority nationalism. Both authors take seriously such nationalisms as sincere demands for acknowledgment, recognition, and self-rule. And they promote flexible and asymmetrical forms of federalism as fair and just forms of recognizing and accommodating differences. This is not a call to rally around shared institutions but to see these institutions as extensions of an ethic of comparative dialogue. It is on these grounds that both have defended multinational federalism. In the body of their written work, both authors explicitly draw the connection between their approaches to democratic dialogue and flexible, non-uniform federalism. Since their scholarship has been partly in response to domestic political struggles, Canada is exemplary, although not exclusively. They see Canada as a multinational state, and they accept the genius of multinational and multiregional forms of federalism, which are not definitive but always open to periodic renegotiation when required. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that both Tully and Taylor have made among the most cogent arguments against territorial, symmetrical, uniform, and monological federalism, and in favour of multinational, asymmetrical, diverse, and dialogical federalism.161 In chapter 6, I will explore further the significant aspects of Tully’s political science and how they are influenced by Wittgenstein. But before we get there, in chapter 5 we’ll consider the work of one of Tully’s mentors, Quentin Skinner. For now, let’s sum up some of the things we have learned from Taylor. Conclusion: The Political Implications of Wittgenstein’s Remarks I’ve been considering the ways in which Taylor’s approach is similar to and influenced by Wittgenstein’s remarks. It is an approach to explanation and understanding in the human sciences that avoids the craving for generality, that takes seriously agents’ ordinary self-descriptions, and that pays attention to particular cases and examples. It avoids essentialist, metaphysical, or definitive languages of explanation, while accepting that periodic understanding and reconciliation is possible in comparative dialogue. We can know and understand others, or we can at least try to describe their actions, as long as we accept that any such description is “inherently itself open to challenge” and revision.162

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Where Taylor differs from Wittgenstein and from the therapeutic sceptics who read him is that he is much clearer about the political uses and implications of this approach. Let’s conclude by considering some ways in which this Wittgensteinian approach has had a positive influence in our understanding of the study of politics and how we do politics, in terms that are neither conservative, nor negative, nor contingent. The first way we might consider what positive implications this has for politics relates to political science as a field of study. Recall that an almost universal claim among the therapeutic sceptics is that repudiating epistemological dogmatism (that is, exposing metaphysical nonsense) does not entitle us to substantive or positive epistemic conclusions or philosophical explanations. This way of looking at things has no place whatsoever in Taylor’s political science – in fact, it is antithetical. And it is based on Wittgenstein’s idea that language-games and forms of life are inherently meaningful, which is to say they are constitutive of certain normative ontological frameworks. So to discredit one framework does not land us in the middle of nowhere; instead, it compels us to stand somewhere else, and all along on the basis of a background or constitutive moral framework we never fully call into question. Among Taylor’s concerns – indeed, perhaps the centrepiece of his vision of modernity – is explaining why we are bewitched by an “extraordinary inarticulacy” and denial of constitutive moral sources, something that has seriously detrimental political consequences.163 Neutral liberalism, moral subjectivism, instrumental rationality, and normal methods of social science all conspire to discredit moral explanations, banishing them to the margins of political debate. Rejecting this conspiracy with its pretence to neutrality and moral freedom, Taylor retrieves various rich moral frameworks shaping modernity, restoring them and historical explanations to their rightful place. He has long argued that humans are beings for whom things matter, so our actions are inherently meaningful, which means they cannot be explained by a language that is neutral on values, that reduces explanation to causally contingent variables. Actions and practices must be explained in terms of what is meaningful to us, to their constitutive moral purposes, or point.164 Another way of saying this is that human beings, unlike other sentient beings and non-sentient objects, are inescapably self-interpreting and self-defining animals. Our actions therefore cannot be explained without reference to deeply held motivating self-definitions. Moral self-definition renders explanations in the human sciences unlike those in the natural sciences because such explanations partly constitute their



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objects by being accepted or rejected. Politics, for example, is a science in which normative and explanatory languages are interwoven in the sense that political descriptions can shape, alter, undermine, or strengthen the political practices on which they bear. “In politics,” Taylor tells us, “accepting the theory can itself transform what the theory bears upon.” Politics is a science in which the explanation or description can transform its object.165 Throughout this chapter I have been considering the complex ways in which Taylor criticizes various kinds of naturalist explanatory languages, with their presumptions to normative neutrality. In several essays, his critical remarks have been specifically directed at the discipline of political science. We see this in two of his earliest and most celebrated works: “Neutrality in Political Science,” first published in 1967, and “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” first published in 1971. In these, Taylor thoroughly reviewed some orthodox works of well-known political scientists, such as David Easton, S.M. Lipset, Gabriel Almond, Karl Deutch, Harold Lasswell, and Robert Dahl, and argued that they were flawed in suggesting that human beings could be explained by a neutral language that separates facts from values. By surveying the value positions implicit in all their works, Taylor exposed their erroneous pretensions to value freedom. By uncovering their implicit normative ontological commitments, he showed why presumably moral free explanatory frameworks in political science are not neutral, but simply take for granted deeply held values that cannot be avoided. Political descriptions are also always political evaluations.166 Taylor’s argument is that culturally invariant approaches that presume to be morally neutral, like the mechanistic and causal methods inspired by the modern natural sciences, cannot properly or fully explain human agency, which is inherently meaningful and purposeful. So unlike the therapeutic sceptics, Taylor argues that we cannot avoid substantive epistemological conclusions, nor should we, even when our aim is merely to expose nonsense. Another way to consider what positive implications Wittgenstein has for Taylor’s political science has to do with the practice of politics. Recall that the therapeutic sceptical position is stuck with a somewhat limited set of political conclusions that can be derived from Wittgenstein’s approach. We must accept some variation of political conservatism, ranging from uncritically accepting customary practices to blindly obeying authority. Or we define politics in merely personal terms and leave the world alone, which is to say we

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suspend judgment on any substantive or positive political commitments and instead focus on the self in terms of a therapy of selfexamination and self-transformation. Alternatively, we must conclude some variation of contingency: that political actions and ideas are largely unintended and accidental, or politically speaking anything goes because Wittgenstein’s remarks are apolitical, so there is no particular politics that necessarily follows logically from them. This leaves us with a language of politics that is very limited and whose utility is dubious. It’s not clear what relevance it has at all in addressing the most complex puzzles of contemporary politics. Among these are questions of political reconciliation, social cohesion, and political integration. In societies that are multicultural, intercultural, multifaith, multinational, and diverse in a host other ways, questions concerning integration, accommodation, and reconciliation inspire considerable discussion and concern. There are no obvious or clear solutions regarding how polities can accommodate the seemingly incommensurable demands of recognition in ways that protect minorities, preclude majority identity anxieties, and prevent political fragmentation and exclusion. The puzzle here is how to promote diversity without undermining belonging and the capacity to cooperate in pursuit of common goals. The question is how to resolve conflict in constructive and non-violent ways. The problem for those who read Wittgenstein in strictly therapeutic sceptical ways is that their construal disqualifies them from addressing these complex problems without supplementing his philosophy with some other political alternatives, such as feminism or Marxism or democratic theory, because his vocabulary restricts our political options. From Wittgenstein’s remarks, Taylor reaches none of these political conclusions. On the contrary, with Wittgenstein’s help he has no difficulty reaching many substantive moral conclusions and addressing some of the most difficult and pressing political challenges of modernity. This is particularly true, but not exclusively, with regard to struggles over recognition. Taylor’s dialogical orientation offers a promising and distinctive solution to these enduring diversity puzzles. Rather than constructing catch-all theories that presume to explain such political struggles, he pays attention to particular cases and the agents engaged in them. This dialogical approach commits Taylor to enter into conversation with the subjects of political action, to listen carefully to the words they use to describe their experiences, and to include self-descriptions in his explanatory framework. Because his position is



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founded on negotiation, comparison, and compromise, it avoids the culturally relativist conclusion that such self-descriptions are inherently incorrigible; it also avoids the non-realist assumption that moral disputes cannot be arbitrated. Rather, in conversation there is potential criticism, learning, mutual transformation, and sometimes even reconciliation. So we can pursue common objectives and constructive solutions as long as these are seen as imperfect and as open to ongoing reconsideration. As I have been arguing, Taylor’s dialogical approach is one of engaged and embodied agency in which humans are not detached from either their own bodies or other minds, either from other human beings or the external world. Abandoning disengaged ontologies and epistemologies opens up a whole universe of possible political activities of common action. Taylor often speaks of ways we can understand and improve our shared and divergent values and political institutions and know better our political practices. He has made clear, cogent arguments against modernity’s therapeutic tendency and its obsession with personal fulfilment and self-realization. In doing so, he has retrieved much subtler languages of personal resonance that emanate from beyond the self and that do not shut out robust moral claims and shared political practices. Consequently, with unapologetic conviction, Taylor has been able to offer a rich contribution to the way we practise politics, suggesting ways we can improve political institutions and offering solutions to political disputes, all along recommending “effective common purpose through democratic action” and a “politics of resistance.”167 Seeing his Wittgensteinian aspects therefore improves the way we read Taylor. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach offers insights into Taylor’s. It allows us to understand how Taylor proposes to reconcile the seemingly incommensurable and incomparable plurality of cultures, political values, and conceptual frameworks in a way that recognizes and makes room for different forms of life and alternative ways of looking at things. Taylor’s proposal for long-term social cohesion and enduring political stability is not the embodiment of a single allembracing principle of politics or morality from which everything can be deduced, and he is not suggesting that political fragmentation and exclusion can be avoided if we simply embrace our inherited customs and traditions, improve our shared institutions, or affirm some universal good. Taylor’s proposals for long-term political harmony and stability begin from the position that we are deeply motivated by sometimes

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conflicting ontological commitments and that understanding, recognition, and various forms of political reconciliation are possible in ongoing comparative dialogue. This is similar to Wittgenstein’s claim that what unites the variety of language-games is not uniformity but family resemblances, a complicated network of overlapping and criss-crossing similarities. So when Taylor proposes forms of political reconciliation and the arbitration of moral disputes, his point is that these can be achieved not definitively, but conditionally, and in a mutually undistortive manner, through a continuing conversation of negotiation and persuasion in which the differences and similarities are compared among people who take turns speaking and listening to one another. With Taylor’s political science, we are not stuck in the traps of scepticism and non-realism. We do not need to rescue Wittgenstein from a stultifying conservatism, a hopeless negativity, or the agonizing uncertainty of contingency. Rather, we begin to see clearly the remarkably positive political aspects of Wittgenstein’s method of comparative dialogue, along with all the potentially fair and socially just forms of political thought and action it can inspire.

5 Quentin Skinner: Wittgenstein and the Historical Approach to Political Thought

In chapter 4, I explored the various areas of similarity in the philosophical approaches of Charles Taylor and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I talked about how Taylor offers a reading of Wittgenstein that is different from the tradition I outlined in the first two chapters, and similar to the reading outlined in the third. This is a reading that learns realist lessons from Wittgenstein, not therapeutic sceptical ones. On this reading, we learn not just by being trained or conditioned into a form of life, but also in comparative dialogue with those inside and outside our forms of life. We can really know and understand others, and we can judge, criticize, and compare our own and other forms of life, even if they are incompatible. The absence of a general, culturally invariant theory does not render impossible the aim of critical evaluation. It does not force us to accept the incorrigibility or incomparability of contested forms of life. And this comparative dialogical approach offers a rich way of explaining and understanding politics. It explains why neutral, relativist, or non-realist ways of studying political phenomena are misguided. It tries to explain the tensions of modernity, the worries that beset the modern human condition, and political struggles over recognition not in terms of general theories or frameworks that are devoid of values, but in terms of background normative ontologies, rich moral frameworks, historical explanations, and self-descriptions. It allows for the reconciliation of political diversity while preventing fragmentation, and it does so without undermining the capacity to cooperate in pursuit of common political goals. This dialogical approach justifies flexible political institutions such as multinational forms of federalism, and it explains why we need public consultations such as the Quebec

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government’s 2008 consultation commission on accommodation practices related to cultural differences. This chapter examines another example of this distinctive reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks: that of Quentin Skinner. My aim is to show similarities between the approaches of Skinner and Wittgenstein, and in many respects these similarities resemble the reading I described above promoted by Taylor. This is not to say there are no differences in the ways they read Wittgenstein. As I explained, Taylor situates his reading of the Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI) within the Kantian tradition of an argument from transcendental conditions where the adequacy of an explanation is argued from what is shown to be the indispensable conditions of there being anything like experience or awareness of the world in the first place.1 By contrast, Skinner’s reading of Wittgenstein is influenced partly by the analysis of speech-acts developed particularly by J.L. Austin, who Skinner tells us is, along with Wittgenstein, “among philosophers of language” his approach “owes most.”2 This Wittgensteinianized speech-act approach, or perhaps an Austinized Wittgensteinianism, is a method Skinner uses with great acumen to study the authorial intentions of political texts and the history of political ideas.3 I am not the first to notice the family resemblance between Skinner and Wittgenstein, so I make no claims to originality here. Tully already noted that Skinner’s “Cambridge approach,” in which political writing is looked on as ways of acting with words, “is indebted and in many respects a continuation of Wittgenstein’s investigations (‘words are deeds’).”4 He explains that “the horizon and general orientation” of Skinner’s work is furnished by “the approach put forward by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty,” which is to say that “language is an intersubjectively shared multiplicity of tools for various purposes, yet one in which only some elements are open to subjective criticism, modification and change at any time.”5 This family resemblance is further confirmed by Hamilton-Bleakley, who observes that “Skinner drew heavily upon Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, most notably his Philosophical Investigations” with its notion of language as a multiplicity of tools and the meaning of a word as its use.6 Skinner has been highly influential among a new generation of scholars deeply inspired by this Wittgensteinian approach to interpreting classic political texts in a historically sensitive manner.7 Tully goes so far as to suggest that “drawing on Wittgenstein, Skinner has brought about



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a revolution in the history of political thought.”8 Skinner’s former students see him as a role model, in Richard Tuck’s words, for living “an intellectually adventurous and courageous life.”9 Yet surprisingly few others have sought to delineate the influence of Wittgenstein’s remarks, and there are those for whom Wittgenstein deserves no mention at all. Palonen, for example, draws comparisons between Skinner and Weber,10 and among the various influences Perreau-Saussine mentions, none is Wittgenstein.11 To be sure, in Quentin Skinner, Palonen does discuss Skinner’s Wittgensteinian influences, but in certain respects my reading differs. Palonen considers the significance of Wittgenstein and Austin in light of the rhetorical tradition. This is the right sort of approach, except that he goes on to suggest a sceptical reading of Wittgenstein defined by the latter’s refusal “to subscribe to the ‘realist’ idea that things and phenomena ‘are’ something independent of the language by which they are spoken.” Thus, he claims, Wittgenstein’s “rhetorical insight [is] the contingency of language,” expressed in the form of a related argument for context-dependency, namely, that “conceptual changes are rendered dependent of the context of the language games in which they are used.” Palonen argues that Skinner’s early methodological writings were written in the context of this “moment of contingency,” which Wittgenstein’s remarks and Austin’s works heralded in the academic debates of the 1960s and 1970s.12 This emphasis on Skinner’s contingency was already advanced by Tully in “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword.” In that essay, Tully argues that Skinner shares with Nietzsche and Rorty a commitment to a type of antifoundationalism that studies the history of politics in terms of “the unplanned product of contingent controversies and struggles.” What makes Skinner’s position different from Rorty’s, Tully argues, is that Skinner’s version of anti-foundationalism is not universal.13 But I think that some aspects of Palonen’s and Tully’s arguments are somewhat questionable. One of my central arguments is that there is a reading of Wittgenstein that does not emphasize contingency. In contrast to Tully’s view, such a reading is not anti-foundational, and in contrast to Palonen’s, it does not reject realism. I have considered Wittgenstein’s remarks that are consistent with realism and that suggest a way of using the word “foundation” that is not reducible to something essential, general, or universal. So we should not confuse Skinner’s rejection of essentialist arguments as embracing either contingency or anti-foundationalism. In contrast to Perreau-Saussine’s claim, there is nothing at all paradoxical in

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Skinner’s use of the word “foundations” in the title of his most celebrated work, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.14 My aim is to examine Skinner’s approach and to make more perspicuous its Wittgensteinian influence, to show how Skinner mobilizes Wittgenstein’s approach and his remarks in order to explain the relationship between the past and the present. My intention in so doing is to illustrate another example of the comparative dialogical approach to politics, one that does not commit Skinner to sceptical conclusions, with either conservative, negative, or contingent political implications. Like Taylor, Skinner’s approach rejects the primacy of causal arguments, and it is based in part on a rejection of “the position sometimes ascribed to Wittgenstein,” which is that he proposed forms of scepticism and conceptual relativism, which is to say that “we are precluded from asking about the truth” of beliefs and must accept “the relativity of all values.”15 In contrast, I want to explore how Skinner promotes a form of cautious realism. Essentialist and Causal Explanations Skinner tells us that the primary concern of his early methodological essays was “to expose the weaknesses of two prevailing assumptions about the study of classic texts in the history of political thought.”16 One is a sort of naturalism that assumes that meaning is causally determined, and another is a kind of textualism that assumes that the text itself has timeless, essential meaning. Skinner’s reply to both assumptions is to defend non-essential and non-natural meaning, or illocutionary force. Textualism is premised on a belief that the text is a self-sufficient object of inquiry we can understand autonomously – that it is possible to understand utterances and hence interpret the meaning of texts even without understanding the social context because those utterances and texts contain perennial elements, universal ideas, dateless wisdom, fundamental concepts, in other words an essential meaning that can be grasped and that the interpreter can retrieve.17 On this reading, the essential meaning – what Wittgenstein called ostensive or demonstrative meaning – is given by the sense of the words’ meanings (or the logic of the arguments contained in the texts) and the references of the text, or the designated objects for which its concepts stand. The premise of the naturalist argument is that a proper explanation entails recovering the cause of an action and that knowing the cause is equivalent to understanding the meaning of an action. Those who



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promoted this methodology, like Sir Herbert Butterfield, argued that ideas are the causes of public events. Others argued that social contexts in themselves causally determine the meaning of the text – that is, the text is “produced” by “historical conditions,” and social contexts are causal determinants of the ideas of a given author.18 To understand Skinner’s position properly, we need to recognize that he is not objecting to causal explanations per se, but to the suggestion that this particular form of explanation is somehow exclusive, or deserves a privileged place, and that there are no other valid forms of explanation, particularly explanations for the ideas of a given political text. Skinner’s point is that causal explanations do have a place.19 But it is important to recognize the limitations of this form of explanation, because there are some things it cannot explain and those things in fact must be explained for understanding. So an important aspect of Skinner’s approach is the distinction he makes between causal and non-causal approaches. Causal explanation identifies a condition antecedent to and contingently connected with an action (for example, a statement made) such that it might have been different or might not have occurred in its absence, or the occurrence of the action might have been predicted from its presence.20 That which explains is an antecedent event, or an independent variable, or an independently specifiable condition. With causal explanation, the methodological imperative is to find antecedent causal conditions and their results, which means finding an independent variable that produces the effect and the dependent variable that is the effect or result or outcome of the independent variable. Practice and Use For Skinner, essentialist and causal approaches are insufficient and inappropriate means of achieving proper understanding. The textualist thesis fails to recognize that the meaning of an utterance is fixed neither by what the words refer to or denote, nor by those words’ roles in the sentence or in relation to other available vocabulary, because a word may have varying and incompatible uses, and therefore meanings. Furthermore, even if the context fixes the sense of the utterance – its linguistic meaning or the substance of the argument itself – it alone cannot uniquely fix the meaning, nor can it resolve ambiguities in reference, since that context is capable of yielding a variety of alternative senses, or the sense may itself be one of a number of possible interpretations.

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One also needs insight into the purpose of the text, which is to say the author’s intentions, her point in writing, which is something that causal contextual explanations cannot provide. Therefore Skinner advises us that rather than study social context as a causal variable, it should be examined for its insights into the purpose of the action for the agent who performed it.21 In criticizing these claims about essential, timeless, and causally determined meaning, Skinner embraces Wittgenstein’s insights about practice and particular use, drawing on Austin’s analysis of speech-acts, specifically, his insights about intention and convention. From these formidable sources, Skinner develops an approach to history that explains the author’s intended meaning (the purpose, or point) and the context in terms of the conventionally recognizable meanings. He argues that failing to account for practice, use, and intended meaning gives rise to various anachronisms, abstractions, and historical “mythologies” rather than “the record of an actual activity” or a “realistic picture” of how political thinking happens.22 In contrast, the main arguments Skinner defends are that “the historical meaning of any given text is a necessary condition to understanding it” and that “this process can never be achieved simply by studying the text itself.” Following the speech-act tradition, Skinner defends the view that recovering an agent’s intentions and the conventions surrounding them can provide a valid form of explanation.23 Wittgenstein’s Influence Skinner’s reply to essentialist and naturalist approaches, whether textual or causally contextual, is to promote an innovative historical approach influenced by a reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks, in particular his argument in PI that “we ought not to think in isolation about ‘the meaning of words,’ but “we ought rather to focus on their use in specific language-games and, more generally, within particular forms of life.”24 Now there are a number of important things to remember about the way Skinner reads Wittgenstein: it is influenced by Austin’s analysis of speech-acts, it is framed in explicit contrast to various sceptical Wittgensteinian approaches, and it is connected to an argument about dialogical moral and political reasoning. Let’s begin by considering the importance of Wittgenstein and then go on to consider these other aspects. Skinner credits Wittgenstein with a “central insight” that is “most economically conveyed” by the remark “that ‘words are also deeds.’”25 This



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reference to PI, s. 546, is of such fundamental importance to Skinner that he uses it as the methodological framework for Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, in which he attempts to “take seriously the implications of the fact that, as Wittgenstein puts it in Philosophical Investigations, ‘words are also deeds.’”26 A similar remark – “words are deeds”27 – is used as an epigraph in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. In this way, Skinner’s hermeneutical approach illustrates the practical nature of language not merely as a description of human activity but as something inextricably interwoven into human actions and values: “speech is also action,” and “to say something is always and eo ipso to do something.”28 It is also an approach that avoids the craving for generality and takes seriously the particular use of words. And this gives us a way of explaining historical events by focusing on the actions of political authors. To understand an author entails surveying the particular way in which he or she uses words. Like an anthropologist attempting to understand a different culture, or a philosopher attempting to understand an unfamiliar conceptual scheme,29 the historian understands past statements or actions by including and making use of “the range of descriptions that the agent could in principle have applied to describe and classify what he or she was saying or doing.”30 The key to understanding such actions is to examine the particular use of words, which is to see, as Skinner puts it, “the nature of all the occasions and activities – the language games – within which it might appear.”31 Skinner’s reference to Wittgenstein’s concept of the language-game is a clear indication of the important place that PI holds in his approach. Again reflecting Wittgenstein’s approach, Skinner’s historical surveys highlight a crucial feature of human understanding: that we understand the meaning of a word by actually using it in various specific contexts in ongoing customary practice and in new and innovative ways. Skinner invokes the language-games argument to challenge naturalist and essentialist methods of history and their privileging of reductive and causal claims, their contempt for what is less general, and to illustrate why it is a mistake to look for timeless and essential features of history that can be discovered once and for all. Instead, the languages of history must be seen as a diverse collection of tools with different functions, as a complicated network, as an ancient city with a maze of little streets and squares, old and new houses, a multitude of neighbourhoods, a labyrinth of paths.32

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This Wittgensteinian way of doing history is one in which “we must study all the various situations which may change in complex ways, in which the given form of words can logically be used – all the functions the words can serve, all the various things that can be done with them.” Citing PI, ss. 43 and 79, Skinner claims that the “appropriate, and famous, formula” is that what we should look for is not the essential or fixed meanings of words, “but their use,” and that “the meaning of the idea must be its uses to refer in various ways.”33 Skinner turns to Wittgenstein’s remarks as a “classic statement” of his own alternative methodological commitments.34 In “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” he describes his historical Wittgensteinian approach as one in which “to explicate a concept” is “to give an account of the meanings of the terms habitually used to express it.” And furthermore, “to understand the meanings of such terms is a matter of understanding their correct usage, of grasping what can and cannot be said and done with them.” He then adds: “So far so good; or rather, so far so Wittgensteinian, which I am prepared to suppose amounts in these matters to the same thing.”35 Using this Wittgensteinian approach, Skinner criticizes the orthodox way in which the history of ideas is typically studied. He then proposes a practical, use-oriented approach to history, one that reflects that “that there is no determinate idea to which various writers contributed but only a variety statements made by a variety of different agents with a variety of different intentions.” As soon as we see this, “what we are seeing is that there is no history of the idea to be written. There is only a history of its various uses, and of the varying intentions with which it was used.”36 A proper historical understanding, he argues, is an ongoing process in which we explain “what range of uses the expression itself could sustain” and which questions and answers concerned the classic authors themselves. The Wittgensteinian conclusion Skinner reaches is that any statement, far from being perennial, universal, or general, “is inescapably the embodiment of a particular intention, on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation in a way that it can only be naïve to try to transcend.” Which implies that there are no essential problems in philosophy; “there are only individual answers to individual questions.”37 As Skinner put it, he learned from Wittgenstein that there cannot be a history of essentially unchanging ideas “but only a history of the various uses to which they have been put by different agents at different times.”38



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Non–Sceptical Wittgenstein I am exploring the ways in which Skinner’s historical approach is based on Wittgenstein’s remarks about meaning as use in a form of life. Another central aspect of this approach that we will now consider is that his philosophical approach is partly shaped in contrast to sceptical interpretations. In fact, Skinner is quite deliberate about his position and could not be clearer on this point. “Wittgenstein’s argument,” he writes, “cannot in fact be assimilated to that of the sceptical relativist.”39 Skinner is responding here to two examples of sceptical relativist interpretations, which are exhibited in these two claims: that there are no objective external standards; and that understanding is inherently bound by context. The first example is promoted by the “disciples of the later Wittgenstein such as Peter Winch,” who claim that because we have no access to “super-cultural” norms, no “objectivist conception of rationality,” no “trans-cultural or trans-historical criteria for applying the concept of rationality at all,” therefore we cannot distinguish what is rational from what is not, thereby leaving the topic of rationality “more or less in complete disarray.” And the “very idea of assessing the rationality of beliefs is thus dismissed as nothing better than an intrusion, a forcible imposition of our own epistemic standards on an alien ... ‘form of life.’”40 Elsewhere, Skinner contrasts his approach with a variation of “the thesis of conceptual relativism,” which is a position “sometimes ascribed to Wittgenstein, that we are precluded from asking about the truth” of beliefs different from our own on the ground that “they can only be understood as part of a form of life that may be ultimately no less cognitively justifiable than our own.”41 The other example of a sceptical reading that Skinner mentions, one that he describes as “true but unhelpful,” is evident in Rorty’s “Wittgensteinian style.”42 This is the suggestion that if we want to understand other activities and forms of life with which we are unfamiliar, we need to “get into the swing of whatever exotic language-games are being played by the people whose beliefs we are trying to describe and explain.”43 This is unhelpful because it doesn’t suggest how in fact we can participate in such activities and forms of life. Furthermore, Skinner distances himself from another aspect most evident in Rorty’s approach, and defends a view articulated by Taylor. It is “a mistake to portray the relationship between our social vocabulary and our social world as purely external and contingent,” Skinner writes. Instead, following Taylor, we should see how our social vocabulary helps constitute the character of our practices,

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how “our social vocabulary and social fabric mutually prop each other up.”44 Skinner’s point is that contingency, just like causality, has a role in explanation, but not a privileged one. So he opposes the “overwhelming element of contingency” in some forms of explanation; but he also aims to learn from the past in a way that allows us to distinguish “what is necessary and what is the product of our own contingent arrangements.”45 What is evident in Skinner’s historiography is that it is stated in opposition to various kinds of essentialism (or objectivism) as well as to what he calls sceptical relativist Wittgensteinian approaches, what Taylor calls a “vulgar Wittgensteinian” position. He rejects two variations of the sceptical relativist Wittgenstein, as well as the thesis of conceptual relativism, as misconceived, unhelpful, and self-refuting since they embody the statement of a preferred point of view “while denying that any such point of view can be attained.”46 But this rejection is not motivated by an attempt to “vindicate a substantial and objective conception of reason and employ it in the assessment of beliefs.”47 Skinner’s position here is that the abandonment of the search for external, objective, common, or neutral standards does not preclude the idea of assessing beliefs for their rationality. His alternative is an approach that judges the agent’s beliefs according to her own prevailing conventions and norms.48 The historian would rationally assess a belief other than her own by “reporting” whether the belief was appropriate “for that particular agent to have espoused in that particular society at that particular time.”49 Skinner’s Realism: Speech Acts and What Authors Are Doing We’ve been considering the ways in which Wittgenstein’s meaning-asuse approach has shaped Skinner’s approach to interpreting political texts and ideological contexts and how this is based on a non-sceptical reading. I want to go one step further now and establish a case for Skinner’s realism. I think this is partly shaped by his reading of Austin, whom Skinner claims introduced “refinements” into “Wittgenstein’s suggested analysis of ‘meaning’ in terms of ‘the use of words.’”50 The refinements are to distinguish two kinds of use of words: perlocutionary, and illocutionary. Wittgenstein’s point is that meaning is use; Austin’s point is to explain the various ways in which we can use words to mean things. All of this means that the interpreter’s task must be to



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explain at least three kinds of meaning: locutionary meaning, or what Wittgenstein called ostensive definitions; “illocutionary force,” which points to “what an agent may have been doing in saying what was said”; and perlocutionary meaning, which is what he may “succeed in bringing about (whether intentionally or not) as a result of speaking with force.” To understand a text, in other words, is to grasp what the writer “was doing in presenting his argument.” 51 It is central to Skinner’s approach to explaining action that he emphasizes doing, which is another way of saying the author’s intention, and the purpose or point of his utterance. Neither Causes nor Rules, but Intentions and Conventions An important feature of this approach is that it is not causal, in that explaining the cause of an action does not tell us the point of the action or its intended purpose. An intention does not state a condition of occurrence, and it is neither antecedent nor contingently related to the action. Rather, the intention “serves to characterize the action itself.” And it is “purely scholastic” to reply that intentions must precede actions “and thus might still be treated as an antecedent condition,” because intentions “can quite validly be made to characterize an action after it has been performed.”52 The significance of this non-causal aspect for Skinner’s argument is that if the action itself is to be “correctly characterized and so understood,” the non-causal intention “must be grasped.”53 So understanding entails knowing the purpose or point, not the cause of an action, and once again, Skinner recognizes a Wittgensteinian source of this position. He rejects the claim that fully intended and complex actions are best understood as the results of causes that are antecedent to and contingently connected with the resulting actions; he favours instead the “Wittgensteinian notion” that there is a logical connection between the agent’s intentions and actions.54 One reason why this is significant is that with this approach, Skinner refuses to accept the prevailing terms of the naturalist/anti-naturalist debate and thereby promotes an unconventional reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks. The prevailing conventional reply to the naturalist demand for the recovery of causes was the anti-naturalist response that social action must be explained in terms of how it conforms to a context of rules (also described as the agent’s motives for performing an action). So, the usual anti-naturalist position was to place “the agent’s action in the context of

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rules not causes,” and this anti-naturalist emphasis on rules was influenced by a reading of Wittgenstein. The response from naturalists was that motives cannot function as causes and therefore cannot explain them. But Skinner argues that the anti-naturalists are twice mistaken: in equating recovery of meaning with recovery of the context of rules, and in assuming that this rules determinism is the correct way to read Wittgenstein. Skinner insists that Wittgenstein’s argument is not about recovering rules (or motives), but rather about recovering what an agent is doing, which is to say her intentions. And so the recovery of intentions implies the recovery not of rules or causes but of purposes and conventions, which is to say the agent’s “more general awareness of the conventional standards which are generally found to apply to such types of social action within a given situation.”55 The Illocutionary Dimension Skinner warns us not to misinterpret Wittgenstein and Austin as offering a theory or hypothesis about language. Rather, a better description of their achievement is that they pointed out the “illocutionary dimension,” which is something “every speaker and writer exploits all the time.” The concept of a speech act, Skinner argues, is meant to “point to a fact about language,” namely, that “anyone who issues a serious utterance will always be doing something as well as saying something.” The analysis of speech-acts is a way of examining a “particular act” and a “particular utterance” on a given occasion.56 This emphasis on the particular is of course central to Wittgenstein’s approach, and it is one that Skinner shares. Let’s consider two examples Skinner uses to explain the illocutionary dimension of intention and how it is different from cause. To illustrate this non-causal intentional form of explanation, Skinner offers the example of a policeman who sees a skater on a pond and says, “The ice over there is very thin.” He is using words that mean something, and to understand what’s going on, “we obviously need to know the meaning of the words.” But, Skinner tells us, “we also need to know what the policeman was doing in saying what he (or she) said.” For example, he may have been using those words with the intention, or the illocutionary force, of warning the skater. To speak with illocutionary force is to perform an act that Skinner calls “the intentions of the agent.”



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To perform a particular speech-act of warning someone, “we issue a particular utterance with the form and force of warning,” and at the same time, “we mean or intend the utterance as a warning and mean it to be taken as a warning by way of its being recognized as an instance of just that intentional act.”57 To recover illocutionary force is to recover how a given utterance “ought to have been taken.” What an Author Is Doing: Machiavelli as an Innovating Ideologist The explanatory potential of Skinner’s emphasis on intention is illustrated with reference to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. This example also sheds light on conceptual innovation. How are we to make sense of Machiavelli’s advice in chapter 15 that “princes must learn when not to be virtuous”?58 Skinner argues that in order to understand this (or any) statement, it is not enough to grasp the statement itself or what its context may be alleged to show about what it must have meant, since the context is evidently capable of yielding two alternative interpretations “and so can hardly be invoked to reject either in favour of the other.” The decision on which historical claim is correct “will very greatly affect any understanding of what Machiavelli can have been intending to achieve.” The question is potentially “whether he intended to subvert or to sustain one of the more fundamental moral commonplaces of political life in his time.” It must follow, Skinner continues, that in order to understand any given statement made in the past, the further aspect that must still be grasped is its role in upholding or challenging a prevailing social practice, “how what was said was meant, and thus what relations there may have been between various different statements even within the same general context.”59 Understanding an utterance is therefore connected to our grasping how it enabled, legitimized and commended a practice under threat or how it challenged, condemned, or undermined one. Grasping this practical purpose or point is a crucial aspect of understanding the text, and this cannot be done by studying the linguistic social context alone. Skinner uses this historical method to explain Machiavelli’s point in writing The Prince and why he was an “innovating ideologist.” Machiavelli was attempting to show that a favourable evaluative-descriptive term prevalent in early sixteenth-century Renaissance Italian society, virtù, could be applied to activities that would conventionally be

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described as illegitimate or vicious – violence, lying, deceit. Machiavelli’s conceptual innovation was that he succeeded in manipulating the term so that it could be used to describe and so justify these activities. He achieved this end by manipulating the criteria of application and the range of reference of virtù; in this way, he manipulated the term’s speech-act potential – the range of attitudes the term could standardly be used to express. As Skinner puts it, Machiavelli used a term normally employed to condemn what it describes in such a way as to make it contextually clear that the relevant action or state of affairs ought to in fact be commended.60 Conventions, Forms of Life, and the Limits of Innovation There’s another thing that the Machiavelli example illustrates, and it has to do with forms of life, which is to say that in explaining political actions, it’s not just what an agent is doing that is important, but also what he is not doing. What the agent takes for granted also needs to be explained. The claim here is that there are limits to the agent’s ability to single-handedly or privately manipulate concepts for his own purposes. The innovating ideologists whom Skinner examines, the political theorists who manipulated their available appraisive or evaluative-descriptive vocabulary, could not manipulate the prevailing normative vocabulary indefinitely or employ it to legitimate untoward or unusual practices; rather, such manipulation had to be grounded in terms of what was already accepted and taken for granted. Put another way, the nature and range of evaluative concepts that any agent can hope to apply in order to legitimate his behaviour can in no case be set by the agent himself. On the contrary, the agent is constrained by other accepted principles of the society in which he is acting. Other conventions set limits on how far the innovating ideologist can stretch the use of terms to legitimate his actions.61 In his summary of Skinner’s position, Tully has argued that the term that does all the work here is “convention,” which Skinner uses heuristically to refer to relevant linguistic commonplaces uniting a number of texts: shared vocabulary, principles, assumptions, criteria for testing knowledge claims, problems, conceptual distinctions.” The innovating ideologist is constrained because he “changes one part of an ideology by holding another part fast; by appealing to and so reinforcing convention.” Tully adds: “Since Machiavelli is standardly taken to be one of the most radical of theorists, Skinner’s



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analysis shows very graphically the conventional limits to ideological innovation.”62 The idea of conventional limits is precisely what Wittgenstein means by forms of life, yet what we find with Skinner is a much more nuanced explanation than either the strong or weak conventionalism discussed earlier. This is because he is not just describing how the linguistic context shapes and constrains action, but also how there is a free space, that is, political room for manoeuvre within which innovators can critically contest the limits of linguistic conventions. Skinner’s point is not to disclose how knowledge and meaning are culturally constructed and determined by context, or trapped by linguistic conventions. Rather, his purpose is to explain how innovation is successfully justified within the terms of conventional constraints. In other words, conventions do not stop the exchange of reasons, nor do they preclude genuine innovation. We can and do evaluate and justify our own and other forms of life. It’s just that conceptual innovation must be described and justified partly in terms of these conventions, which is to say in terms of an already existing range of evaluative vocabulary that is not questioned but taken for granted. To this extent, “every revolutionary is ... obliged to march backwards into battle.”63 To justify his behaviour, the innovative ideologist must show that it can be described in a way that those who currently disapprove of it can be persuaded that they ought to approve it after all. And to achieve this end, he has to show that the favourable evaluative-decriptive vocabulary used by his opponents can be used to “legitimate his own untoward behaviour.”64 These limits, and the taken-for-granted features of conceptual innovation, are evident in the example we’ve been considering. One of the long-standing conventions of advice literature was to advise the prince to act virtuously. As Tully explains, Machiavelli justified his advice that a prince need not always act virtuously by arguing that “this would enable a prince to achieve what everyone assumed a prince should achieve,” namely, to act “with virtue in laying down good arms and good laws and so achieve honour, praise and glory.”65 So, Skinner explains that reading Machiavelli’s advice in light of this convention lets us understand that he is using it is “to challenge and repudiate accepted moral commonplaces.”66 The taken-for-granted feature of human understanding, the given, what Skinner calls convention, is what Wittgenstein famously referred to as forms of life.67

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Skinner’s Holistic Ontology I’ve been talking about the various ways in which Skinner takes seriously the Wittgensteinian idea that words are intentional actions. What we’ve been seeing here is how Skinner mobilizes this idea into a strongly and compelling holistic historical approach. This approach sees a connection between a word, an entire vocabulary, and a form of life.68 It sees a connection between political ideas and principles on the one hand, and political actions and public events on the other – that is, between the linguistic or ideological context (thought) and the social context (action).69 What this analysis tells us about a word changing its meaning is that we must focus not on the “internal” or “normal” structure of particular words, “but rather their role in upholding complete social philosophies.”70 The historian is therefore obliged to make sense of the complex variety of social philosophies, and the form of life, and not simply the sense and reference of the word, if she is to understand the meaning of a word and how it changes over time. This holism also assumes that language does not just describe but sometimes “helps to constitute the character” of social and political practices.71 So Skinner tells us in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought that his aim is to provide a clearer understanding of “some of the connections between political theory and practice.” He tells us that one such connection – one in which he is particularly interested, as expressed in the earlier example of Machiavelli we just considered – is that of a political actor who wants to engage in a particular action that he has to legitimate. The challenge for such an agent is not simply a matter of tailoring the available normative language in order to fit his projects; he must also tailor his projects “in order to fit the available normative language.”72 His approach in Foundations, in other words, is to consider how political ideas and principles help legitimize actions, how they become the enabling conditions of their occurrence.73 Briefly, an agent can only do what she can legitimize, so the agent’s capacity to succeed while legitimating depends on her ability to describe her actions in terms of the prevailing norms.74 Skinner’s holistic approach, then, is to explain the dynamic nature of the relationship between an agent’s professed principles and the actual practices of political life. In contrast to Sir Lewis Namier, this approach is meant to show that political actions are motivated by principles and that political theories are not just “ex post facto rationalisations of political behaviour.”75 Skinner’s favourite example to illustrate the role of



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principles is the one discussed earlier, that of Machiavelli’s advice in The Prince. This example teaches us that the connection between political thought and action emphasizes the importance of studying certain types of vocabulary, or keywords that Skinner calls “appraisive” and “evaluative-descriptive.” Why this vocabulary is significant is clear when we consider that the type of situation in which an agent like Machiavelli is engaged is a form of political action that is in some way untoward and that Machiavelli wants to legitimize. “In such a situation,” Skinner writes, “the agent must be able to describe his behaviour in such a way as to override any hostile appraisals of it, and in this way to legitimate what he is doing to those who may have doubts about the morality of his actions.”76 Since the agent justifies his own actions on the basis of certain professed principles, the explanation of the agent’s behaviour must include these principles because there is a connection between the principles for the sake of which he professes to act and his actual social or political actions.77 In Skinner’s words, “any course of action is inhibited from occurring if it cannot be legitimated. It follows that any principle which helps to legitimate a course of action must also be amongst the enabling conditions of its occurrence.”78 The central task of this innovating ideologist is to legitimate untoward social action, that is, to legitimate a range of social actions by changing the normal ways of using the moral vocabulary prevailing in his society. The agent must try to show that the existing favourable evaluativedescriptive terms can somehow be applied to his apparently untoward actions. Skinner writes: “If he can somehow perform this trick, he can thereby hope to argue that the condemnatory descriptions which are otherwise liable to be applied to his actions can in consequence be discounted.” In this way, Skinner argues that it is by manipulating the set of evaluative-descriptive terms that any society succeeds in establishing and altering its moral identity.79 Let’s pause for a moment and review where we are so far. We have been talking about how, according to Skinner, a proper historical understanding is grasped by securing authorial intention – that is, what authors are doing – and how this is an ongoing process in which we grasp what point a given expression might have had for the agents who use it, according to prevailing conventions. We have also been discussing how this kind of historical approach concentrates on the vocabulary employed to describe and appraise these conventions, as well as why such concepts come into prominence at particular moments in history.80 We have considered how the ways in which linguistic debates that arise

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over the use of terms are, says Skinner, about substantive social issues. In this survey I have also been alluding to some of important lessons that can be learned from this historically sensitive hermeneutical approach, lessons that might shed light on important themes in political theory. Let’s consider in detail four lessons: foundations, change, truth, and comparison. Foundations One lesson Skinner’s approach can offer is a clear explanation of the foundations of our present beliefs and arrangements. This is in fact the aim of Skinner’s book with that concept in the title. In The Foundations, Skinner recovers “the foundations” not by finding something essential or fixed but by reminding us of the historical developments that led to the idea of the modern concept of the state as the sole supreme authority within its own territories and that led as well to the acceptance of the modern idea of the state as a uniquely political society with a distinct apparatus of power, as a form of public power separate from both ruler and ruled.81 Skinner uses the word “foundation” as a concept meaning a survey of the “gradual emergence of the vocabulary of modern political thought.”82 In describing this approach, he is clear that he is trying to avoid presenting something that presumes to be metaphysical or permanent, so much so that in response to those who objected to his project being a constructed meta-narrative, he concedes that some of the criticisms are justified.83 But Skinner is too generous in this concession. As I argued earlier, there is a non-essential way to use the word “foundation,” and Skinner’s famous book illustrates this beautifully. He tells us, for example, that his Foundations “offers a survey of the political literature produced in Western Europe” in the early modern period and that it treats these materials as “aspects of an overarching theme.”84 And this idea of getting non-fixed foundations is evident in his earlier essays, where he tells us his approach is meant to foster diversity awareness, to let us see “the essential variety.”85 Change Another lesson that Skinner’s approach offers is an explanation for conceptual change, to which I alluded earlier. A key to Skinner’s argument – one that he emphasizes in a variety of ways – is that studying how vocabularies are used and manipulated explains how



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our “moral and social world” is held in place and how it changes. This approach sheds light on political innovation and change because in the histories Skinner considers, it is by manipulating and altering vocabulary that innovating ideologists alter the moral identity of their societies. As Skinner succinctly explains, changing applications are among the “engines of social change.”86 This approach lets the historian notice those aspects of conceptual change that occur because innovating ideologists go against a rule or convention by manipulating their available appraisive vocabulary to justify their political activities. In The Foundations, he puts it this way: “The clearest sign that a society has entered into self-conscious possession of a new concept [is] that a new vocabulary comes to be generated, in terms of which the concept is then articulated and discussed.”87 Reality: History Is “Supposed to Be True” Skinner’s approach also promises us a better historical picture of social reality or, as he puts it, a “more realistic picture” of how “political thinking in all its various forms was in fact conducted in earlier periods.”88 This idea of a “realistic picture” can be understood in an academic sense, as a proper way to study historically significant classic texts. In The Foundations, vol. 1, for example, Skinner uses his method to correct the neglect – evident in the work of Hans Baron, among others – of the emergence of the political ideology vindicating republican (or neoRoman) civic life.89 In this way, his approach helps us avoid anachronism and distinguish historical truths from fairy tales. But I think there’s a more robust use of the word “realistic” here. If we understand properly Skinner’s holistic ontology, what becomes more apparent are the ways he avoids scepticism and operates within what might be called a form of realism, and this is in fact something to which he occasionally admits. Skinner uses words like “real,” “realistic,” “reality,” and “actual” to describe the kind of history he’s doing, and he typically contrasts this with approaches – of which he is highly critical – that result in “wholly meaningless debate,” that perpetuate historical absurdities, abstractions, and “mythologies” that “no one ever actually succeeded in thinking,” and that “scarcely contain any genuinely historical reports about thoughts that were actually thought in the past.” Skinner’s reply to these “purely mythological” histories is straightforwardly realist. History, he tells us, “cannot simply consist of stories.” But “a further feature of historical stories is that they are at

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least supposed to be true.”90 This commitment to the truth and to reality is something he mentions as an important part of his way of doing history, and he sees this commitment as the historically correct approach to the study of moral and political thought. So, for example, when he explains how appraisive vocabularies are used and manipulated, he says his aim is to shed light on reality, namely, the “artificial distinction between social reality and the language of description of that social reality.” And with this he defends the view that the relationship between “our social vocabulary and our social world” is not “purely external and contingent.” Rather, languages are interwoven in practices and help “to constitute the character of those practices.” To see this relationship is, Skinner writes, “to see the point at which our social vocabulary and our social fabric mutually prop each other up.”91 In Liberty Before Liberalism, Skinner explains the significance of this historical approach. In the autobiographical passages, he talks about the late 1960s, when a number of scholars (among whom he singles out John Dunn) made Cambridge University “the leading centre for a more historically minded approach to the study of moral and political thought.” But in contrast to Palonen’s picture, he doesn’t describe this as a moment of contingency. He writes: “Among the intellectual historians like myself, it seemed an exciting development to be able to relate our studies more closely to what used to be called ‘real’ history.”92 Comparative Dialogue: Conversations among Neighbours Up until now I’ve been describing Skinner’s methodological writings and how they emphasize what an agent does and takes for granted, which includes how an agent criticizes and helps change his own social and political world. Skinner’s argument has been that words are connected to actions and that the changing applications or uses or words can be engines of social change. Now I would like to discuss two significant changes in emphasis that took place in Skinner’s work. These are further refinements to his Wittgensteinian historical approach and point to other significant lessons his approach promises. I am talking about the increasing emphasis on comparison and dialogue. In his early work, Skinner seemed too prone to think in terms of meanings in a sort of essentialist way, despite his aims to the contrary – too inclined to suppose there are relatively stable, standard, accepted, and correct meanings that are consciously and effectively manipulated by ideologists. Skinner tells us that his immersion in the rhetorical



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tradition (the classical theories of eloquence) changed all this, shifting his emphasis to one in which he recognizes the fluid, negotiated, and contested nature of meanings. He distances himself from the earlier view that evaluative terms have correct accepted denotations that can be followed or manipulated, but for him this does not entail that the meanings of political vocabularies are therefore merely contingent, incorrigible, or incommensurable. He accepts instead the classical rhetorical assumption that there will always be a degree of “neighbourliness” and “neighbourly relations” between apparently conflicting evaluative vocabulary.93 Skinner also tells us he is interested in writing different kinds of histories than his earlier works, which were concerned with “the goal of tracing the origins of our current beliefs and arrangements.” Instead of the foundations of present beliefs, Skinner tells us he’s become more interested in “the contrasts between our past and present systems of thought” and that he believes this kind of history “can have practical significance.” This commitment to historical comparison, he tells us, is evident in “Meaning and Understanding,” an article first published in 1969. But he adds that it is only more recently that he made the commitment “central” to his research, particularly in Liberty Before Liberalism.94 What Skinner talks about in “Meaning and Understanding” is the value of a “strongly diachronic methodology” for studying the history of ideas, the phenomenon of conceptual change, and the relationship between linguistic and ideological change. He describes “the most exciting possibility” here as being the “possibility of a dialogue between philosophical discussion and historical evidence.”95 This is a historical approach that avoids demanding solutions to our own immediate problems of the present and instead looks for “distinctions,” through which we learn to appreciate differences and similarities between our society and other societies we are studying. Such a dialogical comparative approach, he concludes, might let us distinguish what is necessary from what is contingently the product of our own arrangements and in this way allow us to learn something about ourselves.96 An Object of Comparison: Machiavellian Libertà We begin to see this transition to a full-fledged historiography as object of comparison in Skinner’s “The Idea of Negative Liberty.” In this essay, he explains that his interest is to turn to history to enable us to “stand back from our own beliefs and the concepts we use to express them,”

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forcing us perhaps to reconsider, recast, or even abandon some of our beliefs, to release ourselves from the confines of an accepted political convention “in light of these wider perspectives.”97 In this case, the conventional beliefs he has in mind constitute a prevailing orthodoxy around political liberty – the freedom of action available to individual agents within the confines imposed by their membership in political society. The orthodox view of political liberty Skinner seeks to challenge is that such liberty is essentially negative (the absence of constraint) and that negative liberty is an “opportunity concept,” which is to say mere absence of constraint, unconnected to the pursuit of any substantive ends. On this interpretation, liberty is not connected to the idea of civic virtues or public service and is necessarily connected to individual rights.98 Skinner turns to what he takes to be the lessons of history to show that “in an earlier and now discarded tradition of thought about social freedom,” the negative idea of liberty as “the mere nonobstruction of individual agents in the pursuit of their chosen ends” was combined with the ideas of virtue and public service “in just the manner nowadays assumed by all sides to be impossible without incoherence.”99 Thus his aim is to “supplement and correct” this prevailing and misleadingly restricted sense of what can and cannot be said and done with the concept of negative liberty by examining the record of “the very different things that have been said and done with it at earlier phases in the history of our own culture.”100 By turning to the Roman republican theory of citizenship101 as articulated by Machiavelli in The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Skinner shows how negative liberty is consistent with performing public services, and cultivating the virtues needed to perform them, and that these are “instrumentally necessary” to avoid coercion and servitude and thus “necessary conditions of assuring any degree of personal liberty in the ordinary Hobbesian sense of the term.”102 Even though many contemporary negative theorists say this is contradictory, Machiavelli’s is a theory of negative liberty, but he develops it without any resort whatsoever to the concept of individual rights. As Skinner explains, Machiavelli writes that the prudent citizen recognizes that “whatever extent of negative liberty he may enjoy, it can only be the outcome of ... a steady recognition and pursuit of the public good at the expense of all purely individual and private ends.”103



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The methodological commitment evident here is something similar to that which Wittgenstein expresses in PI, s. 130. That is, Skinner surveys various political vocabularies “to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities,” and this comparison is intended to enable us to change our way of looking at things, to free us from aspect blindness about political liberty, to get us to see things differently regarding the concept of negative liberty. Skinner in Liberty before Liberalism continues to pursue this comparative historical approach when he explains the neo-Roman theory of free citizens and free states and how this was eclipsed by the liberal analysis of negative liberty in terms of the absence of coercion. He likens his approach to archaeological excavation, in that it entails seeking values we no longer endorse and questions we no longer ask. He describes this as a search for “comparable aspects” of our present moral and political world as well as for “discontinuities” within our intellectual heritage. This might allow us to “stand back from, and perhaps even to reappraise, some of our current assumptions and beliefs.”104 In Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Skinner elaborates further this comparative historical approach, tying it together with a formidable conception of dialogue. Specifically, he suggests that the appropriate approach to moral and political argument and debate is a neo-Ciceronian form of eloquence. This tradition – a humanist vision now widely repudiated – characteristically promotes a dialogical style of moral and political reasoning. And in fact Skinner’s book focuses on “the historical juncture at which the shift from a dialogical to a monological style of moral and political reasoning took place.” Skinner uses the word “dialogical” to mean the “central contention of rhetorical theory” found in classical authors like Cicero and Quintillian, which is, that there will always be two sides to any question, so “it will always be possible to construct a plausible argument in utramque partem, on either side of the case.”105 Stemming from this belief is a commitment characteristic of the rhetorically minded view of Renaissance humanism that in moral and political political debate “our watchword ought to be audi alteram partem, always listen to the other side.”106 The important lesson Skinner learns from this tradition is that “the appropriate model will always be that of a dialogue, the appropriate stance a willingness to negotiate over rival intuitions concerning the applicability of evaluative terms.” By this approach, “we strive to reach understanding and resolve disputes in a conversational way.”107

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The Skinner–Taylor Debate: Cross-Purposes? Following Skinner’s advice, let’s consider a disagreement that exists between him and Charles Taylor and see if we can’t resolve it in a dialogical way by surveying the family resemblances of the two sides. There is much in common in their approaches, particularly the way both study politics. Both accept the meaning-as-use argument, and both have cited with approval Wittgenstein’s concept of a form of life. However, the forms of life Skinner is talking about are political struggles and their related languages that existed in places and times different from our own; by contrast, Taylor uses the concept of forms of life in narrow terms to mean specific political forms of life and in broader terms to mean background conditions of intentionality. Both Skinner and Taylor accept in different ways that understanding is necessary for explanation, in the sense that we cannot avoid value commitments and that the agent’s self-understanding cannot be ignored in explaining her actions. They agree that because evaluations cannot be separated from descriptions, the very use of language carries evaluative commitments. In brief, meaning is use, not a neutral theory that finesses the agent’s self-understanding. Keeping these important similarities in mind, it’s hard not to see a well-known discussion between Taylor and Skinner as a case of crosspurposes, because it appears that there is a disagreement based on each misinterpreting the other’s position on the questions of incorrigibility and neutrality. Taylor wants to know whether Skinner shields or insulates questions of historical explanation from those of truth, whether the truth can be bracketed, whether a historian can avoid “taking a stand on the truth” of the ideas he is examining.108 The issue that “must be faced,” Taylor insists, is that certain explanations are inseparable from evaluations. If we want to give convincing and realistic explanations, we cannot avoid value commitments, neither our own nor others’. In explaining, we inevitably affirm or negate what it is we are explaining. In this sense, Taylor argues that a political explanation is “on all fours” with the historical theories it is called upon to explain.109 The two are potential rivals. So, to recall the issues we discussed in chapter 4, what Taylor wants to know is whether Skinner includes an explanation of error in his explanation, because on his view the identification of error is essential to the task of explanation. How in other words does Skinner explain the actions of people whose ontology he does not share?



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What I am suggesting is that if we understand their Wittgensteinian sources properly, both Taylor and Skinner avoid any answers to such questions that crudely assume either incorrigibility and relativist incomparability, or a simple realism that presumes that other language-games are wrong and ours are right. My point is that both adopt instead more nuanced approaches based on Wittgenstein’s suggestions about perspicuous representation, which is a form of realism I have been calling a comparative dialogical approach, in which we always listen to the other side and in which we might discover something about ourselves in trying to understand other forms of life. So Skinner begins with the assumption that at least part of the historian’s task (but not the sole or principal task) is to recover the historical subject’s point of view, which is to say what he may have meant.110 If our aim is to understand an action, whatever else we do, we cannot discount the agent’s own explanation of his action or assume there exists some essential metaphysical truth that can explain it. Skinner’s approach is (like Taylor’s) to be charitable to the agent’s language of self-description. For Skinner this entails certain methodological commitments that include making the agents appear “as rational as possible,” and if contradictions or confusions are encountered, we must assume that we have in some way “misunderstood or mistranslated.”111 As an example, Skinner turns to the influential explanation of witchcraft beliefs offered Le Roy Ladurie in his classic study The Peasants of Languedoc. He rejects Ladurie’s position that such beliefs are manifestly false, a mere product of “mass delirium,” that they could not be rationally held because these mistaken assumptions commit the historian to the misleading task of looking for “an explanation of a breakdown in normal reasoning.” Skinner’s point is that there might be a “recognizable chain of reasoning” that the historian should look for.112 So, in replying to Taylor’s question, Skinner seeks a nuanced approach. He agrees with Taylor that understanding is necessary for explanation, and he accepts that forms of life are corrigible, although with qualification, and not without difficulty. He gives several reasons why sometimes we must revise and even contest the language of the people we are studying113 and why sometimes it may be appropriate to override and discount a writer’s own statements (what they say).114 Skinner acknowledges that “an observer might be in a position to give a fuller or more convincing account of the agent’s behaviour than he could give himself.”115 When it comes to a given belief, he explains why it may be “crucial to insist” that it was “less than rational for a given

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agent to have upheld it.”116 Perhaps the writer was self-deceiving about recognizing his intentions or incompetent in stating them – and this indeed seems possible with complex actions – or perhaps the writer failed to make clear how exactly the utterance is to be taken or understood. As he readily admits, these are cases where the recovery of intentionality “raises special difficulties.”117 In these nuanced ways, Skinner avoids what Taylor calls “vulgar Wittgensteinianism,” in that he accepts that the agent’s language of understanding may be corrigible. Connected to this position, Skinner also tries to find a nuanced way to avoid incommensurability and incomparability by rejecting any dramatic form of it and defending an undramatic one. By this he means it is a mistake to assume that explaining an alien concept can be “reduced to that of finding a counterpart in his or her own language for the term that expresses it.” By this, all he means is that languages are not incorrigible. And this explains why he distances himself from views that promote “the relativity of all values.”118 The reason I’m singling out an exchange between Skinner and Taylor is that it helps us see Skinner’s realism, in that the agent’s language of understanding is sometimes corrigible. The example of Bodin’s belief that there are witches in league with the devil illustrates my point. Skinner tries to make sense of this by distinguishing what is “rational” from what is “true.” Whether a belief is rational depends on whether it accords with some accredited local process of reasoning. There might in other words be “a local canon of rational acceptability” that we must identify.119 On this basis Skinner asserts that “it may well have been rational for Bodin to hold it true that there are witches in league with the devil, even if such beliefs no longer strike us as rationally acceptable.” But Skinner rejects as “reckless” what he calls “the thesis of conceptual relativism” – that there might be a local canon of truth and that truth varies in the same way. So he simply dismisses the assertion that “it was true that at one time there were witches in league with the devil, even though such a belief would nowadays strike us as false.”120 But rationality means something different than the truth. If Skinner suggests that we should bracket the truth, that there are ways of interpreting a text that do not involve truth or falsity,121 it is only in the sense that he is not trying to recover something historically invariant. He is not saying that the historian’s task is free of value/ontological commitments. This is why I think the conversation is at cross-purposes, because Taylor’s point is that we cannot avoid evaluation (taking a stand), and Skinner’s



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point is that there is no point in looking for something timeless or essential. In this respect I think there is more in common with Taylor than this dispute suggests. Both authors avoid vulgar relativism, and both acknowledge the possibility of corrigibility without slipping into a forms of brazen ethnocentrism. That’s because both mobilize a comparative dialogical approach to meaning and understanding. Conclusion Among the central problems that have been raised in this book is how we can know and understand others and whether we can criticize our form of life or compare it with others at all in the absence of any kind of essential or universal truths or culturally invariant explanations. Palonen has argued that for Skinner, “a rational determination of beliefs” has been “convincingly demonstrated to be a hopeless task.” This leads not to irrationalism, he concludes, but to “semantic holism.”122 I have suggested another possibility, which is that Skinner’s holism does in fact defend forms of practical rationality and realism, which are evident in his non-sceptical and non-monological Wittgensteinian approach. The family resemblances to Wittgenstein are based on the idea that words are deeds, which is to say that language is interwoven in human practices. Following this lesson, Skinner goes on to claim that an author’s intention or purpose is holistically related to the action it characterizes, that principles and ideas can help legitimate a course of action and are among the enabling conditions of its occurrence, so that recovery of intention entails recovery of ideological convention. On this view, misunderstanding a political text is a result of aspect blindness, which is to say our craving for timeless, essential forms of explanation, or being held captive by a general theory that purports to lay out the essential features of the political phenomena we are trying to understand. In response, Skinner presents a way of freeing ourselves from the craving for political generality by way of a dialogical survey of the vocabularies of political thought, by comparing cases, and examples, in order to see similarities and differences. Skinner’s alternative approach to the understanding of texts, his response to sceptical, essential, and causal explanations, is a kind of Wittgensteinian historiography that is realist, non-causal, and dialogical. This is a form of historical explanation that attempts to retrieve the author’s intended purpose. It is not a theory or some search for essence, but “a way of describing.” In other words, his methodological essays equate the historical meaning of a text with its illocutionary force,

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which is to say the author’s intention in writing the text. Skinner’s approach is to retrieve the author’s point or purpose in writing and so explain his actions in terms of what he was “doing,” not in terms of either a text’s timeless essential meaning or an antecedent and causally determinate context. In this way, Skinner shows that Wittgenstein’s positive contribution to the study of politics is a way of understanding political texts, as well as political concepts, contexts, ideologies, and institutions.

6 James Tully’s Aspectival Approach to the Study of Politics

Like Charles Taylor and Quentin Skinner, James Tully draws on a variety of philosophical sources, and as with those two, Wittgenstein is one of them. In this chapter I hope to show how Tully is similar to the others in another important respect: his work provides another case study of a comparative dialogical reading of Wittgenstein that avoids therapeutic scepticism. My aim is to survey the Wittgensteinian sources and recall the aspects of Tully’s work that show Wittgensteinian inheritance. This will shed light on how Tully interprets classic political texts and their political concepts, understands historical contexts and their authoritative traditions of interpretation, and describes political movements, struggles, and practices. In his early writings, Tully’s use of Wittgenstein was influenced by the work being done at Cambridge University, in particular by John Dunn and Quentin Skinner.1 The earliest evidence of this influence is apparent in Tully’s A Discourse on Property, in which he acknowledges his debt to the “methodological writings” and “model of scholarship” of the two Cambridge professors.2 Tully’s book was published two years after Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and the methodological similarities are noticeable. In fact, Skinner’s influence is evident throughout Tully’s writings and is the subject of two of his edited collections,3 so it is worthwhile reminding ourselves what those similarities are. Interpretation of Classic Political Texts in a Historically Sensitive Manner As I argued in chapter 5, in his early writings Skinner’s historiography was based on equating the historical meaning of a text with its illocutionary force, which is to say its author’s intention in writing it.

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Skinner’s approach recovers the author’s point or purpose in writing a text and thus explains his actions in terms of what he is doing and not in terms of either essential timeless concepts or an antecedent, causally determinate context. This innovative historical approach was influenced by a reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI) and On Certainty (hereafter OC). In his early writings, such as A Discourse on Property, Tully adopts a similar approach. His aim, he tells us in Discourse, “is to recover the meaning which John Locke intended to convey in his theory of property in the Two Treatises of Government,”4 and this, he tells us, requires us to situate the text in two contexts. The first of these contexts is “the range of normative vocabulary and conventions available to Locke in terms of which his theory is written.” Tully uses other natural law theories to throw light on Locke’s work “by illuminating their similarities and dissimilarities” – an approach that acknowledges a “methodological commitment” to Wittgenstein’s PI, s. 130, and OC. By this method, we are told, it is possible to “make explicit the conventions normally employed in natural law writing” and to answer “three sorts of questions”: What aspects of Locke’s analysis are conventional? Where does Locke diverge from conventional norms? And what is taken for granted by his audience, which is to ask, what are the “public criteria for justifying arguments”? And “this point is also adapted from Wittgenstein’s work in On Certainty.”5 The second context is “the group of social and political issues Locke addresses in Two Treatises: to understand his intentions, and so his meaning,“ in other words, “what Locke was doing in deploying the normative vocabulary in the way he does; what social and political action he wishes to condone or condemn.” For this approach, Tully credits Skinner and Dunn.6 This speech-act method, as I explained in chapter 5, equates the meaning of a text to intention and convention: the author’s purpose or intention in writing it (or what the author is doing), and “the intersubjective and conventional vocabulary” for “its articulation.”7 This Wittgensteinian historical approach yields important insights. In Skinner’s case, it allowed him to correct the neglect evident in the work of Hans Baron, among others, regarding the emergence of the political ideologies vindicating republican (or neo-Roman) civic life.8 In his early writings, perhaps the most compelling outcome of Tully’s use of Wittgenstein to interpret Locke is that it contributed to a kind of Lorenzo Valla moment in political philosophy with respect to C.B. Macpherson’s thesis of possessive individualism.9 By carefully surveying the normative vocabulary and conventions of seventeenth-century England and



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the political actions Locke was condoning and condemning, Tully showed that Locke could not have intended to promote unlimited private property, or to object to common property, because the concept of property had a meaning different from ours, so the thesis of possessive individualism was glaringly anachronistic.10 Tully shows that Locke’s adversary was principally Sir Robert Filmer and his Royalist defence of absolute monarchy. Locke’s context was the exclusion crisis, and his main ideological task was to refute neither socialism nor nascent capitalism, but Filmer’s natural subjection theory, articulated in Patriarcha and other political writings, justifying unconditional obedience to absolute monarchy.11 Using his Wittgensteinian approach, Tully offers a corrective to various orthodox understandings of early modern theories of property, not a justification of private property but a theory of individual use rights within a framework of inclusive claim rights. In other words, Tully is a scholar who (like Skinner) uses Wittgenstein to shed light on a set of political texts, political concepts, political institutions (namely, property), and political ideologies. In “Locke on Liberty,” Tully shows how this Wittgensteinian approach could be mobilized to shed light on other political concepts besides property. Citing PI, s. 18, as his motto, he elegantly summarizes how his approach has learned from Wittgenstein’s practical depiction of knowledge, in that “its aim is not speculation alone, but a certain kind of life or conduct.” Political concepts such as liberty are terms and distinctions “partially adopted from the languages or traditions of political expression available to the author” and “partially adapted by the author to articulate his concerns, thus making his distinctive contribution to the city.” In other words, the language an author employs is “interwoven in human action,” and “the way he adapts it is meant to alter, by being accepted by his audience, that practice.” He then states that “this point has been made by Aristotle, and Wittgenstein, and put beyond doubt by Taylor.”12 The references here are to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, PI, ss. 23 and 570, and Taylor’s “Neutrality in Political Science.” In other words, Tully is arguing that if we want to understand what Locke means by liberty, we need to explain Locke’s purpose or point, which is to say his intention in using the term in this way. And we can understand this use by comparing and contrasting the “similarities and dissimilarities” in the ways that words are used by Locke and other authors, which will “throw into relief what is conventional and what is original in Locke’s account.” Tully tells us that by “surveying this in the light of the practical context,” we will know what Locke was concerned about in writing, and this will enable

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us to understand the purpose. The Wittgensteinian survey approach of comparing and contrasting also helps us see where our contemporary political thinking is similar and different, or as Tully puts it, where his style “has left its mark on whole areas of the city, and where our thought diverges.”13 In these early publications, we find that Tully uses Wittgenstein’s approach to explain the meaning of classic political texts such as Locke’s Two Treatises, and political concepts such as property and liberty, and also a way of explaining authoritative political traditions of interpretation (or ideologies) such as liberalism. And this is informed by a reading of Wittgenstein that does not really bear any resemblance to the therapeutic or pedagogical approaches I explained earlier.14 We find a reading that does not promote scepticism with its tendencies to incomparability and incommensurability, and its politically conservative, negative, and contingent conclusions. On the contrary, and in a number of further commentaries, Tully continued to elaborate the Wittgensteinian underpinnings of his approach in a way that made clear its realist, critical, and politically progressive implications. This is particularly evident in his “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” first published in 1989,15 and in several essays written between 1979 and 1990, eventually collected under the title An Approach to Political Philosophy, a book that begins by citing PI, s. 127, and that identifies Wittgenstein as one author from whom Tully has “drawn inspiration.”16 With his essays “Rediscovering America”17 and “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” Tully begins to make a transition that he fully articulates in Strange Multiplicity. He continues to take a Wittgensteinian approach, but he begins to shift his focus to struggles over recognition, and he expresses far more perspicuously the dialogical aspects of understanding. Before we consider Strange Multiplicity and subsequent publications, I want to outline how Tully describes Wittgenstein’s method in these earlier writings. I will then focus on subsequent commentaries. Wittgenstein’s Method: #1 – the Craving for Generality The first aspect of Wittgenstein’s approach that Tully adopts is the basic assumption that meaning is particular use, not an abstract theory or generalization. Tully rejects the “widely held assumption” that understanding consists in having a “general theory” or “a comprehensive theory” that sets forth the “essential features of the phenomenon in question.” What Tully means by a “theory” is something that “is always



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an example or two mistaken as the comprehensive view of all possible examples.”18 And this is a lesson he learns from PI, ss. 65–97. “Wittgenstein showed that this is a mistaken conception of understanding” because any phenomenon we seek to understand “is too complex to be grasped in a general schema which purports to lay out its essential features.”19 The idea of “general theory” here also includes a variety of possible essential or comprehensive forms of explanation, including causal explanations, interpretations, and more recently “normative theory” (to which I will return). In “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” Tully surveys two examples of such a craving for generality, what he calls “practices” or “language games of critical reflection”: the justificational or validational approach of Jürgen Habermas, and the interpretational form advanced by Charles Taylor.20 Tully is critical of Habermas for conflating understanding with reaching agreement, and he is critical of Taylor for equating understanding with interpretation, and he criticizes both for presuming that their form of critical reflection is grounded in universal foundations or that it plays an essential role in defining how “our way of political life is free and rational.” Tully’s reply is that no form of critical reflection can play this essential, universal or metaphysically foundational role.21 This is not to say that Tully is promoting a conservative position and opposing the very practice of critical political thought – quite the contrary (and like Skinner, in subsequent writings he also rescues the concept of foundations). Tully uses this approach to show that validation and interpretation are not the definitive or essential ways of being critical in the world; rather, they are just two examples of critical reflection among many.22 If we wish “to conserve such traditions,” it is necessary to call into question the “customary misunderstandings of critical reflection” without “embracing the stultifying abdication of critical thought promoted by various forms of conservatism.”23 I will not take issue here with the way Tully depicts Habermas – others are free to address this aspect – but I would like to take a brief detour for a moment and explain why I think there are reasons to question his account of Taylor, particularly in light of what I said in chapter 4. A Commentary on Tully’s Reading of Taylor In his earlier version of “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” while recognizing Taylor’s similarities with Wittgenstein, Tully failed to notice Taylor’s Wittgensteinian aspects in two important respects. First,

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Tully claimed that Taylor granted ontological status to interpretation, in that “the most fundamental ways in which humans understand themselves are interpretations.” Second, he equated ontology with something essential, definitive, metaphysically foundational.24 As I argued in chapter 4, this would be a partial interpretation of Taylor’s position, since he in fact promotes neither view in the way Tully describes. First, Taylor uses the word ontology in a different way than Tully. Ontology is dialogical and provisional, not essential or definitive, in that it is always open to challenge. Second, Taylor accepts Wittgenstein’s claim that meaning is use and understanding is knowing that use, and use entails that language is a form of life. On this view, practices (not interpretations or articulations) are primary to understanding. The fact that Tully’s 1989 essay does not engage the distinctly Wittgensteinian sources of Taylor’s approach may account for this unfortunate mischaracterization. In revised versions of this essay, Tully acknowledges the flaw in his earlier interpretation in part by admitting in the revised version that Taylor promotes a “modest nonfoundational” view of interpretation, that “Taylor himself does not attribute this foundational role to interpretation,” and that he and Taylor are “now in agreement on Wittgenstein’s distinction between interpretation and understanding.”25 Tully tried to account for his earlier position by distinguishing Taylor’s “earlier formulations” from “his most recent work.”26 But this distinction is not sound because Taylor’s dialogical Wittgensteinian account of understanding is clearly evident throughout all the sources Tully cites in his 1989 version, not just the particular ones he picks out in the 2003 and 2008 editions. In other words, Taylor’s “earlier” account of understanding is already “in accord with the account given by Wittgenstein” so that there is no distinction between earlier and “most recent” regarding this aspect of similarity between Wittgenstein and Taylor.27 This qualification notwithstanding, Tully’s essay is a significant contribution to explaining how Wittgenstein’s remarks have direct relevance in understanding politics. Craving generality and essence, and ignoring the limits of theory, attributing to it essential pretensions it does not deserve, or universal, metaphyical foundations it will not admit, is a widespread tendency that carries consequences. Tully repeatedly cites PI, s. 115, where Wittgenstein emphasizes this point: that sometimes a picture can hold us captive.28 A picture is a theory, a comprehensive view, or the presumption of a transcendental standpoint that so captivates us that it can “elbow aside” other ways of thinking.



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It captivates because it informs a broad range of vocabulary and customs we employ in thinking and acting, even when we take a critical stance.29 The danger in being held captive, in the “misidentification of understanding with theory,” is that such captivity blinds us to diversity – it “directs us away from the multiplicity of the world and towards abstract and procrustean representations of it.” So a theory can cause us “to overlook the complexity of what we are trying to understand.” By masquerading a particular as a general, by representing a particular phenomenon in a general way, a theory causes us “to overlook and therefore misunderstand the very phenomenon we seek to understand.”30 Wittgenstein’s Method: #2 – Forms of Life: What Is Taken for Granted The first point I considered is that theories do not transcend or capture the everyday, ongoing variety of our particular practices.31 Another aspect of Wittgenstein’s argument Tully mobilizes is the claim that our ways of explaining and understanding the world rest on judgments that are not doubted and that depend on a context that is accepted, given, or taken for granted; this is what Wittgenstein calls forms of life.32 He writes that “throughout the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein is concerned to draw our attention to this feature” of a form of life, and language-games.33 On this view, understanding is based on unjustified grounds, non-individual customary use, conventional understanding, or “what is taken for granted,” so understanding cannot be reduced to something essential or captured by a meta-language, like justification or interpretation. “All our inquiries,” Tully argues, “no matter how reflective and critical, always take place within some ways of thinking and acting that are taken for granted and not questioned.”34 With reference to Wittgenstein’s OC, s. 105, he suggests that any type of critical activity, even “our most critically reflective activity of doubting,” always rests in “a nest of judgments that are not doubted at all,” which to say a form of life.35 In this way he is able to show the limitations of three orthodox types of critical reflection, namely, justification, interpretation, and scepticism. To differentiate his own approach from the stronger or weaker forms of conventionalism, and to guard his account from charges of conservatism, Tully reminds us that one is still free to question and that it is still reasonable to raise doubts.36 In other words, this approach does not mean we must simply accept any give form of life or that we are automatically precluded from any type of

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critical self-reflection; rather, “questioning a given form of life involves the acceptance of others and not a transcendental standpoint.”37 The Ability to “Go On Differently”: The Diversity of Being Trained and Guided This explanation of forms of life is relevant to the discussion here because the central thesis I have been defending is that Tully’s reading is different in important respects from those of the commentators I discussed earlier. This difference becomes readily apparent when we consider Tully’s views about being trained into a form of life. Tully is not issuing either conservative or politically indifferent utterances. There is no doct­ rine of non-interference here, and the purpose of his commentaries – the illocutionary force – is not to leave the world alone. He accepts that there is a fact of the matter, and he has no qualms about criticizing his own form of life, and other forms of life, or about comparing the content of his training with that of others. And when he does reference Wittgenstein’s remark about therapy, he uses the word the same way Witt­ genstein does – in the plural, as “therapies.” Tully reads this comment about there not being “a philosophical method” as a call to diversity awareness, in that “there are indeed methods.” Wittgenstein’s own method is one that appreciates and sees variety, and this is no less true for critical reflection. So Tully argues that “the resources available to reflect critically on our political thought and action are more various – richer in possibilities – than the standard classifications of two or three schools … lead us to believe.”38 I want to consider this point in more detail, because Tully’s comments about critical reflection also apply to the practice of being guided and inducted into a language-game, which I will call being trained. He pursues this line of reasoning to illustrate that even in the context of an unquestioned way of life, we are not trained into a stultifying indifference or an imprisoned conservatism; rather, we have the freedom to “go on differently,” to “go against in actual cases,” to go against our training, which is exhibited in what Wittgenstein calls in PI, s. 201, “‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases.”39 Tully is actually making more than one argument here. The first is that being guided and trained is not something “mechanical” or “reducible to the behavourist’s causal compulsion of habit.” Citing PI, s. 172, he argues instead that there are many different ways we can be inducted into



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language-games that don’t involve habit and that are not tantamount to behavioural conditioning. On the contrary, as Wittgenstein says, “being guided is a particular experience!”40 So being trained to follow a rule doesn’t somehow turn off our critical or rational faculties. We’re not just trapped in an uncritically determined set of norms and practices, because we do have such critical abilities to “go on differently.” In contrast to the argument suggested by the pedagogical reading, Tully argues that it’s not just “seasoned practitioners” who are capable of going on differently; “novitiates,” too, are able to question and raise doubts.41 This argument implies that training is a family resemblance concept and that being initiated and inducted into a form of life does not necessarily entail either strong or weak forms of conventionalism. Training does not entail either the determinacy or the primacy of context. It does not imprison us in our way of life or destroy any possibility of liberating ourselves from conventions Arguments for Criticism and Freedom Tully’s point is that our ability to be critical and free is not and can never really be extinguished, and with this his Wittgensteinian approach comes nowhere close to the contextualist assumptions typically found among strong and weak conventionalists, with their tendencies towards incommensurability and incomparability. Lets consider four other related reasons why this is the case – how we always criticize, call into question, challenge, and struggle for freedom.

(a) Reflex One claim is that the faculty of judgment itself “involves a reflexive ability” even though “it is always developed in the context of a practice or institution.” This reflex is an ability “to suspend and examine the authoritative traditions of that practice itself.” Tully calls this a “transcendent feature of critical political judgement,” and it is a line of argument he develops in “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy” as well as when he explains Locke’s concept of political freedom. He turns to this idea of reflex to explain how “one is free to question” and interpret variously in the course of a language-game, which explains in part how political institutions are established and why they “continue to be open to change and improvement.”42

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(b)  Built-In Dual Quality of Norms Another reason why humans go on differently is one that Tully has learned from both Foucault and Wittgenstein: there is no such thing as complete or total normalization.43 Instead, norms have a dual quality: they normalize, and they also have an aspect of freedom in the sense that those subject to them have a say over them. So while a norm normalizes, citizens are also free to act, except in extreme cases of total domination. That is, “it is also within the range of possibility, to varying degrees, for the individual and group actors subject to a norm to turn, call it into question, challenge its acceptability or legitimacy, and struggle to negotiate its modification or transformation (in various ways) with the other members who strive to hold it in place.” There is no sharp demarcation between normal and abnormal uses or between “same” and “different,” so there is a “vast landscape of ways of thoughtfully being guided by, of following, and going against conventional uses.”44 The implication of this claim is the possibility that people are able to acquire and exercise political abilities without being trained at all – indeed, in spite of being trained – because they might be “outside the canonical institutions and com­ munities.” That is, “they often acquire them through the experience of exclusion from and oppression by these institutions.”45 With marginalization and oppression, we learn not from training but in spite of training.

(c)  Praxis and Actual Cases Third, forms of life are not governed by rules but by conventional practices that, because of their particular and practical nature, we always already question, alter, and make up as we go along, “one conventional boundary at a time.” Tully calls this praxis, and he argues that understanding is an ability to grasp a sign in actual praxis, which is to say that understanding is obeying a rule and going against it “in actual cases.”46 Praxis is also a historical exercise in the sense that what is taken for granted and what is explicitly called into question and reflected on are “provisional and subject to change over time – in the historical course of our activities of critical reflection.”47

(d)  Perspicuous Representation Tully also promotes a specific technique that we can employ, and this opens up a discussion about his own preferred practice of critical reflection. To free ourselves from the captivity of essential pictures and their



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mistaken ways of thinking, what we need is “a way of thinking that is able to recognize and affirm the limits of our knowledge and action,” and Tully finds this way of thinking in Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation. The “best way to proceed, is to use the techniques developed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations,” which is to say “survey the numerous examples” of a phenomenon, an approach that draws our attention to similar and dissimilar examples, thereby freeing us from conventional ways of doing things and letting us see our preferred activity as one practice among many.48 By means of objects of comparison, the survey helps us see similarities and differences; it shows that the presumption of essentialism is mistaken, that no theory can “ground … our motley of activities.” And this enables us “to address the pressing political issues of our age.”49 By comparing the similarities and differences of particular cases and examples, the survey lets us see different aspects, frees us from a picture’s hold,50 and in so doing frees us from conventional and mistaken ways of thinking.51 Tully reminds us of the advantage of this approach, if it is not already clear: “Wittgenstein’s argument directs our attention to and wonder at” the “irreducible diversity and our relations to it.”52 Strange Multiplicity: Tully’s Dialogical Turn I have been describing Wittgenstein’s influences in some of Tully’s earlier writings. We find here an emphasis on language-games and forms of life as conventional practices into which we are trained and against which we go on differently in various ways. This is not a form of therapeutic scepticism, but a survey approach that compares the similarities and differences between political phenomena. It does not concede contingency or radical continuing doubt, nor does it conclude that Wittgenstein’s remarks have dubious implications for politics. Its goal is not merely to detect nonsense, and it does not insist on suspending judgment on any substantive political or epistemic conclusions. It avoids any conservative or negative implications, and it defends freedom and agency by claiming that our ability to go on differently is based on a critical reflexivity, and on praxis, by which is meant political room for manoeuvre to raise certain questions and resist domination. So we are not simply conditioned by what society lets us say, or trained into a form of life, because our practices and institutions do not destroy our ability to critically examine forms of life. And indeed there are a multitude of practices of critical reflection and “a diverse world of political thought and action between total revolution and unthinking conformity.”53

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During the 1990s, in such essays as “Rediscovering America”54 and “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” Tully’s argument began to undergo a nuanced yet significant transformation, one that he would fully articulate in his book Strange Multiplicity. At least two things make that book different from his previous work. One difference relates to the object of study. In his earlier writings, Tully focused on classic and less wellknown political texts, concepts, and political traditions of interpretation, and in doing so he recovered the constitutive practical contexts, practical problems, and linguistic conventions that informed them. Beginning with Strange Multiplicity, Tully began to focus squarely on diverse political forms of life and to place more emphasis on their ongoing practical struggles, although without ignoring the texts and political vocabulary shaping them. This difference in emphasis was influenced by a number of important actual political events in Canada. These included the confrontation and standoff between the Mohawk of Kanesatake and Kahnawake and the Canadian Armed Forces near Montreal in 1990,55 the failure of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1991 (for which Tully was an adviser between 1992 and 1995), the rejection of the proposed Charlottetown Accord in October 1992, the 1995 Quebec referendum on secession, and a series of landmark Supreme Court of Canada decisions, including R. v. Sparrow (1990), Delgamuukw v. B.C. (1997), and the reference case on Quebec secession (1998).56 These events and others inspired Tully to direct his attention to constitutional impasses and struggles and to propose helpful and realistic approaches to reconciliation. The second significant difference is that with Strange Multiplicity, Tully took a decidedly dialogical turn. This is evident in his vocabulary: he used the word “dialogical” for the first time. In his earlier essays, Tully had talked about a reflexive ability to follow and go against rules and linguistic conventions, to resist normalization, and to compare cases and examples, an ability he also described as praxis. In emphasizing these reflective and practical abilities, Tully still seemed too prone to argue that our critical thinking abilities, and our capacity to free ourselves from linguistic conventions and political structures of domination, are somehow inevitable or automatic, notwithstanding his claims to the contrary. But more importantly, he was not clear about the nonmonological aspects of his approach to explanation and understanding as sources of our self-formation and our ability to resist and manoeuvre. To say that judgments have reflexes, that norms have dual qualities, or that we alter the rules as we go along, doesn’t seem to account



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for the importance of others as sources. He needed to explain how the mysterious reflexive and praxis abilities we have allow us to go on differently. The argument needed to be developed further: he needed to spell out whether political institutions could be established in a just and fair way and how they could remain open to change and improvement. He did this magnificently in Strange Multiplicity and in his subsequent writings, where he argues that the practices of explanation, learning, and understanding, and of criticism, conceptual innovation, manoeuvrability, and political change, always happen in conversation, comparison, and negotiation with others. I would like to highlight four principal intellectual sources that Tully has cited as primary initial influences of this dialogical turn. One was the work of Quentin Skinner, in particular his book Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Another was Charles Taylor, particularly his essay “To Follow a Rule.” Next, there’s Bill Reid’s masterpiece “The Spirit of Haida Gwaii,” which was placed in the courtyard of the Canadian Chancery in Washington, D.C., on 19 November 1991. And of course Wittgenstein’s posthumously published philosophical remarks were centrally important: as in his earlier works, Tully granted these remarks a prominent place in his dialogical methodology. But Strange Multiplicity took all of this a step further by offering a significant and innovative contribution to showing Wittgenstein’s possible relevance for the study of politics. Tully devotes chapter 4 of Strange Multiplicity to explaining this relevance in detail, beginning with Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.”57 Then throughout the rest of the book, Tully routinely cites remarks from The Blue and Brown Books (hereafter BB), PI, and Culture and Value (hereafter CV). In what follows, I will emphasize the significance of these intellectual sources, while not ignoring others. I will explore what Tully means by dialogue and consider the crucial role it has in his approach to explanation and understanding. As I will explain, he uses the concept to shed light on diverse political practices and forms of life, seeing this as a way to mediate their various contested demands. I will begin with the Wittgensteinian concept of aspectivalism. Aspectivalism Tully typically describes his dialogical orientation as an “aspectival” approach. This derives from Wittgenstein’s argument that we should resist the craving for generality and instead acquire the ability to see

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particular aspects, compare examples, and learn from what is less general.58 The reason we should adopt this approach is articulated in “two famous” anti-essentialist arguments, namely, that meaning is use, and that use is an irreducibly tangled diversity of family resemblances.59 In other words, meaning is embodied and constituted in practical abilities that cannot be reduced to or circumscribed by any common, essential, implicit, or clearly defined rule or generality. According to the first line of argument, famously encapsulated in PI, s. 43, the meaning of a word does not come from an ostensive definition disconnected from its conventional use in practice. Rather, understanding is a mastery of customary use, which is to say a practical ability to use concepts and to give reasons and explanations why they should or should not be used in different particular ways and in various circumstances and contexts. Tully describes this as “a form of practical reasoning.”60 The second line of argument is that no common denominator, no essential set of characteristics or definite list of rules, can presume to circumscribe, unite, bind, govern, or capture particular cases, examples, and uses of particular words. As Wittgenstein argues in PI, ss. 65–70, the varieties of language-games (the uses of words and concepts in forms of life) cannot be reduced to something essential, which is to say one thing in common, because our language-games are too diverse, creative, tangled, and contested to be captured by any such generalizations. Consequently, the criteria for correct use are too various, indeterminate, and unpredictable to be explicated in terms of an implicit, fixed, or transcendental set of rules or in terms of general theories that presume to unite different cases and examples of practices. Since the uses of a concept cannot be determined by or reduced to any set of rules or theories, we must resist the temptation to look for some unitarian characteristic or rule somehow abstracted from practice. This means it is a mistake to try to generate an explicit, exact, or definite set of rules or necessary and sufficient criteria for the correct use of concepts, or a calculus for their correct application in particular cases. And as Wittgenstein argues, we should also not assume that the essence of language is therefore something lying “beneath the surface.” There are no definite rules hidden, implicit, or embedded in our cultural practices and forms of life.61 Embracing aspectivalism and resisting the cravings that pretend to unite diverse political phenomena does not mean we are obligated to neglect or dismiss altogether what’s common. It just commits us to a certain approach to what is common. What we should look for is what Wittgenstein calls “objects of comparison” and “family



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resemblances,” which is to say a complex and complicated network of similarities and dissimilarities or a constellation of overlapping and criss-crossing networks. And as Tully adds, we need to accept that family resemblances among uses of a concept “change over time in the course of human conversation.”62 As I explained in chapter 3, these concepts of family resemblance, overlapping similarities, and objects of comparison are crucially important because they point to Wittgenstein’s preferred method of perspicuous representation, the comparative survey. Recall that this method is not promoting a view that anything goes, that our practices are completely unregulated, haphazard, and chaotic, or that there are no rules or boundaries at all. Wittgenstein’s point is that our practices cannot be captured, defined, or fully articulated by rules, so we need to be clear about the limits and specific reasons for boundaries and rules. “To repeat,” Wittgenstein reminds us in PI, s. 69, “we can draw a boundary – for a special purpose.” His principal claim is that our practices are primary: “it is our acting,” not an implicit or explicit rule, “which lies at the bottom of the language game.”63 Recall also that aspectivalism also doesn’t mean there are no ways to differentiate correct from incorrect use. We learn from comparing examples of regular use. So, what connects a word to its correct use is not a rule and not necessarily training, but the ongoing customary practice of comparative dialogue, which is to say that dialogical activities shape the ability to use words correctly.64 Wittgenstein’s Influence: Meaning Is Use, Not a Definition, Theory, or Rule I have been exploring Tully’s dialogical, practical survey approach, which resists the cravings for generality and “definitive theory.”65 All along I have been highlighting the Wittgensteinian aspects of this approach, particularly the influence of two anti-essentialist arguments. The consequences of these arguments are profound for political science and political philosophy, and this stems from the fact that politics is not theoretical but practical in three interrelated ways. One is that it is not about inanimate objects, but human subjects and their actions, practices, and language-games. The thing about human practices is that even simple ones are loaded with meaning and purpose – perhaps more so when it comes to political practices. It is in the games of politics that we learn meaning. So, for example, it is in the diverse activities of

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ongoing freedom struggles that we learn the meaning of a concept like liberty. Likewise, the meanings of political concepts like equality, imperialism, globalization, and citizenship manifest themselves in different examples, cases, and contexts of equality-seeking struggles; in techniques of imperialism and democratic movements to “deimperialize”; and in practices of globalization and negotiated practices of civic action and ongoing contestation. The second way in which politics is practical is understood when we see what political scientists should be doing. Besides being constitutively meaningful, the other thing about human action is that it will not admit certainty because politics is about contested purposeful practices relating to public goods.66 Therefore, political scientists should not, to paraphrase Aristotle, expect from politics a certainty it will not admit. The meanings of political concepts cannot be given by fixed definitions, determinate rules, or general theories. The ability to understand them cannot therefore be the activity of grasping, interpreting, or applying definitions, rules, or theories to particular cases. So the role of the political scientist, political theorist, or political philosopher should not be to render explicit some putatively implicit essential rule embodied in practice, mainly because our political practices are not reducible to rules, general theories, mathematical formulae, or causal variables. Likewise, the political scientist does not have the privileged role of working out definitive theories and rules and applying them, as if she were some kind of lawgiver who does not engage in politics. Rather, political science is a practical, political, and dialogical activity in the sense that political scientists should listen to the voices of others in their own terms and offer reasonable public arguments for discussion among free and equal citizens reasoning together.67 Thus the problems political scientists should address are practical ones, not eternal, speculative, or theoretical problems such as identifying general and comprehensive rules and then how to apply them to particular cases. The third way in which political science is practical is evident when we examine what political scientists actually do. The discipline has a practical intent and outcome. As Taylor noted, unlike in the natural sciences, explanations in the human sciences can be accepted or rejected by the objects being studied (which are human subjects). The dialogical nature of explanation means that such explanations can alter their objects or can strengthen or weaken the practices on which they bear. In this way, political scientists actually modify or justify the practices they criticize or explain because the language they employ is accepted or



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rejected by their audience. Thus, political science is a kind of knowledge that can transform what it studies.68 So rather than looking for explicit rules or catch-all theories that presume to uniquely, comprehensively, and definitely explain diverse aspects, Tully invites us to examine on a case-by-case basis the particular practices of politics themselves, to pay close attention to the political actors engaged in them and notice what they are actually doing, to listen carefully to the words political agents ordinarily use to describe their experiences in their own terms (what they are saying and how), and to include these vocabularies of self-description in their explanations. And all of this is part of an overall practice of comparing differences as well as overall and detailed family resemblances. The culturally charitable, historically sensitive, dialogical practice of comparing similar and different aspects of texts, concepts, intellectual traditions, and forms of life is what Tully means when he uses the word “survey.” Wittgenstein’s Alternative Philosophy of “Dialogical Comparison and Contrast” An important aspect of the two famous aspectival, anti-essentialist arguments, to which Tully draws our attention, and which I have already mentioned, is that these practices of explanation and understanding, of using concepts and comparing different uses, “always takes place in dialogue with others who see things differently.” And Tully interprets Wittgenstein’s remarks in terms of this idea of dialogical comparison. “Understanding,” he writes, “like the Philosophical Investigations, is dialogical.” The point of Wittgenstein’s PI, and its key concepts like language-games, is to illustrate the “dialogical character of understanding,” which is to say that it is an activity that takes place “in conversations.” Tully cites PI, s. 122, as a condensed presentation of the two anti-essentialist lines of argument and as the place where Wittgenstein introduces his “alternative philosophy of the dialogical comparison and contrast of examples in actual cases,” or what Wittgenstein calls perspicuous representation. This approach is useful, Tully tells us, because it provides a way of understanding others without “comprehending” or translating what they say, that is, without redescribing it; instead, it is just one heuristic description among others “in the dialogue of humankind” and so is a way of fostering awareness of cultural diversity. It also constitutes a form of political realism because this

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is how understanding occurs “in the real world of overlapping, interacting and negotiated cultural diversity in which we speak, act and associate together.”69 Because this dialogical approach to explanation and understanding is so central to Tully’s argument, and because the concept of dialogue is such an important part of his vocabulary, it’s worthwhile to consider in more detail how Tully uses this term and how this approach differs from the monological orientation he rejects. This contrast is a lesson Tully learns in part from Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” and like Taylor and Skinner, Tully intentionally adopts the dialogical implications of those and many other remarks. He says “there is no question” that Wittgenstein intended his arguments to be used “to question the imperial and monological form of reasoning.”70 The Monological Approach to Explanation and Understanding Tully defines monologue as a style of moral and political reasoning exhibiting at least two related aspects, tendencies, or characteristics: imposition and definition. One of the tendencies of a monological orientation is that it is one-sided and elitist – an approach to explanation and understanding in which any speaker pre-emptively sets the terms of discussion or imposes a point of view without even trying to listen to what others are actually saying in particular cases. This tendency is typically evident among theorists, courts, and policy makers, who hand down “from on high” or “ram through” their “top-down” interpretations, explanations, decisions, solutions, statutes, rules, policies, programs, or institutions without any regard to diversity awareness, without democratic input from citizens, or by forcing citizens to deliberate within a range of already established languages or predetermined norms. Such political explanations and solutions to political problems are therefore experienced as “imposed rather than self-imposed.”71 This monological imposition is another way to describe the essentialist, non-aspectival approach I just talked about, in that it reflects the tendency to assign priority to a rule or general theory as the privileged and essential source of explanation. The imperative of this theoretical approach is to develop a general procedure or conceptual framework and determine how to apply it in particular cases. This privileging of a general theory is monological because it presumes that one need not listen to what people are saying in their own terms in actual cases. In this situation, what counts as a sound explanation necessarily comes from



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the correct application of the theory, and ignoring self-descriptions is a necessary requirement of explanation. A variant of this monological imposition is to begin by listening (or pretending to listen) to self-descriptions and then proceed in at least two ways to subvert or distort what others are trying to say. One way is to force the self-description and self-understanding into some universal principle, general theory, or meta-language, or – as Wittgenstein says – to fit what one has heard into a “preconceived idea to which reality must correspond.”72 This monological step is a practice of translating, redescribing, reinterpreting, or comprehending self-descriptions into preset, general, universal, transcendental, culturally invariant, implicit, comprehensive, or theoretical languages, categories, principles, norms, or rules “that any rational person would be compelled to accept.” Here, monologue masquerades as universal an inherently partial perspective of noticing or bringing to light “some aspects” of the phenomenon at the expense of disregarding or overlooking others.73 Another way that monologue can subvert self-descriptions is by critically adjudicating diverse vocabularies within dominant, conventional, pre-established criteria and norms. A monological approach is therefore effectively a practice in which the words and deeds of one side are explained and evaluated within the ready-made framework of the other.74 It is any contemptuous attitude towards particular cases that, either by deliberate design or by unintended happenstance, excludes from the explanatory framework a practice of genuine dialogue with others, because they are not allowed to speak for themselves, so the spoken voice is not genuinely the speaker’s but that of another hidden source, akin to that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.75 Or what they say is redescribed and unfairly adjudicated. Even if the aim is not imposition, another aspect of the monological orientation is finality-orientation, which can be called definition. This definitional tendency is apparent when it is assumed that the purpose of dialogue is similar to that of the Platonic exercise explored in chapter 3, which is to say it is a kind of conversation that rejects a priori the possibility of learning from particular examples, and thus another way of describing the non-aspectival approach discussed earlier. But more precisely, the definitional orientation is the view that the aim of a dialogue is to reach some kind of final immutable agreement, so that the goal is to search not just for some common definition that unites all the various particular examples and cases, but a definition that is authoritative and final – like a straightjacket. This is a practice based on the assumption

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that eventually conversations should stop, and can stop, and that we can and should accept the definitive or comprehensive rules, principles, norms, or solutions agreed or found in conversation or handed down from theorists, courts, and policy makers. This view accepts the existence of finality-oriented end states, and it presumes that after the conversations are finished, normal life can continue on with imposed or negotiated solutions.76 Dialogue: Listening, Speaking, Disagreeing The monological approach imposes and defines; the dialogical approach recognizes and negotiates forever, promoting explanations, understandings, and political solutions that are provisional and defeasible, which is to say always open to ongoing reconsideration. The word “dialogue” is used here in the comparative sense of “a willingness to exchange and negotiate alternative descriptions” with others “who see things differently.”77 In contrast to the monological forms of explanation and understanding, a dialogical approach is aspectival in that it accepts there is no explanation that can set forth the general, comprehensive, or essential features of the phenomenon at hand. So, comparative dialogue is an open attitude towards the particular case, an appreciation for what seems the less general, which is to say it reflects a suspicious attitude towards generalization. Dialogue entails resisting the craving for generality and instead exchanging reasons with others who see different aspects or who might be trained differently. And all this is based on the fact that reasonable disagreement is an ordinary, unavoidable feature of everyday life and therefore an inalienable civic freedom. I will discuss these aspects of comparative dialogue in the concluding section of this chapter. A dialogical orientation assumes that if our aim is to understand the meaning of actions, “we must listen” and “enter the conversation.” The key here is not just talking, but taking turns listening.78 Accordingly, following Skinner’s suggestion in Reason and Rhetoric, Tully adopts as the “ethical watchword” of his approach to dialogue the Roman motto audi alteram partem (always listen to the other side or the voices of the others) – a catchphrase he employs repeatedly throughout his work.79 Listening entails rejecting any kind of comprehensive rule, general theory, or meta-language that redescribes, comprehends, or represents what others are saying or that adjudicates and criticizes self-descriptions within preset criteria or norms. Tully calls on us to listen not only



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to what others say but also to “the way or language in which it is said.”80 With regard to listening to the voices of others in their own terms, Tully is careful to suggest an important nuance: the other can refer to those within one’s form of life or to those outside it who speak within their own cultural voice. We have a duty to listen to the voices of others because “there’s always more than one side to a case” and it is “always possible to speak on either side of the case,” and also because no theory can successfully or accurately provide a comprehensive understanding of such complex, diverse otherness. Since there is no methodological substitute for listening, we must “always consult those on the other side” to avoid misunderstanding the other point of view, or to avoid entanglement in a partial point of view with pretensions to the universal. As Tully puts it in his usual Wittgensteinian fashion, it is “always necessary to enter into a dialogue with interlocutors from other regions of the city, to listen to their ‘further descriptions’ and to come to recognise the aspects of the phenomenon in question that they bring to light, aspects which go unnoticed from one’s own familiar set of examples.”81 Tully describes this dialogical approach as post-imperial and as a rejection of the “imperial habit” of imposing interpretations, traditions, rules, and institutions on others. The dialogical approach also replaces the tendency of imperial ventriloquism, in which the subaltern voice is replaced by the colonial speaker’s voice in disguise. This post-imperial dialogue is a practice of intercultural conversation that enables us to see things from “a multiplicity of paths,” to see different aspects of the phenomenon in question, “to see and understand aspectivally,” and thereby fosters diversity awareness. The test of such dialogical awareness and understanding is an ability and willingness to listen, to change perspectives and perhaps oneself, or to conduct one’s life differently in light of what one has heard or what one learns about others.82 The premise here is that this kind of dialogue is just. Just dialogue, then, is based on a distinction between imposition and recognition; 83 it entails a disposition to listen to culturally diverse voices and acknowledge them in their own terms and traditions, mutually recognizing distinct ways of speaking and action. This is an ongoing postimperial dialogue that learns from examples and that avoids redescribing others by some general theory, or meta-language. Parti­ cipants strive for intersubjective understanding in a way that does not presuppose any kind of comprehensive language; “the interlocutors participate in their diverse cultural forms.”84 And so the concepts of dialogue, recognition, and post-imperialism are related.

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Contemporary Political Struggles Among the principle ways Tully mobilizes this contrast between monologue and dialogue is by explaining contemporary local and global political struggles over social justice, the environment, and imperialism, with particular attention to diverse struggles over recognition and distribution. His understanding of democratic and civic struggles is shaped by the two anti-essentialist arguments discussed earlier, which is to say he uses a Wittgensteinian aspectival and comparative dialogical approach to explain, understand, and conciliate political struggles. Because his approach is aspectival, he accepts the irreducible plurality of such political practices, but their diverse aspects are neither incommensurable nor incomparable. He sees dialogue at the centre of such struggles, which thereby are contested and open to ongoing negotiation, and not immune to periodic and defeasible reconciliation. Tully’s approach sees not uniformity but the tangled diversity of political struggles and the agents engaged in them. When he describes forms of life as “diverse,” he means they are overlapping, interdependent, interacting, open, negotiated, and continuously contested, imagined, reimagined, transformed, and negotiated over time rather than separate, closed, “internally homogeneous,” bounded, or internally uniform. Elsewhere he describes these as hybridized identities simultaneously negotiating within, among, and between themselves.85 Because they are aspectival, not essential, he is committed to a historically sensitive survey approach to understand the diversity of political forms of life. This is why he explains political struggles in terms of their variegated particularities and not by way of theories or generalizations. Because of this overlap, interaction, and negotiation of cultures, Tully uses the PI, s. 203, metaphor to refer to the politics of recognition as a “labyrinth.”86 In the course of his writings, the question of what exactly constitutes a political struggle went through what Tully calls an improvement, which entailed wider application. In Strange Multiplicity, he surveys nationalist, linguistic, ethnic, feminist, multicultural/intercultural, and Aboriginal/ anti-colonial struggles, or the politics of recognition in the narrower sense of identity politics. He refines this approach in his later writings by considering a broader range of political struggles, and he articulates more nuanced and complex meanings of such struggles. In these later writings, he begins to describe political struggles not simply as contests over ethnocultural identities but as contests over intersubjective norms,



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by which he means laws, rules, conventions, or customs that are social, cultural, legal, political, and constitutional.87 In a number of respects, this amounts to a deliberate move towards a more robust, complicated, nonethnocultural, informal, and “glocal” understanding of the concept of recognition, civic citizenship, and civic contestation. For example, he describes mutual recognition norms as a constituent feature of “any rule-governed cooperation” – in other words, any system of governance, not just of formal political systems such as cities, provinces, or states but also of schools, bureaucracies, and markets, for example.88 And this points to a broader understanding of political forms of life and their ongoing movements to “civicize,” democratize, mobilize, deimperialize, network, and act otherwise. Rather than adopt a narrow definition of identity, understood exclusively in terms of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, or religious modes of recognition, he reminds us there are other multifarious overlapping aspects to identity-related struggles over diverse forms of recognition, distribution, social justice, the environment, and anti-imperialism.89 An important aspect of such contests over norms, to which Tully devotes particular emphasis, is that they always have redistributive dimensions and that distribution struggles are always already over recognition.90 This differs from other forms of analysis that see the concepts of recognition and distribution as restricted, analytically distinct, general, rhetorically opposed, or universal.91 Instead, recognition and distribution are “aspects of political struggles, rather than distinct types of struggle,” and the two aspects may coexist. So he argues that what is required for a proper political explanation is a kind analysis that is capable of studying political struggles “under both aspects.” Tully’s approach offers such analytical complexity. It permits the view that both distribution and recognition may be present, and it allows us to see that citizens engaged in various kinds of political struggles may “place more emphasis on one aspect than another at specific times”; equally important, “political scientists and theorists may do the same.”92 Another refinement in Tully’s argument, one that he developed after Strange Multiplicity, is that he draws a sharper contrast between two distinct approaches to explaining and understanding recognition claims and conflicts: a theoretical struggle for, and a political struggle of or over.93 The theoretical approach starts from a monological perspective of evaluating a recognition claim in abstraction from the context in which it is raised. And this perspective sees recognition contests as finality-oriented, dyadic struggles for recognition, aimed primarily at definitive, once-and-for-all, end states of justice, equality, democracy, or

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formal accommodation. In contrast, a political approach focuses on the context in which the struggle arises, and it sees recognition conflicts as agonistic, activity-oriented, multiple, intersubjective, and flexible, as struggles over norms, and as governed by open-ended, dialogical, public reasoning. Because recognition norms change over the course of dialogue, any potential solutions are always imperfect, partial, and open to revision.94 Because of this flexibility, Tully proposes that we think of such contested politics as struggles over “mutual disclosure” and “acknowledgment” rather than recognition, which carries connotations of finality.95 On this agonistic, activity-oriented view, actual engagement in ongoing, endless public dialogues constitutes and sustains our identities as free citizens. This freedom is not the “mere possession of constitutional rights and duties” or agreements about shared goods, values, or principles; rather, it entails genuinely participating in open-ended public contestation and dialogical negotiation.96 The repertoire of participation ranges from such practices as having a say over how and by whom political power is exercised, discussing and modifying prevailing norms, striving for and responding to forms of mutual recognition, and even just making public displays. What is important here is not necessarily a successful or tangible outcome. Even if the recognition demanded is denied, or the results are less than perfect, the very activity “is an intrinsic public good of modern politics” and the struggle is an achievement in itself, particularly for those involved. Moreover, the freedom to participate in public dialogues and negotiations fosters legitimacy, stability, belonging, and identification within the polity, thereby dispelling the ressentiment that could lead to violence.97 The First Nations: Constitutionalism as “Activity of Intercultural Dialogue” Because they are exemplary, which is to say particularly enlightening cases of the phenomenon of the politics of recognition, Strange Multiplicity focuses specifically on the struggles of First Nations for constitutional accommodation. A central argument of the book is that constitutionalism should be seen from the perspective of Aboriginal peoples’ struggles because this reveals “unnoticed aspects” of the history and current limitations of constitutionalism.98 Strange Multiplicity, then, examines the history of constitutionalism by listening to the voices of Aboriginal peoples, and it details how these voices were either



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ignored or redescribed and unjustly adjudicated; in this way, Tully offers specific cases of how monologue manifests itself when imperialism’s norms are imposed. The book’s central question, one that Tully considers “one of the most difficult” in contemporary politics, is whether a constitution can recognize and accommodate cultural diversity. His answer is that it can, if it is seen as an activity of “intercultural dialogue” in which culturally diverse citizens negotiate over time and in accordance with three dialogical conventions: mutual recognition, consent, and continuity.99 Provided that those conventions guide constitutional negotiations over recognition and accommodation, the results will be just. So these dialogical constitutional conventions offer a way of doing philosophy and reaching mutual understanding in a way that is fit for a “post-imperial age.”100 As Dale Turner observes, the first step – and the most important, difficult, and complex of the three – is mutual recognition, which requires a willingness to listen to the voices of others in their own terms.101 According to this step, a just constitution cannot eliminate, overcome, transcend, exclude, assimilate, or exterminate the cultural dimension of politics; rather, it must begin with the full dialogical recognition of different cultures, and this includes a willingness to accommodate cultures within a variety of constitutional forms.102 Justice, in other words, requires dialogue. And dialogue, as I will explain further, implies the civic freedom to disagree. Tully’s book begins by examining how an empire of uniformity began to hold contemporary constitutionalism captive because it lay within our dominant “modern” language. He compares that language to another language, a dissimilar and subordinate one connected to other non-European languages of constitutionalism. The two dissimilar languages, which comprise the history of contemporary constitutionalism, emerged in response to the question of cultural recognition.103 Tully is critical of this modern language and its liberal, nationalist, and communitarian traditions of interpretation because theorists of these authoritative schools redescribe and adjudicate recognition claims within their prevailing norms of constitutional recognition. In so doing they “overlook, exclude, and assimilate” cultural differences and justify uniformity in different ways.104 His critical remarks are directed at the conservative and progressive variations of these schools. The conservative response is problematic because it maintains that cultural demands for recognition are a threat to constitutional association, the proper response to that threat being “to assimilate, integrate, or transcend, rather than recognise and affirm, cultural diversity.” But the more

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progressive response does not escape the monological tendencies, in that its response has been “to comprehend” such demands within the prevailing norms. Whether conservative or progressive, one of the “deep-seated conventions of modern constitutionalism” is the imperial monological imposition of norms, not their dialogical recognition and negotiation.105 Tully rejects the modern language, but he also distances himself from three non-authoritative schools of constitutional interpretation that have arisen in response to it, namely, postmodernism, cultural feminism, and interculturalism. The response from these non-authoritative schools is that there’s no possible way the norms of the three authoritative traditions can ever do justice to recognition demands because such demands challenge the hegemony of these schools and their shared language, with its European, male, and imperial bias.106 But Tully disagrees with these positions as well. The composite, contemporary language of constitutional thought and practice does not need to be either blindly defended against any identity claim or blindly rejected for its prejudices. Rather, if it is reconceived in dialogical terms, it can be amended to do justice to the demands for cultural recognition.107 So Tully turns to a “common” language that has been hidden and elbowed aside by the modern one, and he surveys its three dialogical constitutional conventions (recognition, consent, continuity). These conventions are not political theories, but they are evident in various historical examples of political contestation and articulated in numerous sources. One of Tully’s favourites is the myth of Antigone, who represents the intercultural “crossing of native and newcomer cultures,” who defends custom against the imposed constitutional order and its presumed universal standards, and who pleads for recognition.108 Tully also looks to legal sources, such as the writings and constitutional arrangements of agents of justice who “sought to come to terms with powerful, nonEuropean cultures, immigrants, women and linguistic and national minorities fighting for cultural survival.” He also looks to the applications of constitutional law in particular cases, especially in the common law of Commonwealth countries and in international law.109 The “most spectacular” example Tully offers of dialogical constitutionalism is treaty constitutionalism, by means of which Crown negotiators recognized Aboriginal peoples as equal, self-governing nations. They did not redescribe them; they “simply listened,” and the Aboriginals reciprocated, as it was their tradition to do. This led to two remarkable constitutional frameworks: the Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763, and US



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Chief Justice J. Marshall’s decision in Worcester vs State of Georgia in 1832.110 Tully is not saying that dialogical constitutionalism is a thing of the past. He also praises some current examples, particularly multinational federalism and the newer field of legal pluralism. Of course, the most important modern-day examples Tully cites, and the best examples by far, are found in the writings of Wittgenstein, which I have already discussed, and in The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, to which I now turn. His point is that this Haida artwork is an invitation to engage in a kind of dialogue that has strong family resemblances to Wittgenstein’s approach (as well as to the other historical examples) in that it is designed “to awaken and stimulate this dialogical capacity for diversity awareness.” And the kind of awareness Wittgenstein and Haida Gwaii foster is both local and global: by “speaking and listening in turn,” we “gradually become mutually aware of the cultural diversity that ought to be recognised and accommodated in the global family of constitutions and cultures.”111 The Black Canoe: A Symbol of Strange Multiplicity and Intercultural Dialogue As symbols of the spirit of democratic constitutional dialogue (or multilogue) of mutual recognition, and of the post-imperial age of cultural diversity, Tully considers a work by Bill Reid, the renowned artist of Haida and Scottish ancestry. Reid’s magnificent sculpture, The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, is an excellent example of what Tully argues throughout the book. The sculpture is a black bronze canoe, but the members of this canoe are not “all teachers and all students” or “all elders and all children,” as Cavell’s metaphor insists.112 Rather, this is a “strange multiplicity of cultural diversity that existed millennia ago, and wants to be again.”113 This beautiful sculpture awakens and stimulates diversity awareness in a host of ways. The observer, for example, cannot see the sculpture from one definitive or comprehensive point of view or vantage point but can only see the endless aspects of its particular interrelations. As we gaze at the sculpture we become aware that the members of the canoe themselves are a squabbling diversity in the sense that they are an overlapping, interacting, intercultural motley who are questioning and contesting their identities in conversation and negotiation. Tully notes that all the passengers are vying for dialogical recognition in their own way, exchanging stories and claims without allowing any speaker to “set the terms of the discussion.” The passengers themselves

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all have the civic ability “to see and understand aspectivally” because they can see their association from “from a multiplicity of paths”; and by listening to the different stories, and giving their own in exchange, they come to see their common and interwoven histories together. In this way, they acquire the ability to change perspectives through “their participation in the intercultural dialogue itself.”114 A Genuinely Wittgensteinian Political Philosophy? An unquestioned assumption held by most Wittgenstein commentators is that he did not write about politics. I myself began chapter 1 of this book by reiterating that very contention. It is in taking that for granted that all along we have been talking about the implications of his remarks, or their influence, or their relevance for the study of politics. However, when we turn to Tully’s analysis in Strange Multiplicity, we find a very different claim being made, one that might counter the opening statement in chapter 1. That’s because the dialogical conventions of recognition, continuity, and consent that Tully surveys, the conventions he finds in The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, are also seen in an image of constitutionalism expressed in Wittgenstein’s PI, specifically the remark in s. 18 comparing language to an ancient city.115 It is here that Tully suggests a strikingly innovative interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks, one that might counter the assumption that Wittgenstein did not write about politics. Tully’s point is that when we examine what Wittgenstein is actually saying in PI, s. 18, and when we understand his words in the practical context of his two homes in Vienna and Cambridge, we find that he did in fact write about politics and did have something positive to say. That’s because the s. 18 remark is a metaphor for the constitution of a diverse city. According to Tully, the illocutionary act Wittgenstein is performing here is to commend a kind of nonuniform, overlapping, diverse constitutional arrangement. So Tully sheds light on how both The Spirit of Haida Gwaii and Wittgenstein’s remarks evoke an immensely flexible, diverse, and democratic vision of identity as well as cross-cultural constitutional dialogue. They teach us that even though recognition is never definitive or eternally fixed, periodic forms of recognition are nevertheless possible. This explains Tully’s remark that a constitution can be “both the foundation of democracy” and at the same time “subject to democratic discussion and change in practice.”116 He accepts the possibility of poli­tical foundations – particularly the idea that a constitution



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can be foundational – as long as the foundation metaphor is understood as an ongoing, defeasible, democratic project of perspicuity. So Tully is not against foundations, as long as this is seen in diverse and provisional terms. So he writes that his approach is “neither antifoundational nor unifoundational” but rather “multi-foundational.”117 And this is true to Wittgenstein’s remark that he is interested in “having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.”118 Ongoing Constitutional Dialogue My point has been to examine Tully’s Wittgensteinian perspective and its strong family resemblance to Reid’s The Spirit of Haida Gwaii. With particular help from Wittgenstein and Reid, Tully’s dialogical approach avoids scepticism on the one hand and culturally blind or invariant forms of explanation and understanding on the other. On this view, forms of life are overlapping, interdependent, open, negotiated, contested, flexible, and practical rather than fixed, uniform, or ruled by culturally invariant or monological approaches. What all these approaches have in common is their suggestion that the ability to see different aspects, to change perspectives, is acquired through participation in the dialogical activity itself. These philosophical traditions have positive influence on the study of politics, at least for Tully, because they shape his understanding of what it is to have a just constitution. Unlike modern theories of constitutionalism, the aim of dialogue is not universal principles, or procedurally neutral rules, or the creation of a political association united by definitive or non-negotiable principles. On Tully’s view, the point of dialogue is not to reach some comprehensive agreement. Now it’s important to qualify this, because Tully is obviously not against people agreeing with one another. What he criticizes is the idea that any agreement, even one reached in dialogue, can be so comprehensive and exclusive that it can somehow end democratic discussion.119 What Tully objects to, then, is the “Platonic image” of a foundational agreement or institution that is definitive, final, fixed, and necessarily universal, comprehensive, and exclusive for political concepts and for their application in particular cases. The notion of a fixed and definitive universal agreement contrasts with the Aboriginal and common law view Tully prefers, because according to these traditions, agreement is one link in an endless chain and the link is “always open to review and renegotiation in a future dialogue if it is not as fitting as

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it appeared at the time.” To use an analogy from labour relations, he is describing something like a collective agreement that is tentatively agreed, ratified by both sides, and always up for periodic renegotiation. Whatever the analogy, Tully’s point is that ongoing, periodic review, reflection, or renegotiation “is a necessary ingredient of a healthy and untarnished association.”120 Public Philosophy In subsequent writings, including the two-volume Public Philosophy in a New Key (hereafter PPNK, a collection of the best of Tully’s essays written between 1999 and 2008), Tully reaffirms his commitment to the aspectival/anti-essential, comparative, non-final, dialogical Wittgensteinian orientation he established in earlier writings. He tells us that the approach he favours draws inspiration from Wittgenstein, Austin, Foucault, and “the Cambridge school” – particularly Skinner, who developed speech-act theory into a historically sensitive and contextual activity that involves exchanging reasons and justifications, which is to say ”reason and rhetoric, conviction and persuasion.”121 To be sure, throughout the text, Tully acknowledges many other sources as well, some of whom I will mention and discuss. But my principal goal is to continue to follow Wittgenstein’s influence on the themes of comparison and dialogue, which are among the most visible threads woven into the fabric of these publications. What is particularly noteworthy is that Tully spells out even more perspicuously the implications his approach has for the study of politics, whether it is called political science, political theory, or political philosophy. Since there are countless ways of studying politics, and no universal or definitive criteria for adjudicating this diversity, the activity of studying politics constitutes “an open-ended dialogue.”122 Keeping this in mind, his preferred way of studying politics is what he calls public philosophy, an approach that draws inspiration from a diverse and eclectic group of political theorists and public philosophers, from whom he develops a robust conception of civic citizenship and freedom.123 This practice-based, critical, and historical method answers “the first question for political philosophy today,” similarly posed in Strange Multiplicity: “How do we attend to the strange multiplicity of political voices and activities without distorting or disqualifying them in the very way we approach them?”124 The answer is to “enter into dialogues” and “enter into relations of mutual learning” with a wider audience of fellow citizens who are



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engaged in democratic struggles against various forms of injustice and oppression. This requires a flexible, defeasible “language of provisional description,” which is part of an approach that bridges academic research and public affairs – hence the term “public philosophy.” On this view, every reflective civic activist and every engaged citizen is a public philosopher, and every civic-minded academic and every academic public philosopher is a fellow citizen.125 This goal of seeking ongoing open-ended conversations with the broader audience of democratic citizens engaged in civic struggles is a central theme of PPNK.126 Tully begins by suggesting four reasons why political scientists are tempted to avoid such conversations and instead adopt elitist methods that stop them from seeing their work as “a discussion with their fellow citizens” as equals, and thereby putatively elevate them “above the demos.” The answer is that those who study politics are held captive by an inexorable craving for generality that is simultaneously connected to an insidious contempt – one could say allergy – towards ordinary particular cases. This craving and contempt takes many forms, stemming from the scholars’ elitist presumption that they see and know more than ordinary citizens do. They tell themselves that with their research expertise, they alone are equipped with the special superpowers to accurately understand and explain the secret hidden mysteries of the human condition that mere mortals are incapable of grasping on their own if at all. This orientation – what Tully calls their “presumptive elevation” – is based on adopting very particular preconceived ideas, masquerading as general theories, about the real foundations of politics: there are causal processes, or universal normative principles, or background norms and goods, or canonical institutional preconditions that act behind the backs of citizens or that determine how they act, or that are implicit in our practices, or that provide foundations of democratic activity. Political scientists see their essential role as one of studying these theoretical, mysterious, sometimes hidden conditions; the consequence is that those who study politics do not see their work as a civic-minded dialogue and instead disengage from their equal fellow citizens. To reiterate Wittgenstein, they presume that their task consists in having to uncover phenomena that are hard to get a hold of rather than the phenomena of the everyday. Tully’s aim is to reject “each pillar” of this elite political science because these monological methods are inherently and fundamentally flawed. Mesmerized and entangled in their generalities, those who follow these methods fail to notice the most important aspects, which are

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already in plain view. Disengaging from “the everyday activities of democratic citizens” amounts to disconnecting from political reality. And the results of that include not just varieties of academic paternalism and methodological imposition, but overall misunderstanding and confusion. So one of Tully’s stated goals is to bring political science back to everyday life – back to reality – by embedding it in the ordinary, grassroots, daily activities and practices of democracy and thereby rendering it a situated public philosophy “in conversation” with fellow citizens.127 And he reminds us that this practice-based approach learns from the teaching of Wittgenstein, as well as Marx and Foucault, whom he calls “the great philosophers of practice.”128 Rorty, Cavell, and Scepticism That political theory must avoid monological elitism is a “revolutionary insight” that Tully associates with Rorty, and he credits Cavell with lessons from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House about listening to others, not prejudging them, and not disqualifying their voices.129 While these acknowledgments are important and not to be ignored, the significance of these philosophers and any similarities to which Tully draws attention should be neither exaggerated nor misunderstood. One should not lose sight of important differences between Tully’s approach and the philosophical orientations of Rorty and Cavell, especially their sceptical inclinations, their therapeutic readings of Wittgenstein, and particularly the primacy each attaches to contingency.130 Unlike Cavell, Tully nowhere endorses the truth of scepticism, and he does not share Rorty’s penchant for causality, his proclivity for behavioural explanations, and certainly not the priority he places on historical accident, unintended circumstance, and habit over good reasons and persuasion. On the contrary, recognition, solidarity, diversity awareness, and non-violent conflict resolution are not contingent by-products but the potential outcomes of deliberate practices of fairly exchanging reasons and justifications with others, or, as he aptly puts it, reason and rhetoric, conviction and persuasion. Tully nowhere suggests there is no truth, or no fact of the matter. His position simply takes reality and truth for granted and goes on to a more complex problem, which is that these are things over which we will inevitably disagree. The question is not whether there is truth, but how we deal with inevitable disagreements over the truth – something that I will discuss further in a moment. For now, my point is that it would be a mistake to misunderstand Tully’s very



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generous and considerate way of giving academic credit to Rorty and Cavell and to downplay his considerable differences with their sceptical philosophy. These differences become clearer when we remind ourselves why Tully mobilizes Wittgenstein’s method (what Skinner would call his intentions, or what he is doing in writing) and when we pay close attention to the specific non-sceptical characteristics of public philosophy as a critical activity. As far as his Wittgensteinanism is concerned, I have already explained the dialogical and non-sceptical features of perspicuous representation. Recall that the starting point of the survey method is not radical continuing doubt, but an exercise of comparison and contrast, of negotiation and persuasion, which includes listening and exchanging reasons. And the goal of this method is not the therapeutic practice of merely detecting nonsense and finitude, or calling into question the practice of philosophy, or exposing for its own sake the sheer contingency of our humanity, or arriving at ironic conclusions. And he tells us his approach is not a type of political theory but practical theory, because its aim is not to develop a normative theory (of justice, equality, or democracy, for example). Rather, Tully uses the survey as a specific genre of critique, one that he typically mobilizes in a devastating fashion to categorically reject all manner of tyranny, oppression, injustice, and genocide. And he criticizes such politically degenerate, morally reprehensible practices and ways of thinking by comparing and contrasting them not just with possible alternatives but with other actual ways of thinking and acting, of governing and being governed. The aim of this “critical attitude” is to disclose the “conditions of possibility” of our present problems in a way that encourages transformation.131 So it is no surprise that in explicating the details of his method, Tully does not hesitate to draw inspiration from a long tradition of radical political philosophers who include Marx, Goldman, Gramsci, Gandhi, Foucault, Said, and Chomsky. Tully’s approach could therefore be seen as a cure for the craving for generality, but it is not merely a therapy in the sceptical sense against metaphysical foundations, and its political implications are not merely to disclose the ironic or contingent. Instead, it acknowledges that comparative dialogue can offer real solutions, albeit imperfect and provisional, to conflicting political demands. Tully also points to compelling resemblances with Charles Taylor’s arguments on the centrality of practical dialogue in struggles over recognition. He emphasizes that they share a way of interpreting the activity of recognition “as an ongoing dialogue of negotiating reciprocal

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acknowledgement.” And he singles out Taylor’s Sources of the Self as a particularly influential illustration of his own critical, historical, and dialogical method.132 There are indeed a number of significant family resemblances between these two authors – their emphasis on the priority of practice, on irreducible diversity, and on the possibility of periodic reconciliation – and these resemblances are particularly evident in the way they employ dialogical approaches to explain political struggles. Both describe these struggles as ongoing dialogical actions that cannot be explained monologically, and both suggest that a form of comparative dialogue is the most promising way to reconcile their diverse contested demands.133 I would like to mention another significant family resemblance between the approaches of Tully and Taylor, and something I pointed to earlier, which is that democratic dialogue is not something they say should happen. Rather, they insist that dialogical negotiation is something that already constitutes and underpins the everyday real world of politics – another world of dialogue is not just possible, it’s actual.134 Because political practices are dialogical, political explanations must also be, since disengaging from conversation and relying on theories will result in partial explanations that mask ethnocentrism or disconnect from reality. If the aim is genuinely to understand actual struggles, the political theorist’s necessary role is to talk with those participating, not just about them. In this way, both argue that dialogue is fundamental to explanation and understanding. So, dialogue is not something Tully and Taylor just talk about; it significantly shapes their political practices. Neither presumes to be a disengaged political scientist setting the terms of debate. Instead, Taylor speaks as a public intellectual actively participating in the politics of Canada and his own Quebec nation. An example, one that illustrates practical dialogue, occurred when Taylor entered into direct discussions with Quebec citizens in the remarkable open forum he co-chaired, the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (CCAPRCD).135 Similarly, Tully talks with those struggling over recognition, listening carefully to their stories and myths and including their self-descriptions and forms of self-expression within his explanations. Likewise, Tully does not limit his conversations to experts at academic forums, but actively participates in public discussions, like Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and thereby engages in direct negotiation with those who are struggling. Of course the key to Tully’s critical, historical, dialogical approach, and what he frequently credits as a principal influence, is Skinner’s



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pioneering historiography, for example, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which Tully calls the “classic example” of the type of historical survey he pursues.136 In fact, Tully mobilizes two refinements developed by Skinner concerning Wittgenstein’s famous antiessentialist method: the first is a critical survey of practical struggles, and the second is the use of historical survey or genealogy, which is to say “a dialogue of comparative evaluation.” With the first form of survey, political theorists reflect on or disclose the complex context, or constitutive conditions, or unexamined conventions, in which the author is situated. But this context is not an austere conventionalism. Through comparison and contrast, political theorists have the freedom raise certain questions and to criticize and evaluate practices and conventions, so that there is a certain room for manoeuvre to call into question the limits of our conditions. This is the role of the historical survey, which enables us to think and act differently, and Tully reminds us that this critical approach is a “dialogical technique.”137 So, four dialogical aspects characterize public philosophy as a critical activity: it does not develop normative theories as solutions to contests over governance, but seeks to test and disclose conditions of possible self-understanding and political transformation; it grants primacy to irreducibly plural, contested practices; it employs the comparative method of critical and historical survey and provisional description to criticize and evaluate languages and practices; and it rejects finalityoriented solutions to political struggles and instead pursues ongoing, inclusive, and dialogical negotiation and reconciliation with the wider audience of engaged citizens.138 Perspicuous Representation or Normative Theory? I have been discussing Tully’s critical public philosophy, how this approach resembles Wittgenstein’s method of perspicuous representation, its similarities to the approaches of Skinner and Taylor, and its differences from Cavell and Rorty. I want to consider how his way of contrasting normative theory with his preferred method of perspicuous representation has generated some confusion. For example, Deveaux claims that Tully’s dialogical approach is too formal and that it is part of a deliberative tradition that aims at “normative consensus.”139 McCarthy concurs that Tully “operates within a normative framework that is no less general in its reach than those of Rawls, Habermas and other neo-Kantians.”140 On the other hand, Maclure and

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Forst both suggest it is not normative enough, or more accurately, that Tully’s critique will not admit its own real normative foundations and commitments.141 These criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of perspicuous representation and the place normative theories have in this approach. If we understand properly Tully’s Wittgensteinian orientation, we can see why these commentators are mistaken. My reply is to remind them that Tully’s method does not stop us from ever drawing theoretical boundaries, nor does it completely deny normative generalizations, and that it does not compel us, as Forst suggests, to steer clear of strong normative conceptions of justice, rights, freedom, and reason. On the contrary, we are free to do so for specific purposes and as long as we recognize the provisional, aspectival limits of our theories and concepts. “Of course,” Tully writes, “we can always construct a theory or generalization if we wish as long as we remember that it serves the limited and heuristic purpose of throwing light on a small number of features of the phenomenon at the expense of obscuring all others.”142 Because this qualification is so important yet neglected by these critics, it is worthwhile to explore in more detail this aspect of Tully’s method, namely, his claims about normative theory. Since Maclure’s interpretation constitutes a particularly clear illustration of misunderstanding, I will devote some attention to his construal, and propose two correctives: one concerns the idea of normative judgments, the other has to do with how Tully reads Wittgenstein. Maclure is confused as to why Tully does not include among the range of critical research he advocates “the task of designing normative theories or of working out more specific normative judgments.”143 He claims there is no “epistemic incompatibility” between the two approaches of perspicuous representation and normative theory, which I take to mean that they are compatible in the way they study, know, or explain phenomena. But to defend this claim, Maclure would have to explain how comparing ordinary use is compatible with ignoring ordinary use and instead “working out fully-fledged theories.”144 He would need to explain how craving generality (and having contempt for what is particular) is epistemically compatible with learning from particular examples, or how the application of a universal rule to particular cases is compatible with comparing and contrasting the particular cases themselves. Maclure would need to explain why we should not listen to the other side even if it is reasonable, or why we should not have the freedom to disagree with theorists, courts, or policy makers.



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Now, one way to justify these things, and such explanations, would be to redefine normative theory in a way that makes it less definitive or general, and more provisional and particular. This seems to be Maclure’s point when he suggests that “putting forward more specific normative recommendations” is compatible with perspicuous representation.145 What Maclure doesn’t see is that what he is suggesting is not just compatible with perspicuous representation; he is actually describing the Wittgensteinian method. That is, he is alluding to precisely the argument Wittgenstein makes in PI that Tully adopts as his own. Tully’s argument all along is that we can draw boundaries for specific practical purposes, and that we can even give interpretations or justifications if we want, but only for specific purposes – for example, to avert a misunderstanding. So it is a mischaracterization to claim that Tully says “civic dialogues” should “replace” the “legislative and judicial decision making” or have primacy over elected representatives and policy makers.146 Maclure misses this important aspect of drawing boundaries for specific purposes, which leads him to describe his cases erroneously as counter-examples to perspicuous representation rather than affirmations. In those particular cases Maclure cites, the judicial and legislative “normative recommendations” he proposes serve very specific purposes. Tully’s point is that those same norms may be inappropriate outside of the purposes they serve. So rather than being an alternative approach to perspicuous representation, Maclure’s practice of comparing examples and proposing particular norms is itself an example of perspicuous representation. So contrary to Maclure’s assertion, Tully has no difficulty advocating normative critical judgments. Recognizing the role of boundaries, foundations, reasons, and norms allows Tully to avoid the various non-realist and sceptical tendencies, and the antinomies of objectivism and relativism, that prevail in academic discussion. And it is from a reading of Wittgenstein that he learns these lessons, which is the second aspect of Maclure’s analysis where he appears to misunderstand. Maclure claims that Tully is compelled to refrain from putting forward specific normative judgments and recommendations because it is not Wittgensteinian to do so.147 And so he associates Tully’s approach (and Wittgenstein’s) with a crudely non-realist position that political philosophy should “refrain from arguing that some answers” are “normatively superior than others.”148 My argument all along is that we do not need to read Wittgenstein (or Tully) in such non-realist terms. Tully’s non-vulgar Wittgensteinian position is that political theorists can argue that some answers are

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indeed normatively superior to others as long as this is understood in a provisional sense. Maclure is confused as to why Tully does not advocate designing normative theories or working out more specific normative judgments. But Tully actually does fully accept the idea that we can draw specific boundaries for purposes that are temporary and particular, which is to say aspectival rather than essential or general. So he does in fact advocate designing normative theories, descriptions, and judgments, as long as these descriptions are understood in provisional and defeasible terms. In this sense, norms and rules do have an important place in the study and practice of politics, and Wittgenstein’s approach is indeed capable of grounding normative judgments. So, a more nuanced construal of Tully’s method of perspicuous representation is that it includes a recognition of the limits of dialogue. Tully concedes there are cases when the conversation might be momentarily suspended so as to adopt reasonable non-negotiated solutions, but these solutions are always corrigible. This justifies the occasional need for imperfect mechanisms of non-partisan adjudication, mediation, or dispute settlement such as arbitrators, courts, parliaments, referenda, and international human rights regimes, in order to temporarily resolve reasonable disagreements.149 In the remainder of this chapter, I spell out this latter point in more detail, because it further illustrates why Tully’s position is so different from that of the therapeutic sceptical Wittgensteinians. On his view, comparative dialogue actually mediates and reconciles differences. Mediation and Reconciliation Throughout this chapter I have been reviewing Tully’s Wittgensteinian approach and its dialogical turn, which is based on “the reality of irreducible reasonable disagreement” and ineliminable “reasonable dissent.”150 A central theme of my argument is that Tully’s defence of diversity and ongoing contest against end-state approaches does not render his position either therapeutic or sceptical. All along I have alluded to an important reason why this dialogical activity is distinctly non-sceptical, namely, its emphasis on the possibility of reconciliation – which is to say, of resolving conflicts by way of “inclusive and dialogical practices of negotiation.”151 In the real world of politics, varieties of dispute settlement, mediation, recognition, mutual understanding, conviviality, and solidarity are not logically impossible goals, but actual ones. “The reason it is possible to understand one another in intercultural



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conversation,” Tully reminds us, “is because this is what we do all the time in culturally diverse societies to some extent.” The way to reconcile political disputes so as to promote peace and non-violent conflict resolution is to abandon the unrealistic ideal of reaching a final agreement – or getting any kind of consensus or unity, for that matter. Instead, accept the fact that disagreement is neither a failure nor a weakness of a just democracy, but its very definition and therefore a normal, ordinary aspect of everyday political reality. Accordingly, if our aims are peace and understanding, then negotiation cannot be avoided, and whatever kinds of political reconciliation, compromises, or solutions ensue are always partial and revisable. Tully compares this periodic reflection and reconciliation with the Mohawk practice of “repolishing the chain.” Agreements reached in dialogue are not definitive, universal, or fixed, but provisional, flexible, and open. Understanding is something we get by participating in dialogue, the “everyday mastery of the criss-crossing, overlapping and contested uses of terms” and the back-and-forth negotiations among those who are willing to talk and listen.152 All of this amounts to a formidable argument in defence of liberty. To be more precise, the emphasis on practice, agonism, provisional description, and interminable public dialogues and negotiations is an orientation towards “dialogical civic freedom,” and this is an orientation towards “freedom before justice.”153 This dialogical civic freedom is more than the activity of speaking out against tyranny, oppression, and injustice; it is also the freedom to reasonably disagree. And this freedom is correlated with a duty on the part of the powerful “to listen to these voices and to respond with their reasons,” that is, “ to enter into an open dialogue governed by audi alteram partem.” If this duty to listen and respond is ignored, or if mutual dialogue is suppressed, “then civic freedom takes the many forms of civic dissent and disobedience to bring the powerful to the table.”154 Since reasonable disagreement is unavoidable, the primary path to reconciliation should not be a search for definitive and final procedures and solutions but rather the protection of the freedom to disagree.155 Because the freedom to disagree is inalienable, the primary aim of politics should be to protect this liberty and its implied civic duty, guarantee free unobstructed participation in practices of negotiation and persuasion, and foster reasonable disagreement over rival views. The possibility of non-violent reconciliation, however imperfect or flawed, has pervaded Tully’s writings since Strange Multiplicity. If our

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aim is to understand or peacefully avoid conflict, then negotiation and compromise are normal aspects of everyday political life. Tully honours and praises those who dare to cross boundaries, listen carefully, avoid redescription and prejudgment, and recognize and accommodate diversity. These are the true champions throughout his narrative: mythical figures like Antigone; philosophers as different as Descartes and Wittgenstein; negotiators like Deganawidah (the mediator of the Haudenosaunee Confederation in the fifteenth century) as well as Gisday Wa and Delgam Uukw of the Gitskan and Wet’suwet’en nations; jurists like Matthew Hale, John Marshall, and Thomas-JeanJacques Loranger; and political dissidents like Vaclav Havel.156 Of course the exemplar, the one who stands in the centre of Bill Reid’s canoe, is Kilstlaai. If there is a principal hero, it is this enigmatic peacemaker, whose identity is uncertain until the end of Strange Multiplicity, when Tully reveals that “she or he is the mediator.”157 Throughout PPNK, Tully praises this goal of dialogical reconciliation in reply to “the first question” of political science. His compelling answer begins with a duty to listen. Conclusion In the writings of James Tully we find an employment of Wittgenstein’s remarks that is very different from the tradition exemplified by the therapeutic sceptical interpretation. We find a reading that is neither conservative, nor negative, nor contingent, and perhaps most important, we find an attempt to articulate an authentic Wittgensteinian political philosophy. In this respect, Tully is among a select group of commentators to recognize that Wittgenstein did indeed have something positive to say about politics. On this reading, as in the earlier case studies, we learn not just by being trained or conditioned into a form of life, but also in comparative dialogue with those inside and outside our forms of life. We can know and understand others if we begin this effort not with Cavell’s argument by analogy or with having a conversation of justice, but by listening to what others are actually saying. Listening grounds civic freedom and is a civic duty. With this approach, the absence of a culturally invariant theory, or a framework of description, does not prevent intercultural understanding or imprison us in a world of contingency. It does not render impossible our ability to offer explanations or interpretations, or to criticize our own forms of life, or to judge the political practices of others, or to



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compare our way of life with others, as long as these are always open to revision and renegotiation. So political solutions are always negotiable, revisable, and provisional, and political explanations are always particular, partial, and defeasible. Without general theories, fixed foundations, or causal variables, we already know and understand the real world and each other in conversation.

Conclusion: Seeing Politics as a Dialogical Science

In these brief concluding remarks I would like to review what we have learned from the examples and practical uses of Wittgenstein’s remarks. Let’s recall what lessons Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully teach us about what Wittgenstein’s remarks might mean for the study of politics. My intention all along has been to suggest some possibly different ways of looking at things. To borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein, I was interested in exploring other neighbourhoods in the city, or perhaps I should say, in nourishing what I saw as a one-sided diet with other examples. I began by noticing some interesting family resemblances in the way a diverse group of philosophers read Wittgenstein, with regard to whether his remarks help us better understand politics. I noticed that a number of these commentators describe Wittgenstein’s method as a kind of therapy that has various sceptical tendencies, or perhaps various forms of scepticism that are meant to be therapeutic. And I noticed that many of them also see his remarks as promoting the primacy of training in a shared form of life, and with this there’s a tendency to promote behavioural explanations about conditioning and socialization, causality and customary habit, in which instruction, pedagogy, discipline, learning, and understanding are necessarily equated. Since it licenses arguments about conventionalism, I argued that this therapeutic scepticism and training work hand in hand, because being inducted into a form of life constitutes various forms of context determinism or cultural relativism, in which our context limits our abilities to think critically, if at all. I suggested that these readings share a strong family resemblance in that they claim that Wittgenstein is promoting a kind of therapeutic scepticism. His remarks are intended to cure us of metaphysical



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cravings for foundations, external standpoints, or epistemologically certain explanations, to expose these as nonsense; at the same time, they are meant to suspend judgment about any substantive alternatives or positive conclusions that might replace them, be they epistemic, normative, moral, or political. We are disqualified from taking a stand on any substantive epistemological or ontological claims, and we are allowed only to attend to the indeterminate, non-metaphysical, philosophically innocent meanings of words and linguistic expressions. Therapeutic scepticism liberates us from metaphysical nonsense, but without any positive alternative other than a focus on the ordinary. And philosophy can only succeed when it serves as a therapy from the many delusional and nonsensical ways of seeing things that turn our attention away from everyday life. I used the word “sceptical” as a family resemblance concept to describe the various kinds of doubt expressed about our ability to know and understand ourselves, or other human beings, or other forms of life that are different from our own. This is not a uniformly similar expression of sceptical doubt, and in any case those who expected an exact definition of scepticism were missing the Wittgensteinian point I am making. These commentators express different kinds of epistemological doubt with arguments that lead to a whole constellation of nonrealist, anti-realist, and sceptical conclusions, like irony, irrealism, irrationality, context-relativity, conventionalism, incommensurability, incomparability, and a rejection of foundations that would serve as common ground for adjudicating knowledge claims. This scepticism is therapeutic in several different ways. Sceptical doubt is meant to be a therapy from metaphysical delusions of grandeur. It is a kind of rehab against our craving for certain truth and our need for fixed foundations. But it also therapeutic in that its aim is public indifference and self-discovery, expressing a rejection of politics. What I noticed in all of these authors is an attachment to an idea of therapy in somewhat personal terms. On these grounds many have felt the need to complement Wittgenstein’s limited approach with a more robust praxis, or philosophy of action, such as Marxism, feminism, or various forms of democratic theory. In fact, the politics that appear to derive from Wittgenstein’s remarks, what they appear to endorse or license, at least according to those who see therapeutic scepticism, are conservative, negative, or contingent political conclusions, which all of these authors either defend or criticize. Put differently, we could say that those who seek to derive political implications from Wittgenstein’s

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remarks too often take for granted various therapeutic sceptical assumptions. So, for example, since all we know comes from being trained and conditioned into a form of life, we cannot just stand outside our training, so we must resign ourselves to the order of things and leave the world as it is. Or we are simply conditioned by what society lets us say. Those who read Wittgenstein’s remarks in conservative, negative, or contingent ways take for granted the arguments for therapy and training and their various sceptical conclusions about knowing and understanding others, about context relativity and non-comparability. In so doing, they cannot explain what positive implications Wittgenstein’s remarks might have for political action, or for the study of politics other than certain forms of conservatism. My point about these tendencies is that while they are evident in a diverse group, there appears to be a recognizably similar genre of political writing that relies on a therapeutic sceptical reading of Wittgenstein. This group is diverse because they don’t all belong to the same school or tradition of thought, and they in fact disagree about the desirability of the various political implications. They range from conservatives to feminists to pragmatists, and they may embrace various forms of naturalism. I have made it clear all along that I am not talking about a rule or a theory here, but overlapping similarities in the way certain authors read Wittgenstein, similarities that shape a certain way of seeing things politically. In other words, the political lessons of Wittgenstein’s remarks are not uniform; rather, they constitute a variety of views, of which I have identified three. One is that they promote indifference towards, disregard for, or rejection of politics – a kind of neutrality. Another is that they promote conservatism in the sense of an apology for the status quo or a defence of existing customs and institutions, with no clear blueprint for fair and just political change. Their third lesson is that politics is somehow the outcome of unintended circumstances, the by-product of time, chance, or causal conditions, or due to a change of habit. Progress or change are thus unplanned and piecemeal, the result of accident and conditioning rather than the direct outcome of deliberate intended action or the exchange of reasons. Alternatively, when it comes to the politics that derives from Wittgenstein’s remarks, nothing necessarily follows. Anything goes. Objects of Comparison In contrast to this therapeutic sceptical reading, I considered three objects of comparison, or three particular examples that do not read Wittgenstein the same way as the therapeutic sceptics. These examples



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show us a different way of reading Wittgenstein, namely, as a robust form of realism. This construal does not privilege or emphasize either training or therapy, but it does see the primacy of a certain kind of comparative conversation from which clear positive implications develop. This reading does not hesitate to promote critical contestation or comparison, nor does it assume that Wittgenstein’s approach prevents us from making substantive normative judgments, nor does it automatically disqualify substantive political conclusions. It actually fosters and entitles robust epistemological and ontological conclusions. I surveyed three particular examples of this alternative reading, namely, how it has been promoted by Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, and James Tully. Counter to all the other commentators discussed in the therapeutic sceptical tradition, what Taylor, Skinner, and Tully take to be Wittgenstein’s most important lesson does not involve either therapy or training; rather, it involves a kind of realism of dialogical comparison. I examined these two aspects in some detail by reviewing the distinction these authors make between monological and dialogical perspectives and the way they adopt languages of comparison and contrast. Perhaps the most significant family resemblance is that these three authors all use the word “dialogical” to describe their preferred approach to politics. I used the adjective “comparative” to characterize the family resemblance because this is another word they also deliberately use, and a method they intentionally mobilize; in this way it informs the very practice of dialogue these authors promote. This is also meant to show a difference from other kinds of dialogue sometimes defended by the therapeutic sceptical Wittgensteinians, kinds that assume confessional, pedagogical, and disciplinary orientations and that do not make enough room for negotiation and for contested conversation among equals. In presenting these examples, I did not intend that the reader see in them a rule, something that is common to all, such as an essential Wittgenstein or a deeper explanation that reaches beyond all the examples. Rather, my aim has been to show some family resemblances among Taylor, Skinner, Tully, and Wittgenstein, how their approaches are related to one another in many ways and how in some cases they are not. The aim of this discussion was to explore a different way of looking at Wittgenstein’s implications for the study of politics by way of assembled reminders, a survey of various uses of Wittgenstein. The survey explored different occasions of use and identified overlapping similarities with aspects of Wittgenstein’s ways of looking at things. And it is because of these relationships that I see in the three examples a

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comparative dialogical reading. The comparative and dialogical reading teaches us that when we abandon the craving for generality, and when we adopt the attitude of perspicuous representation, we are not left with sceptical doubt or non-realism. We can understand our own lived experience and other forms of life that may be very different from our own in ongoing conversations of comparison, in which we have a duty to listen carefully to the other side, and which entails comparing parti­cular aspects and finding family resemblances rather than relying on theories, rules, and generalizations. An important lesson of this survey of Wittgenstein’s remarks is that training and therapy are only aspects of understanding and that understanding might also be something like an ongoing practice of continuing conversation with others. Understanding is not just the outcome of the pedagogical activities of initiation, inducement, or educating someone who doesn’t know; it is also what happens in cross-cultural encounter, as well as the activity of struggling to make sense of different and unfamiliar practices. This is to say that understanding is not the monological activity of being trained into a form of life, or learning from someone who knows more than you do. It is also a contested conversation among equals, or strangers, or those who want to learn from one another, in which we might struggle to reach mutual understanding. This is not a scepticism about other minds; it is simply a normal way of understanding the world around us. Just because there are so many different forms of life, and even though we might never find metaphysical certainty or foundational knowledge, this does not mean we are therefore condemned either to non-realism, or to paralysing scepticism, or to the sheer contingency of life. We should have no trouble accepting that of course it’s possible to know aspects of the truth or reality, and that it’s possible to understand aspects of one another at least more or less, as long as we also accept that this knowledge and understanding is an ongoing work in progress and open to challenge and revision through negotiation and compromise. Politics: The Dialogical Science And this goes for politics too. Political boundaries are sufficiently blurry and overlapping, and conversation is such a normal aspect of human experience, that all sorts of ways of comparing are always possible, and indeed inescapable if our aim is understanding. So political explanation and understanding is in this sense particular, comparative,



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provisional, and dialogical. In these many ways the three authors I examine have called for us to reconsider our understanding of the proper epistemology and ontology of politics: it is not a disengaged, neutral, or elitist discipline founded on the presumed methods of the natural sciences, but an engaged democratic dialogical practice. In this way, even in the absence of antecedent causal forces, general theories, or fixed foundations, we can still know and understand the real world and one another in conversation, because politics is a dialogical science. And in this way, for each of the three examples, Wittgenstein’s remarks do give us a better understanding of politics. His remarks help us understand classic political texts, political concepts, ideologies, historical ideas and contexts, diverse political institutions, and complex political practices, movements, and struggles. These examples teach us that Wittgenstein need not be either defended or rejected for his therapeutic or pedagogical views with their varieties of scepticism and their negative, conservative, and contingent political implications. His remarks can be understood differently. The promise of this comparative dialogical way of seeing things is a rich comparative approach in which language is a multiplicity of tools for building many possible foundations and boundaries of political explanation and understanding, and for revising these foundations and boundaries from time to time. What the comparative dialogical Wittgensteinians teach us is that we do not have to leave the world alone. We can explain and understand the world, and change it too if we want, as long as we see that all this has to be done in ongoing conversation with others.

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Notes

Introduction 1 In describing the approach this way I owe a debt to Quentin Skinner’s Wittgensteinian orientation, in particular as expressed in his “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 198. 1.  Scepticism, Therapy, and Leaving the World Alone 1 PI, s. 133. See also s. 255: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” 2 Dunn, “The Future of Political Philosophy in The West,” 175. 3 Dunn, “The Future,” 176. 4 Besides Gellner, he was talking about Pitkin, Danford, Rorty, and Winch, among others. See Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice; Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy; Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism; Winch, The Idea of a Social Science; Winch, “Authority,” 97–111. 5 Dunn, “The Future,” 171, 174–6, 181. 6 Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 382. 7 Lear “Leaving the World Alone,” 386, 391. 8 Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 390. 9 See, for example, Kahane, Kanterian, and Kuusela, Wittgenstein and His Interpreters, 8­–10. Among the most notable examples is Gordon Baker’s later interpretation of Wittgenstein. In a series of papers written late in life and published posthumously, Baker radically re-evaluated his previous views on the Philosopical Investigations and in its place adopted a new interpretation. As Hacker observes one of its primary distinctive features

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is that “it is primarily therapeutic, on the Freudian model” in that it is “person-relative and “patient-specific.” For Hacker’s excellent summary and critique, see his “Gordon Baker’s Late Interpretation of Wittgenstein,” 88–122. 10 Some have suggested that the kind of scepticism this therapy resembles is a form of Pyrrhonism. While the similarities are indeed quite compelling, my argument differs somewhat in that what I characterize as therapeutic scepticism cannot strictly speaking be reducible to Pyrrhonism, so this label is misleading. I discuss this in the conclusion of this chapter. 11 For example see Ackerman, “Does Philosophy Only State What Everyone Admits?”; Crary, “Introduction”; Tanesini, Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation, 2–3, 32–9; Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory, 86; Moore, “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics.” 12 As proof of Wittgenstein’s conservatism, Nyíri cites biographical evidence such as his admiration for Russian spiritualism in Dostoevsky, the “essential influence” of Spengler (“the most influential neo-conservative thinker of the post-war years”), his acknowledgments to the conservative playwright and essayist Paul Ernst, and “the neo-conservative spiritual milieu of the time.” Nyíri, “Wittgenstein’s Later Work,” 44–68. 13 An excellent overview is offered by Uschanov, “Ernest Gellner’s Criticisms.” 14 Gellner, Words and Things, 223. 15 Gellner, Legitimation of Belief, 20. 16 A volume of essays based on the 1989–90 series of Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures given in London to mark the centenary of the birth of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The aim of the series was to present essays that reflected on “the degree to which Wittgenstein’s influence, in and beyond philosophy, is apparent today; and the degree to which his work is relevant to other areas of thought than the purely philosophical.” See “Preface,” in Griffiths, Wittgenstein Centenary Essays, v. 17 French, Uehling, and Wettstein, Midwest Studies. 18 Sluga and Stern, The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. On therapy and contingency, see pages 159 and 405. 19 Sparti, Wittgenstein politico. This includes a translation of Stanley Cavell’s “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture.” 20 Sluga, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 20. 21 Garver, “Philosophy as Grammar,” 151, 158, 167. 22 Grayling, Wittgenstein; Grayling, “Wittgenstein’s Influence”; Hilmy, The Later Wittgenstein, 139–89; O’Hear, “Wittgenstein and the Transmission of Traditions”; Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science”; Bloor, “The



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Question of Linguistic Idealism Revisited”; John McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, 40–52; S.L. Hurley, “Intelligibility, Imperialism, and Conceptual Schemes” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, 89–108; Anthony Brueckner, “The Anti-Realist’s Master Argument” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, 214–23; Ackerman, “Does Philosophy Only State What Everyone Admits?”; Schulte, “Wittgenstein and Conservatism,” 68; J. Bouveresse, “‘The Darkness of His Time,’” 23, See also Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 219. 23 Bouveresse, “‘The Darkness of his Time,’” 21. 24 Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 216–19. 25 Grayling, “Wittgenstein’s Influence,” 63–4. 26 Two notable examples are the work of Cora Diamond and Aryeh Botwinick. Diamond dismisses as “nutty” the very idea that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is inherently conservative, but she wholeheartedly endorses a therapeutic reading, as both Crary and Stern observe. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, 17–18, 34; Crary, “Introduction”; Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Botwinick interprets the Philosophical Investigations as exemplifying a form of radical therapeutic scepticism that makes all forms of activity and forms of life metaphysically and epistemologically equal; this implies egalitarian participatory implications. Botwinick, Skepticism and Political Participation. 27 Scheman writes that it was Wittgenstein’s aim “to cure us of the felt need” to ignore our practices for something “super-idealized.” But the aim of this therapy was not to refute scepticism or to demonstrate the falseness or unintelligibility of the sceptic’s challenges, but to make us “less susceptible to them.” See Scheman, “Forms of Life,” 22, 386, 387, 394, 402. She concludes: “If we ask what makes our words refer, our sentences true or false, our moral injunctions truly binding, the answer is that nothing does, because nothing could. Only we can do such things for ourselves” (405). 28 Vinten, “Leave Everything As It Is.” 29 Consider Rubenstein, Marx and Wittgenstein; Easton, Humanist Marxism; Pleasants, “The Epistemological Argument”; Pleasants, “A Wittgensteinian Social Theory?”; and Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory, 25 [e-book]. A pioneering work is Rossi-Landi, “Per un uso Marxiana della Wittgenstein,” originally published in Nuovi Argumenti in 1966. An English version, translated by Rossi-Landi and titled “Towards a Marxian Use of Wittgenstein,” was republished in J.C. Nyìri, ed., Austrian Philosophy: Studies and Texts Munich (Philosophia Verlag, 1981), 113–49, as well as in Kitching and Pleasants, Marx and Wittgenstein.

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30 Kitching and Pleasants, Marx and Wittgenstein. 31 See Benton, “Wittgenstein, Winch, and Marx”; Carver, “Marx, Wittgenstein, and Postmodernism”; Pleasants, “Towards a Critical Use”; and Read, “Marx and Wittgenstein.” Pleasants and Read argue that therapy renders Wittgenstein’s philosophy somewhat personal and more individualistic than Marx’s, but not in a narrow sense, since it applies to culture and society. 32 Kitching, “Introduction,” 6, 10; Uschanov, “Ernest Gellner’s Criticisms,” 40. 33 Kitching and Pleasants, Marx and Wittgenstein, 164–7. Pleasants makes several references to Wittgenstein’s “therapeutic method” in his Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical Social Theory. 34 See Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. 35 Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the Idea, 33–4 [e-book]; Pleasants, “A Wittgensteinian Social Theory?”, 399; Pleasants, “Towards a Critical Use,” 162. 36 In moral philosophy a notable example of Cavell’s influence is evident in Edwards, Ethics without Philosophy. 37 Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” reprinted in Pitcher, ed., Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966); Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 44–72. 38 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 65–72. My concern here is not whether this is an accurate depiction of Freud, only that this interpretation of Freud shapes Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein. 39 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 7, 37, 45–8, 61, 154, 175–6, 207, 236, 329, 431, 451. 40 See, for example, Cavell, “Notes and Afterthoughts,” 283; Cavell, “The Wittgensteinian Event,” 210–11 (reprinted in Cary and Shieh, Reading Cavell, 24); and Cavell, “The Argument of the Ordinary,” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 83–4. 41 See “Introduction,” in Goodman, Contending with Stanley Cavell, 3; and Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism. 42 See, for example, Norris, “Political Revisions.” 43 Putnam, “Philosophy as the Education of Grownups,” 120. 44 Mulhall, “Stanley Cavell’s Vision,” 79. 45 I will discuss this below. This view is shared by Norris, who writes that for Cavell the struggle with scepticism is “an argument that can never be won, and that should never be won,” because “that would only close down one or another side of the human.” Norris, “Political Revisions,” 837–8. 46 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 37, 46. 47 For example, p. xxv. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice.



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48 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, viii–ix, xxiii–xxiv, 336–9. 49 Unlike traditional political philosophers, who offer “fairly concrete proposals for remedial action along with their diagnosis of social ills,” Wittgenstein “has no plan, no program, no alternative course of action to propose. He is truly not a political theorist but a philosopher, giving us a clear vision of the current state of affairs.” Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 52, 201, 203, 325, 328, 336, 339. 50 “People simply do not stage linguistic revolutions, draft new linguistic patterns, or band together in a new language group.” Pitkin adds that linguistic change is legislated “in the service of cultural nationalism. But this is hardly typical of innovation in language.” Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 201. According to Pitkin, it is rare that some individual or group has “a serious stake in the maintenance or alteration of linguistic patterns,” and it is rare if ever that change in language is “effected or prevented by the exercise of power” except in special cases “where language is politicized” (202). This phenomenon may not be as rare as Pitkin suggests. Consider, for example, the history of Quebec, particularly in the period from the Revolution tranquille to the 1995 secession referendum. Numerous other comparable examples abound concerning national minorities and their struggles over recognition. 51 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 202–3. 52 See in particular chapter 5 of Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 96–121. Danford acknowledges his debt to Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say?, 227–8n19, and to Cavell’s unpublished The Claim of Reason, 228n23. 53 Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 198, 202. 54 He writes that “for most of us, personal concerns overshadow the concerns of the political community.” Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 201–2. 55 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 185, 189. 56 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 176–90. 57 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 366. 58 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 176–90. 59 Rorty, “Taylor on Truth,” 20–33. 60 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xvi. 61 Rorty, “Taylor on Truth.” This is neither subjectivism nor objectivism because “we cannot draw a line between the object and our picture of the object” (32). 62 Rorty, “Taylor on Truth,” 30. Elsewhere he writes: “Pragmatism starts out from Darwinian naturalism – from a picture of human beings as

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chance products of evolution.” Rorty, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” 15. 63 As Rorty puts it, “inspecting the apparent causal relations between speakers and their environment” and “mapping their behaviour on to ours” will enable us “to predict the behaviour of people who make roughly the same noises in roughly the same situations.” This lets him defend what he calls a trivial, common sense version of realism in which “the production of true beliefs is a matter of causal relations between language-users and the rest of the universe ...” Rorty, “Taylor on Truth,” 27, 29–30. 64 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlvi n28, 16, 186. 65 As he clearly writes in Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 188n19, 366–94. 66 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 21, 34–5. 67 Guignon, “Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Heidegger,” 670. 68 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 7, 221, 228–30, 366, 369, 378. 69 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 221, 228–30, 317, 367–9. 70 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 22, 46, 62. Rorty employs the word metaphysics in the sense of “a search for theories which will get at real essence.” Rorty, Contingency Irony, Solidarity, 88. 71 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73. Rorty defines irony as “an appreciation of the contingency of final vocabularies.” Rorty, “Response to Ernesto Laclau,” 74. 72 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6–7, 16–17, 86–7, 189–92; Rorty, “Remarks on Deconstruction,” 17. 73 Laclau, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony,” 60–67; Rorty, “Response to Ernesto Laclau,” 73–4. 74 Crary, “Introduction,” 1. Outside this particular school, another example of not noticing the important similarities between Rorty and Cavell is evident with Pohlhaus and Wright, whom I discuss below. 75 Crary, “Introduction,” 1–13; Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy”; Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 43. The contribution of P.M.S. Hacker serves as a dissenting voice to the basic premise of the volume, particularly its therapeutic account. Hacker, “Was He Trying to Whistle It?”, 353–88. Another example of the argument about nonsense as a term of criticism is found in McManus, “Wittgenstein, Fetishism, and Nonsense in Practice.” 76 Crary summarily discounts Wittgenstein’s personal political inclinations, focusing instead on his philosophy. Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” 118–45, 141–2n1. 77 Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy.” In these situations “we have no notion what (if anything) will count as the fulfillment of the words we are uttering,” and “when we try to assess our own lives we may come out



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with forms of words which fail to say anything we want to say” (139–41). Also, the words we use “do not say anything that they haven’t (yet) been given any significant use” Crary, “Introduction,” 7. 78 Crary, “Introduction,” 10. 79 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation”; Rosa and Laitinen, “On Identity,” 186–7. 80 Diamond, “Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics,” 226–60. 81 Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” 124, 137; Crary, “Introduction,” 8. 82 Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically.” The authors argue that Wittgenstein’s relationship with scepticism is charitable because “philosophy as therapy remains open to the possibility of the skeptic’s continued dissatisfaction or recurring disease with our criteria.” And they relate this to Cavell’s argument of the ordinary in the sense that “the therapeutic work of philosophical activity” is “to build a relationship of intelligibility with the skeptic by situating her questions into particular (and sometimes newly imagined) situations where they might be answered.” They define scepticism as “a constant possibility of challenging claims about what ‘we’ say,” and they insist that Wittgenstein took seriously these sceptical concerns. His approach was not to reject and abandon sceptical questions – a position they associate with Rorty – but to engage with the sceptic and show her questions to have limited scope, and bring her questions “back to the contexts wherein they might make sense.” (803, 807, 818–23). Likewise, Robin Holt endorses the Cavellian characterization of Wittgenstein’s method as “confession, not bargaining,” but confession is not just negative in that it offers a “way of resistance” and affirmation, and makes apparent “imaginative alternatives” like human rights. Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics, and Human Rights, 1–22; see also Norval, “Democratic Identification,” 231–2. 83 Heyes, “Introduction.” 84 Heyes, “Introduction,” 7–8. From this characterization of therapeutic scepticism, I exclude David Owen and Jonathan Havercroft (and James Tully, whose work I survey in chapter 6). While accepting that Wittgenstein’s method is therapy and cure, both Owen and Havercroft adopt positions that are sympathetic to Tully’s aspectival orientation. Owen, “Genealogy as Perspicuous Representation”; Havercroft, “On Seeing Liberty As.” Linda Zerilli appears prima facie to be an ambiguous case. She claims to articulate “the space between skepticism and foundationalism,” but her position still seems trapped within the non-realist logic of therapeutic scepticism. Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing.” 85 Heyes, “Introduction,” 3, 13. Nevertheless, some commentators do promote readings that are politically negative and neutral. Allan Janik, for example, endorses a quietististic apolitical interpretation the spirit of which compels

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the philosopher to “remain outside the sphere of the political” and “renounce citizenship in any human community.” Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics.” Richard Shusterman offers a reading of a kind of public indifference in the sense that politics is self-focused and personal, concerned with self-improvement and self-knowledge, and “bringing greater slowness and tranquility to our minds.” Shusterman, “Wittgenstein on Bodily Feelings.” 86 Cerbone, “The Limits of Conservatism”; Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics”; Eldridge, “Wittgenstein and the Conversation of Justice”; Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing”; Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically”; Norval, “Democratic Identification.” 87 Janik, Style, Politics, and the Future of Philosophy, 95; reiterated in Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” 104. 88 Scheman and O’Connor, Feminist Interpretations. On therapy, see the following commentaries in this collection: Scheman, “Introduction,” 5, 19; Rooney, “Philosophy, Language, and Wizardry,” 41, 43–4; Baker, ‘Wittgenstein, Feminism, and the Exclusion of Philosophy,” 53–4, 62–3; Heyes, “‘Back to the Rough Ground!”, 201, 204, 211; Bhushan, “Eleanor Rosch,” 276; Bradford, “Words and Worlds,” 288, 299–300; Orr, “Developing Wittgenstein’s Picture of the Soul,” 324. 89 Heyes, “‘Back to the Rough Ground!”, 204, 210–11. 90 O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility, ix–x, 15, 18–20. In a subsequent publication, O’Connor reiterates her view that the Wittgensteinian “methodology” has two aspects: first, diagnosing problems and “offering certain therapies,” an approach that she also describes as “deflationary”; and second, embracing the limitation and finitude of ethical and moral life. O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, xi, 6–10, 44, 55, 58. 91 Tanesini, Wittgenstein. 92 Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory, 21, 64n5; Moore, “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics”; Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science, 81–104, 128, 151. 93 Kuusela, The Struggle against Dogmatism. 94 Richard H. Popkin described Pyrrhonism as a therapy, or a cure for the “disease called Dogmatism or rashness.” Popkin, The History of Scepticism, xv. See also Hiley, “The Deep Challenge of Pyrrhonian Scepticism”; Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 35; Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy, 128, 130; and Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections. 95 Diamond, “Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics,” 238, 256. 96 Cerbone, “The Limits of Conservatism,” 55; Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing,” 136–7; Eldridge, “The Conversation of Justice,” 127; Norval, “Democratic Identification,” 231. 97 Moore, “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics,” 1125.



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2.  The Primacy of Training in a Shared Form of Life 1 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI). Part I was completed in 1945. Part II was completed between 1947 and 1949. 2 Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations” Generally Known as The Blue and Brown Books (hereafter BB). 3 BB, s. 1. 4 BB, 105. 5 According to this view “individual words in language name objects” (or “things”) and “sentences are combinations of such names.” This picture of language in turn entails the following idea: “Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which it stands.” BB, 1–2, 77; PI, ss. 1, 6. Furthermore, as Gordon Baker argues, the difference of meaning of two words must always be explained by reference to a difference between the two objects for which they stand, and the difference between the way two sentences are used must be explained or accounted for by reference to a difference between the two facts they describe. Baker, “Philosophical Investigations Section 122,” 54. 6 PI, s. 5. 7 PI, s. 6. 8 BB, s. 1 [77], s. 30 [93], ss. 50–1 [104–5]. Hereafter, page numbers for BB are in square brackets. 9 If a child does not respond to the training “it is separated from the others and treated like a lunatic.” BB, s. 30, 93. 10 PI, s. 7. The centrality of practice is something most commentators recognize and accept as an important part of Wittgenstein’s approach. For example, consider Schatzki, Social Practices. 11 “Don’t you understand the call ‘slab’ if you act upon it in such-and-such a way?“ PI, s. 6. 12 PI, ss. 6–7. 13 BB, s. 1, 77; PI, s. 9. 14 PI, s. 43. See also s. 197. 15 Understanding a word is like setting up a brake by connecting a rod and lever. Only in conjunction with “the whole rest of the mechanism” is a lever a brake lever. Separated from its support, “it is not even a lever, it may be anything or nothing.” Use is to understanding what “the whole rest of the mechanism” is to a lever: a lever is a brake lever only in its use. Disconnected from this use it is something else. See Baker and Hacker, Rules, Grammar and Necessity, 47. 16 PI, s. 199.

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17 PI, ss. 198, 205. Consider also: “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.” PI, s. 199. Also: “The grammar of the word ‘knows’ is evidently closely related to that of ‘can’, ‘is able to’. But also closely related to that of ‘understands’. (‘Mastery’ of a technique,).” PI, s. 150. 18 PI, ss. 33, 30. 19 See also PI, s. 692: “But now the problem is: how are we to judge whether someone meant such-and-such? – The fact that he has, for example, mastered a particular technique in arithmetic and algebra, and that he has taught someone else the expansion of a series in the usual way, is such a criterion.” 20 PI, s. 27. 21 But even demonstrative training is a varied process that sometimes involves naming objects and sometimes involves naming no objects at all. An example of the variety of ostensive definition is apparent when a person is trained in the use of words that do not signify objects (such as the word “there”). The words may still be taught demonstratively because in these cases ostensive definition is given by an action: “the pointing gesture ... is part of the practice of communication itself.” BB, s. 4, 80. 22 BB, 17, 25, s. 5 [81], s. 21 [91], s. 22 [91–2], s. 32 [94], ss. 35–42 [96–9], ss. 53–8, [106–10], ss. 61–2 [112], s. 65 [116], s. 14 [155], s. 19 [172]. 23 Consider, for example, PI, Pt I, ss. 7, 23–24, 65–71, 142–3, 249, 632, 669; Pt II, pp. 188, 190, 225. 24 PI, s. 7. 25 PI, Pt I, ss. 19, 23, 241; Pt II, pp. 174, 226. 26 Hilmy, The Later Wittgenstein, 146, 184, 139. 27 PI, s. 19. 28 PI, ss. 6, 7, 19. 29 “They are cousins.” Wittgenstein, PI, s. 224. 30 “Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order,” he tells us in section 206, in that we are “trained to do so.” What occurs when being trained into the practice of using a language (when we “learn use”) or when being trained into a language game is that we are trained to obey “the rules of the game.” PI, s. 31. 31 ”When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey blindly.” PI, s. 219. “How am I to obey a rule? … This is simply what I do.” PI, s. 217. 32 PI, s. 7. 33 “In the practice of the use of language (2) [communication between a builder and an assistant] one party calls out the words, the other acts on them. In instruction in the language the following process will occur: the



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learner names the objects; that is utters the word when the teacher points to the stone … And the process of naming the stones and repeating words after someone might also be called language games.” PI, s. 7. 34 PI, s. 241, Pt II, p. 226e. 35 PI, Pt I, ss. 31, 33, 47, 108, 136, 197, 199, 200, 205, 316, 337, 365, 563, Pt II, pp. 174, 181. 36 PI, ss. 211, 217. 37 “A rule stands there like a sign-post. – Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go?” PI, s. 85. 38 The example of the algebraic formula is discussed in PI, ss. 143–90, and BB, ss. 30 and 50. Here he considers a language game in which a teacher orders a pupil to copy and continue a series of numbers according to an algebraic formula. When the pupil is able to write the series down independently, and continue it correctly, we can say he understands the rule because “he has mastered the system.” PI, ss. 143, 145. The right steps to take to carry out the order (to follow the rule correctly) are not determined by the formula but by being trained and taught to use it in a particular way. Wittgenstein suggests that the example is similar to one in which a person reacts to the gesture of pointing with the hand. PI, ss. 185, 188–90. 39 PI, s. 87. 40 PI, s. 201. 41 PI, Pt I, ss. 5, 6, 7, 9, 27, 86, 137, 143, 144, 145, 156, 157, 162, 185, 189, 235, 362, 630. In Pt II, Wittgenstein makes several references to children and pupils learning; see, for example, pp. 191e, 200e. 42 PI, s. 198. In chapter 3, I will consider another meaning of this passage. 43 PI, Pt I, s. 242; Pt II, p. 227e. 44 PI, s. 199. 45 PI, ss. 202, 204–8. 46 PI, s. 150, 154. 47 BB, s. 1 [77]. 48 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 111–12, 168–90; Must We Mean What We Say?, 52. 49 Cavell, “Declining Decline,” 75; Cavell, “The Argument of the Ordinary,” in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 64–100. 50 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 43–9, 50, 62, 80–1, 109–10, 193–203. 51 Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 77–8, 107–10. 52 Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics, and Human Rights, 62–3. Holt cites Cavell’s “Availability” from Must We Mean What We Say? at 79 (155n60) and 110 (162n34). 53 This refers to “teaching and learning a word.” Crary, “Introduction,” 8.

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54 Tanesini, Wittgenstein; Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing,” 145–6. 55 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 174. 56 Winch, “Certainty and Authority.” 57 She says that rule following and training depend on “the existence of authority relations” because institutions and “certain persons, by virtue of their positions as parents and teachers, are accorded intellectual authority.” O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility, 85–91. She likens this to a process whereby children or “immature members” of a community are educated and socialized to share attitudes and to see things “in the same way as other members of the community.” O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, 105–12. 58 Winch, The Idea of A Social Science, 52–3, 57. Furthermore, “all meaningful behaviour must be social, since it can be meaningful only if governed by rules, and rules presuppose a social setting.” And the rules given by the social setting determine sense: “Verstehen implies Sinn and Sinn, as I have argued, implies socially established rules” (116). 59 Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” 107. 60 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 30–6, 115, 118, 180. Likewise, Jonathan Lear argues that a form of life depends on the fact that “we tend to agree in our judgments.” Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 387. See also, Scheman, “Forms of Life,” 384. Pitkin describes forms of life as a context “where all norms are internalized,” and Janik speaks of the rules we “internalize as we are enculturated.” Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 199–203, Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” 107. O’Connor argues that in the course of initiation into our forms of life, “we acquire totalities of judgments,” and that we must also “be trained in following the rules of the game.” O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, 108. 61 Scheman, “Forms of Life,” 386; O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life. 62 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 168. 63 Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 52. 64 Lear argues that a form of life is a matter of sharing “routes of interest, perceptions of salience, feelings of naturalness in following a rule.” Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 385, 387, 389, 394. Schemen reiterates both Cavell and Lear in developing her innovative diasporic idea of a form of life. Scheman, “Forms of Life,” 393, 406n17; See also Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 49; Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 227; Holt, Wittgenstein, Politics, and Human Rights, 110. 65 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 30–4, 115, 168. 66 Cavell, “The Argument from the Ordinary,” 94.



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67 Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing,” 144; Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically,” 810, 819–20; Tanesini, Wittgenstein, 118–21, 123, 127, 131, 137. Crary reads Cavell’s claims about instruction as an exercise of returning us to our “human natures.” That is, “our ability to follow those who teach us” is natural in the sense that “it is not somehow propped up by features of reality perceptible from outside our natural reactions.” Crary, “Introduction,” 8. 68 Saul Kripke, for example, claims that meaning is founded on ”agreement and checkability” by “others ... in the community.” Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules, 7–10, 99, 101. Kripke’s “sceptical paradox” is based on the fact that a rule applied many times in the past should but does not “uniquely determine” or “compel” new instances or applications. The “sceptical solution” turns on the idea that “each person who claims to be following a rule can be checked by others ... in the community [who] check whether the putative rule follower is or is not giving particular responses that they endorse, that agree with their own” (7–10, 101). Also: “Our community can assert of any individual that he follows a rule if he passes the tests for rule following applied to any member of the community” (110). The community will “have justification conditions for attributing correct and incorrect rule following to the subject, and these will not be simply that the subject’s own authority is unconditionally to be accepted”; and “a deviant individual whose responses do not accord with those of the community in enough cases will not be judged, by the community, to be following its rules; he may even be judged to be a madman, following no coherent rule at all” (89, 93). 69 Cavell argues that “the philosophical appeal to what we say, and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community.” Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 20; Lear calls a form of life “a community of like-minded souls.” Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 385. Trigg argues that we understand the meaning of concepts by following a rule “shared by a community.” Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 210. Tanesini argues that by acknowledging claims that others make upon us, we are accepting responsibility “for one’s community.” Tanesini, Wittgenstein, 122–38. 70 Grayling describes Wittgenstein as a communitarian because “language use is essentially a matter of public agreement” and because language use is a rule-following activity in which the rules are “constituted by agreement within a language community” and “only within such a community can one succeed in following rules.” Grayling, Wittgenstein, 109–11. 71 O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility, 86; see also 109. Throughout this text the author typically equates the concepts of form of life and

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community agreement – for example at 14, 16, 30, 100–1. In a subsequent publication, she reiterates the claim that the goal of training is to instil “uniformity of practices.” O’Connor, Morality, 109. 72 Scheman warns us, for example, that it is misleading to think of forms of life as internally homogeneous; instead, she suggests the “internal diversity of forms of life.” Scheman, “Forms of life,” 386, 394. 73 Andrew Lugg examines how this translates into a “consensus conception of scientific authority.” Lugg, “Wittgenstein, Science, and the Authority of The Community.” 74 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 182–3. 75 Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 385–7. 76 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 71–84, 194, 201–3. 77 Something she tells us is derived from Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? Crary, “Introduction,” 8n4. 78 For example, see Paul Feyerabend’s reply to Kuhn in “Consolation for the Specialist,” 198–9. T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, xi, 24, 35, 43–51. When researching and writing his book at Stanford in 1959, Kuhn came upon Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and had frequent conversations with Stanley Cavell, who was at the time writing his doctoral dissertation on Wittgenstein, and whom Kuhn acknowledges in the autobiographical parts of the “Preface” as a “constant source of stimulation and encouragement.” According to Daniel Cedarbaum, Kuhn claims that Wittgenstein’s book provided “the key” to helping him explain the concept of normal science. See Cedarbaum, “Paradigms.” 79 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 56–63. 80 Dummett, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics”; Crary and Read, eds., The New Wittgenstein; Moore, “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics”; Livingston, “Wittgenstein, Kant, and the Critique”; Gunnell, “Desperately Seeking Wittgenstein”; Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science; Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically”; O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, 100–3; Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory. 81 Moore, “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics,” 1115, 1121–2, 1130. My use of the word “weak conventionalist” is influenced by Moore’s explanation of this topic. 82 Grayling, Wittgenstein, 109. 83 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 71–82, 138; Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 117; Nyíri, “Wittgenstein’s Later Work,” 59; Janik, “Towards a Wittgensteinian Metaphysics of the Political,” in Style, Politics, and the Future of Philosophy, 108.



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84 Trigg laments this situation since if social scientists “go native” they cannot fulfil “a scientific role.” Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 212–14. 85 Benton, “Wittgenstein, Winch and Marx,” 149; Kitching, Wittgenstein and Society, 16–17; Vinten, “Leave Everything As It Is,” 21–2. 86 Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science, 80–104, 128; see also Gunnell, “Desperately Seeking Wittgenstein.” 87 Trigg argues that forms of life “cannot be explained or justified” and that we “cannot reason about them, because reasoning can only take place within a particular context.” Trigg, ”Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 212; Nyíri writes that forms of life “cannot be judged” and “cannot actually be criticized” because of their “inexorable binding force” and because “all criticism presupposes a form of life, a language, that is, a tradition of agreements” and “every judgment is necessarily embedded in traditions.” Nyíri, “Wittgenstein’s Later Work,” 58–9. As I mentioned earlier, Gunnell claims that Wittgenstein’s goal was to change philosophy, not what it studied, and that ”ultimately this could only be done by a truly immanent critique, by criticizing it and practicing it differently.” Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science, 98–9. 88 Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically,” 809; Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science, 80–1, 99, 102, 111, 128; Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” 137. 89 Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing,” 139, 146; Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” 137–8; Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, 190; Gunnell, Political Theory and Social Science; Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory, 93; Moore “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics,” 1121–2; O’Connor, Morality. 90 Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language 190–1; Moore, “Wittgenstein, Value Pluralism, and Politics,” 1121–2. O’Connor rejects the foundation metaphor but holds on to the necessity of stability or what she calls “stabilism.” O’Connor, Morality. See, for example, ix–x, 11–15, 18. 91 Diamond says that the “resources” of a language are instruments that explain things like ethics and mathematics. Diamond, “Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics,” 246, 249; Robinson talks about stable “frames” and “depth grammars.” Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory, 175n14. Cerbone employs the scaffold metaphor to explain that there is some “anchorage” of our concepts in the facts. Cerbone, “The Limits of Conservatism,” 55–7. Zerilli also employs the metaphor of an invisible scaffold, and the concept of a taken-for-granted background, to explain the ungrounded ground, the indeterminate, contingent, ordinary

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context of lived experience that “keeps language games going.” Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing,” 130, 139. Crary talks about how our everyday practices of criticism and explanations are “grounded in the ordinary circumstances” of life. Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” 124, 137; Crary, “Introduction,” 8. 92 Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically,” 809. 93 Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory, 111n7. 94 I am not suggesting that incommensurability necessarily precludes comparison, but pointing to a suggestion made by many political Wittgensteinians themselves that incommensurability entails incomparability. Forms of life cannot be compared because they see things differently, and no common language, criteria, or reference points are available by which to correctly measure them. One of the best introductions to this topic is offered by Richard J. Bernstein in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. On the question of incommensurability in Wittgenstein, see Rubinstein, “Marx and Wittgenstein”; and Benton, “Wittgenstein, Winch, and Marx.” Rubinstein and Benton argue that incommensurability is famously associated with Peter Winch’s philosophy of social science, although Pleasants replies that this attribution is incorrect. Pleasants, “Toward a Critical Use of Marx and Wittgenstein” 169–70. 95 Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” 394; Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 202. 96 Grayling, Wittgenstein, 105. 97 Winch claims, for example, that to participate in rule-governed activities is in a certain way to accept authority. Winch, “Authority,” 99; Winch, “Certainty and Authority,” 231–3, 236. 98 Janik argues that to “use language is in a certain sense, to be ruled” and that “to learn anything we have to learn to follow rules blindly (as all army sergeants, novice masters and athletic coaches well know).” To be ruled means “to be subject to behavioural regularities” that we have “neither created nor approve of” and to be “constrained by the rules” not of our making. He does not deny that “the rules we internalize as we are enculturated could be different,” but he contends that authenticity entails first becoming “what your guardians want you to be.” Their rules “establish the range of possibilities open to you.” Janik, “Towards a Wittgensteinian Metaphysics of the Political,” in Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, 98–9. See also Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” 107–8. 99 In addition to Crary, Heyes, and Tanesini, some replies to Nyíri include Janik, “Nyíri on the Conservatism of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,”



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in Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, 40–58; Lock, “Conservatism and Radicalism”; Scheman,“Forms of Life”; and Schulte, “Wittgenstein and Conservatism.” Janik argues that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not conservative but radical, while Lock argues that Wittgenstein is neither radical nor conservative. In Janik’s case, while he claims to “wholly reject Nyíri’s picture,” he in fact admits that in general he is “more sympathetic to something like a ‘conservative’ reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.” Janik, “Afterword with Acknowledgements,” in Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy, 265. Schulte rejects Nyíri’s interpretation but goes on defend Wittgenstein by separating his presumed personal political orientation from his public silence on ethical questions. Schulte also defends a view he attributes to Wittgenstein that because no significant statements on matters of “absolute value” can be made, therefore social and political philosophy cannot be objects of rational discussion. Schulte, “Wittgenstein and Conservatism,” 68. 100 J.C. Nyíri, “Wittgenstein’s Later Work.” 101 Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 214–16, 219, 221–2. 102 Dunn, “The Future,” 174. On the claim that Wittgenstein endorsed gradual change and evolution, see Trigg, “Wittgenstein and Social Science,” 214. 103 Rubenstein says that what establishes bridges of mutual understanding are universal experiences crystallized around shared emotions. Rubenstein, “Marx and Wittgenstein,” 68–9. 104 Eldridge, “Wittgenstein and the Conversation,” 124. 105 Zerilli, “Doing without Knowing,” 137–8; Norval, “Democratic Identification,” 231, 241; Cavell, “The Argument,” 64. 106 Cavell, Claim of Reason, 207. 107 Eldridge, “Wittgenstein and the Conversation.” 108 Pohlhaus and Wright, “Using Wittgenstein Critically,” 807, 812, 816–18, 822–3. 3.  Wittgenstein’s Method of Perspicuous Representation

1 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, viii–x, xxiii–xxiv; Tanesini, Wittgenstein, 23. 2 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 48. 3 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 61, 83, 88–9, 149. 4 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI), ss. 20, 32. Consider also ss. 206–7. 5 PI, s. 32. 6 In the first volume of their analytical commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Baker and Hacker claim that for Wittgenstein, “Plato’s

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method” was “deeply misconceived” about understanding, explanation, and the normativity of rules. Baker and Hacker, Understanding and Meaning, 669. And Monk explains that “Wittgenstein once said that his method could be summed up by saying that it was the exact opposite of that of Socrates.” Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 337–8. 7 Baker and Hacker, Understanding and Meaning, 668. 8 Plato, Theaetetus, 145, 146c–147c. 9 Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”(hereafter BB), 20. 10 BB, 26–7. 11 BB, 17–20. 12 BB, 17. 13 As he explains in PI, pain is a sensation but we give it expression with language. See PI, ss. 151, 244–6, 257, 271, 302. 14 BB, 17–18. 15 PI, s. 65. 16 PI, ss. 69, 75. 17 PI, s. 66. 18 PI, s. 65. 19 PI, ss. 11, 14, 18, 67, 203. 20 PI, s. 593. 21 PI, ss. 208–9. On “examples,” see ss. 71, 75, 76, 77, 133, 135, 210, 593. 22 PI, s. 209. 23 PI, s. 71. 24 PI, s. 208. 25 PI, ss. 54, Part II, p. 220e; Wittgenstein, On Certainty (hereafter OC), s. 95. 26 PI, ss. 71, 75, 77, 82–3, 133, 208–10. 27 PI, ss. 71, 209, 210. 28 PI, ss. 122, 125. 29 Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” (hereafter RF), 133. 30 The precursor of 122 is a remark in an earlier version of PI – the TS 220, ss. 98–100. See Baker, “Philosophical Investigations Section 122,” 44; and Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 310–11. 31 For an excellent synopsis of the debate on the concept, see Baker, “Philosophical Investigations Section 122,” 35–68. 32 PI, s. 90. 33 PI, ss. 91, 98, 105, 107, 116, 120. 34 PI, ss. 90, 100, 122. 35 PI, ss. 89, 109. 36 PI, s. 89, 98, 100, 102, 105, 126.



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37 For example, see PI, ss. 116, 124, 126–7, 436. 38 PI, Pt I, ss. 19, 98, 116, 124, 132, 243, 349, 402, 436, 494; Part II, p. 176e. 39 Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein; Hilmy, The Later Wittgenstein. 40 PI, ss. 89, 102. 41 PI, ss. 91, 92, 102, 121, 126, 129, 164, 435. 42 PI, s. 124. 43 PI, ss. 89, 92, 109, 126. 44 PI, s. 125. 45 PI, s. 115. 46 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 20–1. 47 PI, ss. 100, 103. 48 PI, s. 109. 49 PI, s. 125. 50 PI, ss. 103, 104. 51 PI, s. 129. 52 PI, Pt II, pp. 193e, 213e–214e. 53 PI, Pt II, xi, pp. 193e, 194e, 198e, 200e, 203e, 204e, 206e, 207e, 210e. 54 “It would have made as little sense for me to say ‘Now I am seeing it as ...’ as to say at the sight of a knife and fork ‘Now I am seeing this as a knife and fork.’ This expression would not be understood. – Any more than: ‘Now it’s a fork’ or ‘It can be a fork too.’ One doesn’t ‘take’ what one knows as the cutlery at a meal for cutlery; any more than one ordinarily tries to move one’s mouth as one eats, or aims at moving it.” PI, Pt II, xi, p. 195e. 55 PI, Pt II, xi, p. 212e. 56 PI, Pt II, pp. 198e, 210e, 214e. 57 The example of the table is quoted in Heaton and Groves, Wittgenstein for Beginners, 153. 58 “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect.’” PI, Pt II, xi, p. 193e. 59 This quote, from the notes taken by P.T. Geach, is quoted in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 507–8. As Monk states, these notes, together with those of the same lectures taken by other students, have been published as Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology (1946–7). See “p. 500” in Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 631. 60 Two notable commentaries have emphasized this point. See Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 193–4. Stephen Mulhall argues that Stanley Cavell erroneously conflates these two concepts in his Claim of Reason at 354 and 356, and thereby draws the reader away from one of Wittgenstein’s “key insights.” Mulhall, On Being in the World, 78–81.

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61 “Do I really see something different each time, or do I only interpret what I see in a different way? I am inclined to say the former. But why? – To interpret is to think, to do something; seeing is a state. Now it is easy to recognize cases in which we are interpreting … So there is a similarity in the use of ‘seeing’ in the two contexts. Only do not think that you knew in advance what the ‘state of seeing’ means here! Let use teach you the meaning.” PI, Pt II, xi, p. 212e. 62 PI, Pt II, xi, pp. 194e, 196e, 197e; ii, p. 176e; see also PI, Pt I, ss. 138, 139, 191, 318, 319. 63 See, for example, Norval, “Democratic Identification”; and Zerilli, “Doing Without Knowing.” 64 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 508. 65 Baker, “Philosophical Investigations Section 122,” 35–68. 66 And it is “something we need to remind ourselves of.” PI, ss. 89, 90, 92, 122, 127. 67 PI, s. 130–1. 68 PI, ss. 66–7. 69 PI, ss. 115, 130. 70 PI, Pt II, pp. 193e, 195e, 201e, 202e, 212e. 71 PI, Pt II, p. 193e. Wittgenstein, TS 220, quoted in Baker, “Philosophical Investigations Section 122,” 44. 72 Wittgenstein, TS 220, quoted in Baker “Philosophical Investigations Section 122,” 44. 73 PI, s. 144. 74 PI, s. 77. 75 PI, ss. 18, 67, 68, 69, 99, 203, 426, 525, 534. 76 PI, ss. 68, 71, 84. Games are “uncircumscribed,” words have no “fixed and unequivocal use,” no “fixed meaning, ” there are no “rules for every possible application” of a word. PI, ss. 70, 79, 80. 77 There are some games in which we “make up the rules” and others “where we alter them” as we go along. PI, s. 83. Playing a game cannot therefore be reduced to being trained into a set of rules. And the absence of an explicit or unifying set of rules does not prevent us from playing a game or using a word. Wittgenstein illustrates this point by comparison with tennis. Even though it is a game that has rules, “no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball … or how hard.” PI, s. 68. 78 Written between the middle of 1949 and 29 April 1951, two days before his death. 79 Wittgenstein, OC, s. 99. 80 Wittgenstein, OC, s. 248.



Notes to pages 88–96 

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81 Baker and Hacker, Understanding and Meaning, 372, 373, 367. 82 BB, 19. 83 PI, ss. 98, 100, 101. 84 PI, s. 71. 85 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 45. 86 Wittgenstein, BB, 19. 87 PI, ss. 68, 69, 499. 88 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 276. 89 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 8, 228–30, 317. 90 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 44–69. 91 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (hereafter CV), 7e. 92 PI, ss. 127, 129. 93 PI, Pt I, s. 32; Pt II, p. 223e. 94 PI, Pt I, s. 125; Pt II, p. 223e. In a normal conversation, “He guesses what I intend” which means that “various interpretations of my explanation come to his mind, and he lights on one of them. So in this case he could ask; and I could and should answer him.” PI, s. 210. Or we might ask someone what his motives are and “if he is sincere he will tell us them.” PI, Pt II, p. 224e. 95 OC, ss. 609–12. 96 RF, 119, 125. 97 RF, 125. 98 Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, 202. 4.  Charles Taylor’s Wittgensteinian Aspects 1 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 32–3; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 230. 2 Guignon, “Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Heidegger.” Guignon’s position is that Wittgenstein is not sceptical. But in light of the reasons given in chapter 2, I do not agree fully with his claim that Wittgenstein’s approach is merely “nonfoundationalist.” 3 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, xxiii–xxiv. 4 Stern, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” 444. As I argued earlier, Stern also likens Wittgenstein’s dialogical approach to a variation of Pyrrhonian scepticism. Stern, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. 5 Mulhall, Wittgenstein’s Private Language, 56. For more on Mulhall’s therapeutic reading, see 5, 14, 33–4, 56, 92–4, 122. 6 Peterman, Philosophy as Therapy, 41–2, 53; Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 70–1.

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7 Guignon, “Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Heidegger”; Guignon, “Pragmatism or Hermeneutics?”; Rorty “Taylor on Truth”; Schatzki, Social Practices; Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place; Abbey, Charles Taylor; Abbey, “Introduction”; Redhead, Charles Taylor; N.H. Smith, Charles Taylor; Pihlström, “Linguistic Practices”; Gibbons, “Hermeneutics”; Laitinen, Strong Evaluation. 8 Benner, “The Role of Articulation,” Hjort, “Literature”; Abbey, Charles Taylor; Redhead, Charles Taylor; N.H. Smith, Charles Taylor; Markell, Bound by Recognition; Elshtain, “Toleration”; Lyshaug, “Authenticity ”; Schaap, “Political Reconciliation”; Steele, Hiding from History; Thompson, The Political Theory of Recognition; Gibbons, “Hermeneutics”; Lehman, “Perspectives”; Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire”; Fraser, Dialectics of the Self; Braman, Meaning and Authenticity; Laitinen, Strong Evaluation; Ruparelia, “How the Politics of Recognition”; Browne, “Democracy”; K. Smith, “Meaning and Porous Being,” 2009. 9 Fraser, Dialectics of the Self, 13, 17, 30. 10 N.H. Smith, Charles Taylor, 22–3, 25, 130–4. 11 N.H. Smith, Charles Taylor, 10, 75–6, 82–6, 238. 12 K. Smith, “Meaning and Porous Being,” 18–19. 13 Thompson, The Political Theory, 11; Redhead, Charles Taylor, 152–4; Markell, Bound by Recognition, 57; Braman, Meaning and Authenticity, 42. Braman devotes chapter 4 of his book to “Taylor and Lonergan: Dialogue and Dialectic.” 14 Elshtain, “Toleration,” 137; Shaap, “Political Reconciliation,” 525; N.H. Smith, Charles Taylor, 139; Jocelyn Maclure, “The Politics of Recognition at an Impasse?,” 4. 15 Thompson, The Political Theory, 21–3. 16 This is curious since Taylor credits Humboldt as the direct inspiration for the term “webs of interlocution.” Taylor, Sources of the Self, page 36n12 (and page 525). 17 Taylor also mentions Wittgenstein to make the point that self-interpretation cannot be either fully explicit or completed. “Wittgenstein,” Taylor writes, “has made this point familiar.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 32–41. 18 Thompson, The Political Theory, 13. 19 For example, in explaining Taylor’s “dialogic” approach to politics, Lehman makes no mention of Wittgenstein. Lehman, “Perspectives.” Arto Laitinen makes only a few passing references to his importance. Laitinen, Strong Evaluation. The failure to talk about Wittgenstein, and the neglect paid to the concept of dialogicality, is evident in the January 2009 issue of European Journal of Political Theory and in the November 2009 issue of



Notes to pages 99–101

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Thesis Eleven, both of which examine Taylor’s legacy and his philosophical influences. None of the articles in either journal make any reference to Wittgenstein. On dialogue or public deliberation, there are only very brief passing references in the following: Abbey “Plus ça change,” 84–5, 87; Cooke “Beyond Dignity and Difference,” 92; McBride, “Demanding Recognition,” 98–9; K. Smith, “Meaning and Porous Being,” 8, 14, 19; and Smith and Laitinen, “Taylor on Solidarity,” 56, 61. Browne briefly discusses the concept of dialogue, crediting Herder and the Romantic tradition for their influence. Browne, “Democracy,” 32, 34, 36. 20 Taylor “Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein,” in Philosophical Arguments, 77. 21 Taylor, “Theories of Meaning” (1980), “Cognitive Psychology” (1983), and “Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind” (1983), republished in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (hereafter PP1); Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology.” 22 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation”; Taylor, “To Follow a Rule”; Taylor, “Heidegger and Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Arguments. 23 Taylor, “The Philosophy of the Social Sciences,” 89. Taylor also talks about the “ontologizing” of epistemological procedure; see Taylor, “Heidegger and Wittgenstein,” Philosophical Arguments. See also Taylor, A Secular Age, 574. 24 Taylor, “The Philosophy of the Social Sciences,” 76; Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology”; Abbey, Charles Taylor; Abbey, “Introduction,” 5. 25 Taylor, “The Philosophy of the Social Sciences”; Taylor, PP1; Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (hereafter PP2); Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology”; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self”; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments. 26 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 470–2; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 6–8; Taylor, A Secular Age, 557–8. Taylor writes that epistemology and “moral fervor” are “mutually supporting” and that moral vision “burns at the heart” of this epistemological tradition; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 405–7. 27 Taylor, PP1, 281–2; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 307; Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 171; Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 238; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 67, 75, 169. 28 Taylor, “The Philosophy of the Social Sciences”; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self”; Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology”; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments. 29 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 198–9. 30 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 181–2. 31 Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 311–13. 32 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 49–67; Taylor, A Secular Age, 146–71.

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33 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 506–8. 34 Taylor, PP1, 248–92; Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 472–3; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 308–9; Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 172–3; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 8–9, 61–99, 169–70; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 25. 35 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History”; Taylor, PP1, 259–64; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 32–3; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 311; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32–3; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 172, 230–1; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 65; Taylor, A Secular Age, 156–7. 36 Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 308–9. 37 Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 238–9. 38 Taylor, PP1, 264–6; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 309. 39 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 175–6; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 171–2. 40 Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 237. 41 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 175–6; Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 237. 42 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 33; Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 311; Taylor “To Follow a Rule,” 176; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32–3; Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 238–9; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 173, 230–1. 43 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 35. 44 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 38. 45 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 23. 46 Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 313. 47 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History”; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 117–18. 48 Taylor points out that Wittgenstein rejects the causal explanation of training. Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 177. 49 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 474; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 9. 50 Wittgenstein, OC, s. 204. 51 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 173. 52 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 169; Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 13. 53 Taylor, PP1, 291. 54 Taylor has described this process in different ways: interpretation, selfinterpretation, articulation, retrieval, perspicuous contrast. 55 Taylor’s comparison to Kant is not necessarily one to which Wittgenstein would have objected. Ray Monk points out that in 1932, when he devoted all his energy to producing a presentation of his new thoughts – the period now recognized as when he began to formulate the ideas for which he would later be known – Wittgenstein lectured on the Western philosophical tradition using C.D. Broad’s own series



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of undergraduate lectures, “Elements of Philosophy.” Of Kant’s critical method, he said: “This is the right sort of approach.” Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 319–22. 56 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 473–5; Taylor Philosophical Arguments, 8–10, 69. 57 Taylor, Secular Age, 13, 549, 557, 565, 575. 58 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 472–3; Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 173; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 8–9, 170. 59 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology” 478–9. 60 Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” Philosophical Arguments, 93, 96. 61 “His devastating refutation of ‘Augustine’s’ designative theory of meaning constantly recurs to the background understanding we need to draw on to speak and understand.” Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” Philosophical Arguments, 96. 62 N.H. Smith, Charles Taylor, 239. 63 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 68–70; Taylor, A Secular Age, 13, 794n12. 64 Published in Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 283–327 (Oxford University Press); republished in Taylor, PP1, 248–92. 65 Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” in PP1, 290. 66 Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” in PP1, 265, 281–2. 67 Specifically ss. 87, 202, 211, 217, 219. 68 “Wittgenstein stresses the unarticulated, and on occasion even the unarticulable nature of this kind of understanding. ‘Obeying a rule,’ he says, ‘is a practice’ (I.202). What is more, the process of giving reasons for the kind of practice that is involved in following a rule must necessarily come to an end at some point: ‘My reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons.’ (I.211). Or later: ‘If I have exhausted my justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”’ (I. 217). More laconically: ‘When I obey a rule, I do not chose. I obey the rule blindly.’ (I.219).” Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 169–73. 69 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 172. 70 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 173–4. 71 “Our body is not just the medium through which we enact the goals we frame, nor is it simply the locus of causal factors shaping our representations. Our understanding is itself embodied. That is, our bodily know-how, the way we act and move, embraces aspects of our understanding of self and world. I know my way around in a familiar environment inasmuch as I am able to get from place to place with ease and assurance. I may be at a loss to draw a map, or even give explicit directions to a stranger. I know

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how to manipulate and use the familiar instruments in my world, usually in the same inarticulate fashion.” Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 173–4. 72 Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 69. 73 Lüdeking, “Sraffa’s Gesture.” 74 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 177. 75 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 170. 76 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 171–8. 77 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 182–3. 78 “The rule is what animates the practice at any given moment and not some formulation behind it, inscribed in our thoughts, brains, genes, or whatever.” Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 183. 79 See Taylor, Sources of the Self, pts 3–4 and p. 206; Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 22. 80 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 473. 81 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 169. 82 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 65. 83 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 172. 84 Taylor, PP1, 291. 85 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 21. 86 Consider, for example, the works of Ruth Abbey and Meili Steele. 87 Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” in PP1, 256–7. 88 “A one-word lexicon is an impossibility, as Herder and Wittgenstein have both argued. It is language which enables us to draw boundaries, to pick some things out in contrast to others.” Taylor, “Theories of Meaning,” in PP1, 258. 89 See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 34, 35, 38. 90 PI, s. 69. 91 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 22. 92 “We have a gamut of articulateness. At the bottom, there is the case where no descriptive words are used at all … Now the inarticulate end of this gamut is somehow primary. That is we are introduced into the goods, and inducted into the purposes of our society much more and earlier through its inarticulate practices than through formulations.” Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 23. Compare this to Wittgenstein‘s claim in PI, s. 242, that language is agreement in judgments and that giving grounds, justifying the evidence, comes to an end, that “my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons;” PI, s. 211. And that “it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of a language-game”; OC, s. 204. 93 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 21. 94 Taylor, PP1, 291; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 35. 95 PI, ss. 71, 77; OC, ss. 96–9.



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96 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 69. 97 “There must always be a context from which we are attending if we are to understand the experience of a being like this. So bringing to articulation still supposes a background.” Taylor, “Heidegger and Wittgenstein,” in Philosophical Arguments, 69–70. 98 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 24. 99 As Meili Steele observes in Hiding from History: Politics and Public Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 83–6. 100 Taylor “Philosophy and Its History,” 20–8. 101 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 18–24. 102 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 21. 103 In other words: “in order to undo the forgetting, we have to articulate for ourselves how it happened, to become aware of how a picture slid from the status of discovery to that of inarticulate assumption, a fact too obvious to mention. But that means a genetic account; and one which retrieves the formulations through which the embedding in practice took place. Freeing ourselves from the presumption of uniqueness requires uncovering the origins. That is why philosophy is inescapably historical.” Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 21. 104 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 9–10. 105 Taylor, A Secular Age, 146, 156, 171–6, 200–1, 323. 106 Taylor “Philosophy and Its History,” 19–20. 107 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 28. 108 Steele, Hiding from History, 83. 109 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 72. 110 See “Introduction” in Taylor’s A Secular Age. 111 Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” 169. 112 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 67–73; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 150, 152, 252–6. 113 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 205. 114 Taylor “Understanding and Explanation,” 191. 115 Taylor “Understanding and Explanation,” 201. 116 Taylor “Understanding and Explanation,” 204–9. 117 Taylor “Understanding and Explanation,” 193. 118 He cites as examples historical materialism, utility maximization, and the functionalist theory of development dominant in American political science. Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 196–7, 206–7. 119 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 201–4. 120 This neutral language is made more plausible, Taylor argues, if we argue that “the significance of a great deal of actions of people in their society escape their full consciousness or understanding,” or that their

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understanding is distorted in some way. Taylor “Understanding and Explanation,” 194–5. 121 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 194–7, 205, 209. 122 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 196–202. 123 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 199. 124 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 199–200. 125 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 205–10. 126 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 209. 127 Taylor, “The Philosophy of the Social Sciences,” 90. 128 Taylor Philosophical Arguments, xii. 129 Taylor Philosophical Arguments, 164. 130 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 206; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 67; Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” in Philosophical Arguments, 148. 131 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 205. 132 PI, ss. 103, 115. 133 “We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality.” PI, s. 104. 134 PI, s. 103. 135 Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” 20–1. 136 PI, s. 144. 137 PI, s. 109. 138 PI, s. 127. 139 PI, s. 89. 140 PI, s. 92. 141 Taylor, PP1 and PP2, 8; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32–6; Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 231. 142 Taylor uses “language” in a broad sense to mean not only the words we speak but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, “including the ‘languages’ of art, of gesture, of love, and the like.” Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 33. 143 Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 311–14. 144 Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 313. 145 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32–7. 146 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 37–9. 147 Taylor, PP1 and PP2, 8; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 46–9; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 26–36. 148 Taylor, “The Dialogical Self,” 313.



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149 Taylor, “The Philosophy of the Social Sciences,” 90; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 65, 101, 196–7; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 76–8; Taylor, “Foreword,” xiii–xiv; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 80–2; Taylor, A Secular Age, 184–5. 150 Taylor, “Democratic Exclusion,” 279–86. 151 Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation,” 205; Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 70. 152 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity; Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 250–1; Taylor, “Reply,” 95. 153 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 99. 154 Taylor, “Democratic Exclusion,” 281, 286. 155 Taylor, Malaise of Modernity, 77–8. 156 Consider Taylor’s essays in Reconciling the Solitudes. 157 Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 239, 250–7. 158 The Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (CCAPRCD). Following a number of highly publicized incidents in early 2007 that raised heated debate, including a controversial code of conduct for immigrants adopted by the town of Hérouxville (about 165 kilometres northeast of Montreal), the Government of Quebec invited Taylor and Gérard Bouchard to co-chair a commission, which held public hearings in cities and remote communities across the province between September and December 2007. According to a 7 June 2007 press release, Quebecers were invited “to submit briefs and express their viewpoints on accommodation practices related to cultural differences.” The Bouchard–Taylor Commission submitted its final report to the Quebec government on 19 May 2008, and made it public on 22 May 2008. 159 Bouchard–Taylor, “Building the Future,” 51–2. 160 Bouchard–Taylor, “Building the Future,” 52. 161 This is a consistent theme throughout Taylor’s writings. See, for example, Taylor, The Pattern of Politics, ch. 6; Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes; Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 119; Taylor, “Democratic Exclusion,” 286; Taylor, “Foreword.” 162 As Taylor suggests in his discussion with Skinner. Taylor, “The Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 221. 163 Taylor, Sources of the Self; Taylor The Malaise of Modernity, 18. 164 Taylor has consistently made this claim since the publication of The Explanation of Behaviour. 165 Taylor, “Political Theory and Practice,” 69–74. 166 Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” PP2, 15–57; Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” PP2, 58–90. 167 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 40–1, 72–3, 89–91, 117–18.

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Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection Notes to pages 138–41 5.  Quentin Skinner: Wittgenstein and the Historical Approach to Political Thought

1 Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 473. 2 Tully, Meaning and Context, 312n11; Skinner, “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 161n11. See also Prokhovnik, “An Interview with Quentin Skinner,” 275. 3 On the importance of Wittgenstein and Austin, see Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Meaning and Context, 260–2, 271, 274. See also HamiltonBleakley, “Linguistic Philosophy and The Foundations,” 20–7; Guena, “Skinner, Pre-Humanist Rhetorical Culture, and Machiavelli,” 58; and Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations,” 242. 4 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 204n67. 5 Tully, “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword,” 8. 6 Hamilton-Bleakley, “Linguistic Philosophy,” 24. See also Jonathan Havercroft, “Skinner, Wittgenstein, and Historical Method.” 7 For example, J.G.A. Pocock credits Skinner as one of the scholars to whom he owes “enormous debt.” Pocock, “Foundations and Moments,” 49. This debt is clear in many of Pocock’s works, including his own Virtue, Commerce and History. 8 Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 1, 141. 9 Tuck, “Hobbes and Democracy,” 171. 10 Palonen, “Political Theorizing as a Dimension of Political Life.” 11 Perreau-Saussine, “Quentin Skinner in Context.” 12 Palonen, Quentin Skinner, 134–7. 13 Tully, “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword,” 19–21. 14 Perreau-Saussine, “Quentin Skinner in Context,” 110. 15 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 257, 287. 16 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” in Meaning and Context, 98. 17 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” (also in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 57–89); Skinner, “‘Social Meaning’”; Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 101–5; Skinner, “Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 175–87; Prokhovnik, “An Interview with Quentin Skinner.” 18 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 56–61; Skinner, “‘Social Meaning’”; Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” 109; Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 104. 19 Skinner in fact defends causality as one aspect or example among various possible kinds explanation. So, for example, he argues that even if one argues that motives or intentions are causes (that an action



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performed must presuppose an intention or cause to have done it), there are still non-causal explanations of action and non-causal authorial intentions. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 61; Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 266. And this explains why he responds to Taylor by defending “the causal processes” and “the causal story” by which our modern values “triumphed over … earlier and incommensurable images of spiritual and political life.” Skinner, “Modernity and Disenchantment,” 43–5. 20 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 58–9; Skinner, “Motives, Intentions, and Interpretation,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 98. 21 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 59. It is noteworthy that Taylor and Skinner share an early commitment to explanation by purpose. 22 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 32–49; Skinner, “Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” 99. 23 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” 104. 24 Skinner, “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 103. 25 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 260. 26 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 8. 27 CV, 46e. 28 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 260. 29 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 45; Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 74. 30 Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 78. 31 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 55. 32 PI, ss. 11–12, 18, 23, 203. 33 Skinner “Meaning and Understanding,” 55. 34 “For the classic statement of this commitment, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ... esp. para. 43; and for its application as a means of attacking the idea of fixed meanings, see esp. para. 79 et seq.” Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 300n154. 35 Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 198. 36 Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 85. 37 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 56, 65. 38 Skinner, “Retrospect,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 176. 39 See Tully, Meaning and Context, 331n59. 40 Skinner “‘Social Meaning,’” 80–1, 93. Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 243. 41 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 257. 42 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” Meaning and Context, p., 248. 43 Skinner cites in his footnote page 267 of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 248.

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44 Skinner “Language and Social Change,” 132. 45 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 65–7. 46 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 257. 47 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 243. Also: “It seems positively erroneous to try to arrive at a single criterion, and hence a method, for discriminating rational beliefs. The relations between the ideal of rationality and the practices that may be said to manifest it seem far too complex and open ended to be captured in the form of an algorithm” (240). 48 “The historian need only be claiming that he or she has uncovered the prevailing norms for the acquisition and justification of beliefs in that particular society, and that the belief in question appears to have been upheld in the face of, rather than in the light of, those norms themselves. The historian need only be claiming, that is, that the agent in question fell short of – or perhaps abandoned, manipulated or in some other way deliberately defied – some generally accepted standard of epistemic rationality.” Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 243–4. 49 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 244. 50 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 260. 51 “… what set of conclusions, what course of action, he was supporting or defending, attacking or repudiating, ridiculing with irony, scorning with polemical silence, and so on and on through the entire gamut of speechacts embodied in the vastly complex act of intended communication that any work of discursive reasoning may be said to comprise.” Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 201. 52 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 59–60. 53 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 61. 54 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 60. 55 Skinner, “‘Social meaning.’” 56 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 261–2. 57 Skinner, “‘Social Meaning,’” 83–4, 87–8; Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 260–1. 58 Skinner “Meaning and Understanding,” 61–2; Skinner, “‘Social Meaning,’” 86. 59 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 62. 60 Skinner, “Some Problems,” 110–16; Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” 129. 61 The availability of evaluative concepts that the agent can manipulate “is a question about the prevailing morality of the society in which the agent is acting; their applicability is a question about the standard of meaning and use of the terms involved, and about how far these can be plausibly



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stretched. These factors serve as rather specific constraints and directives to the agent about what precise lines of conduct afford him the best means of bringing his untoward actions in line with some accepted principle, and thereby legitimating what he does while still gaining what he wants.” Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” in Meaning and Context, 117. 62 Tully, “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword,” 9, 14. 63 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” in Meaning and Context, 112. “However revolutionary the ideologist concerned may be, he will nevertheless be committed, once he has accepted the need to legitimate his behaviour, to attempting to show that some of the existing range of favourable evaluative-descriptive terms can somehow be applied as apt descriptions of his own apparently untoward actions.” 64 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” in Meaning and Context, 112. 65 Tully, “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword,” 14. 66 Skinner, “ ‘Social Meaning,’” 86. 67 PI, pt II, xi, p. 226e. “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life.” 68 “A term such as art gains its meaning from the place it occupies within an entire conceptual scheme. To change the criteria for applying it will thus be to change a vast deal else besides … So an argument over the application of the term art is potentially nothing less than an argument over two rival (though not of course incommensurable) ways of approaching and dividing up a large tract of our cultural experience.” Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” 124; Skinner, “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 164–5. 69 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 56–9; Skinner, “Some Problems,” 108. For more on Skinner’s holism, see his “A Reply to My Critics,” 248–9. 70 Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” 124; Skinner, “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 165. 71 Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” 132. 72 Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 1, xi–xiii. 73 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 105. 74 Prokhovnik, “An Interview with Quentin Skinner,” 276. 75 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 104. 76 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” in Meaning and Context, 110. 77 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” in Meaning and Context, 111.

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78 Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” in Meaning and Context, 117. 79 “It is by describing and thereby commending certain courses of action as (say) courageous or honest, while describing and condemning others as treacherous or disloyal, [that] we sustain our picture of the actions and states of affairs which we wish either to disavow or legitimate.” Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action, ” 12. 80 Skinner, “Retrospect,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 175, 178. 81 Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 2, 352–5. 82 See Skinner, The Foundations, vols. I and II, back cover of paperback edition, and cited in Tully, “The Pen Is a Mighty Sword,” 17. 83 Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations,” 245–7. Skinner ‘s objection to the search for metaphysical beliefs is expressed in his early writings as well, for example, in “Meaning and Understanding,” 41. 84 Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations,” 245. 85 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 67. 86 Skinner, “Retrospect,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 178. 87 Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 1, x. 88 Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 1, xi. 89 Skinner The Foundations, vol. 1, 27. 90 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 32–49. See also Skinner, “Analysis of Political Thought and Action,” in Meaning and Context, 99. 91 Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” 132. Skinner cites Taylor’s “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” to support his argument. See Tully, Meaning and Context, 313n33. Taylor speaks of “the artificiality of the distinction between social reality and the language of description of that social reality … To separate the two and distinguish them … is forever to miss the point.” Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in PP2, 34. 92 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 103–6. 93 Skinner, “Retrospect,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1. 94 Skinner, “Surveying the Foundations,” 237n3. 95 Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 64. 96 Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 86–9. 97 Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 202. 98 Skinner argues that “there is one fundamental assumption shared by virtually all the contributors to the current debate about social freedom. Even Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin are able to agree on it: that it is only if we can give content to the idea of objective human flourishing that we can hope to make sense of any theory purporting to connect the concept



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of individual liberty with virtuous acts of public service. The thesis I propose to defend is that this shared and central assumption is a mistake.” Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 197. 99 Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 197. 100 Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 197–8. 101 “a theory that enjoyed a brilliant though short-lived revival in Renaissance Europe before being challenged and eventually eclipsed by the more individualistic (and contractarian) styles of political reasoning that triumphed in the course of the seventeenth century.” Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 203. 102 Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 217. 103 Skinner, “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” 218. 104 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 110–12. 105 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 8–10, 16. 106 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 15. 107 Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 16. 108 Taylor, “The Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 219–24. 109 Taylor, “The Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 228, 224. 110 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 257, 284. 111 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 258. 112 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 242–3. 113 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 254. 114 Skinner, “Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation of Texts,” 77. 115 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 48. 116 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 244. 117 Skinner, “Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation of Texts,” 77; Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 270–1. 118 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 252, 287. 119 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 239–44. 120 Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” 255–6. 121 As Tully observes in “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 198–9. 122 Palonen, Quentin Skinner, 138. 6.  James Tully’s Aspectival Approach to the Study of Politics 1 Tully had other early influences in addition to these, including the French post-structuralism of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, applied in England by Keith Tribe; and hermeneutics, “especially Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor.” Tully, “Locke’s Analysis of Property,” in An Approach to Political Philosophy, 98.

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2 Tully, A Discourse on Property, ix, xi. See also Tully, “Locke’s Analysis of Property,” 98. 3 James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context; Brett and Tully, eds., Rethinking the Foundations. 4 Tully, “Preface,” ix. 5 Tully, A Discourse on Property, ix, 177nn1–2. 6 Tully, A Discourse on Property, ix. 7 Tully, “Locke’s Analysis of Property,” 98–9. 8 Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 1, 27. 9 I use this comparison as a term of art, not to suggest that Macpherson’s thesis is an intellectual forgery, but to explain how careful historical study can discredit anachronistic claims. On Valla’s importance, see Skinner, The Foundations, vol. 1, 201–3. 10 Tully, A Discourse on Property, ix–x, 99; Tully, “Property, Self-Government, and Consent,” 109. 11 Tully, A Discourse on Property, 143. 12 Tully “Locke on Liberty,” 57–82 (reprinted as “Liberty and Natural Law” in Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 281–314). 13 Tully, “Locke on Liberty,” 57–8. 14 In part because Tully’s early influences were primarily those more sympathetic to realist approaches such as Dunn, Skinner, and Taylor. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 98. Tully cites John Dunn, “Practicing History and Social Science on Realist Assumptions” in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. C. Hookway and P. Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). He also cites several essays by Quentin Skinner, some of which were republished in Tully, Meaning and Context. Tully also makes several references to Taylor. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 1, 78, 90, 98, 127, 134, 136, 283, 268, 283, 287. 15 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy”; revised and reprinted in Heyes, The Grammar of Politics, 17–42; revised and reprinted as “Situated Creatively: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” in Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 1: Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 39–70. 16 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 1, 78, 265, 268, 275, 276, 277, 283. 17 This was first presented to a conference on Locke held at Oxford University, 5–7 September 1990, and published in Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy. 18 Tully, “Diversity’s Gambit Declined,” 195–6. 19 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 275.



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20 Tully, ”Situated Creatively,” 39–40. 21 Tully “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 172. 22 Tully “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 193. 23 Tully “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 172–3. 24 Tully “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 192–7. 25 Tully “Situated Creatively,” 39, 68. 26 Tully “Situated Creatively,” 63. 27 Tully “Situated Creatively,” 63n54. 28 Tully cites section 115 in his “Introduction” as well as in “After the Macpherson Thesis” and “Progress and Scepticism.” Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 1, 78, 266; Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 174; Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 58. 29 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 265. 30 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 275, 276. 31 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 189. 32 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 268, 276. 33 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 182. 34 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 276. 35 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 268; Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 180–1. 36 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 184. 37 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 276. 38 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 198. 39 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 183–5, 195–6. 40 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 183; PI, ss. 172–3; see also PI, ss. 170, 175, 177. 41 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 185. 42 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 322–3. 43 This is something Tully reiterates in “Recognition and Dialogue,” 89. 44 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 183–5, 196. 45 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 322. 46 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 188–9, 195. 47 In defending this view, Tully cites Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the river and its bed in OC, ss. 96–9; as well as PI, ss. 23 and 68; and Hilmy, The Later Wittgenstein, 180–9. Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 184, 202n32. 48 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 274–6. 49 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 173–4. 50 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 78, 265, 266, 275, 276. 51 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 173–4. 52 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 276.

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53 Tully, “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,” 183. 54 This was first presented to a conference on Locke held at Oxford University, 5–7 September 1990, and published in An Approach to Political Philosophy. 55 Tully, http://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/politicalscience/people/ directory/emeritusfaculty/tullyjim.php. 56 Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key (hereafter PPNK), vol. 1, 269. 57 In RF, 119–55. 58 Tully says that his aspectival approach is indebted to PI, ss. 193–220, and Stephen Mulhall’s On Being in the World. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 224. 59 Tully introduces these two arguments in chapter 4 of Strange Multiplicity, 105–8, crediting Taylor’s article “To Follow a Rule” as an authoritative source. He reiterates the importance of these arguments throughout the two volumes of PPNK; see, for example, PPNK, vol. 1, 26–7, and PPNK, vol. 2, 244–5. 60 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 105–8; PPNK, vol. 1, 26–7; PPNK, vol. 2, 244–5. 61 PI, ss. 91–2, 102, 126; Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 105-108; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 26–7; PPNK, vol. 2, 244–5. 62 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 107; Tully, “The Challenge,” 218–19; Tully, “Introduction,” 2; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 26–7, 60–1, 167–9, 186–7; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 89, 159, 244, 270. 63 OC, s. 204. 64 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 65–7. 65 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 26. 66 Tully, “Dialogue,” 145. 67 On the contrast between the political approach and the theoretical activity of laying down definitive rules, see Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition.” See also Tully, “Dialogue.” 68 Taylor’s argument is found in his “Political Theory and Practice.” In the introduction to “Locke on Liberty,” Tully brilliantly sums up in a few sentences this practical nature of politics and its connections to Aristotle, Taylor, and Wittgenstein. 69 Tully Strange Multiplicity, 109–13, 133, 182. 70 Tully Strange Multiplicity, 113. 71 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 24, 60–2, 115, 143; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 90–5, 101–2; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 19–24, 29; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 300–13; PPNK, vol. 2, ch. 1. 72 PI, s. 131; Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 110; PPNK, vol. 2, 29. 73 Tully Strange Multiplicity, 57, 110–11, 115, 131, 164; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue”; Tully, “Approaches”; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles”; PPNK, vol. 1; PPNK, vol. 2. 74 Tully Strange Multiplicity, 39, 110, 115, 131, 164.



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75 I am grateful to James Tully for helping me see this aspect of monologue, which emerged in conversation at the conference “Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity: James Tully’s Public Philosophy.” Le groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec, 24–26 April 2014. 76 Tully, “The Unattained Yet Attainable Democracy”; Tully, “Introduction”; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 91; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 20; PPNK, vol. 1. 77 Tully Strange Multiplicity, 109, 115. 78 Tully Strange Multiplicity, 110–11, 182. 79 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 35, 98, 115; Tully, “Struggles,” 475, 477; Tully, “The Challenge,” 215, 226, 230; Tully, “Introduction,” 16, 20; Tully, “Identity Politics,” 528–9, 532; Tully “Recognition and Dialogue,” 94, 99; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 23; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 30, 47, 151, 163, 176–7, 181, 201, 205, 305, 310; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 85, 110, 229. 80 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 57. 81 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 34, 57, 110, 115. 82 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 25–6, 33, 133. 83 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 60–2. 84 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 57. 85 Tully, “The Challenge,” 219; Tully, “Identity Politics,” 518–19; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 168. Tully writes that cultures are negotiated “both by their members and through their interaction with others.” Strange Multiplicity, 11. 86 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 10–14, 24, 46; Tully, “Struggles”; Tully, “The Challenge,” 212; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 160. 87 Tully “Struggles,” 470; Tully, “Approaches,” 855–6; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 86; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 17; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 292–3. Tully defines a “norm” as “a relation of meaning and power that constitutes the behaviour and expectations of the partners to varying degrees.” Tully, ”Recognition and Dialogue,” 88; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 295. 88 He describes this as “struggles over the relationships of communication and power through which we are governed.” Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 90; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 299. 89 Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 86–90; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 4, 293–300; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, ch. 9. 90 Tully calls this “broader” focus the “conflicting demands for recognition of individuals, minorities, nations, and peoples that involve the redistribution of political and economic power by means of various forms of legal and political pluralism.” Tully, “Approaches,” 855.

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91 Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition”; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 298–9. See also Temelini, “Dialogical Approaches”; and Temelini, “The Canadian Student Movement.” 92 Tully, “Struggles,” 469–71. 93 Tully, “Struggles”; Tully, “The Challenge”; Tully, “The Unattained yet Attainable Democracy”; Tully, “Introduction,” 5; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 86; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 17–19; PPNK, vol. 1, chs. 5, 6, 8, 9; Owen and Tully, “Redistribution and Recognition.” 94 Tully, “The Challenge”; Tully, “The Unattained yet Attainable Democracy,” 4–5; Tully, “Introduction,” 5, 21–3; Tully, “Identity Politics”; Tully, Recognition and Dialogue”; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles”; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, chs. 4, 5, and 9. 95 Tully, “Struggles,” 479–80; Tully, “The Challenge,” 216; Tully, “Introduction,” 5; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 189, 303n26. 96 Tully, “The Challenge,” 213–16; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 161–4. 97 Tully, “Struggles,” 477–9; Tully, “The Challenge,” 2001, 5, 21–2; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 100; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 28; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 207, 311; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 232. 98 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 3–4. 99 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 1–30, 183–4. 100 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 57, 111. 101 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 24; Turner, This is Not a Peace Pipe, 74-87. 102 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 6–8, 23–4, 34–5. 103 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 31. 104 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 36, 39, 43, 58. 105 Tully, Strange Multiplicity,. 43–4, 56. Tully provides an extraordinary number of examples of this modern language in authoritative authors such as Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, and of how Europeans used their languages of politics to justify waging war on other nations and appropriating their land – that is, to justify imperialism. Tully also mentions how historically significant public events, such as the French and American revolutions, contributed to the dominance of the modern uniform language of constitutionalism. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 58–98. 106 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 44–5. 107 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 31. 108 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 22–3, 173–4. 109 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 99–100. 110 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 117–24. 111 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 26, 181–2.



Notes to pages 191–8

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112 Cavell, “Declining Decline,” 75. 113 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 18. 114 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 22–6, 56–7. 115 Tully introduces this remarkable comparison beginning on page 103 of Strange Multiplicity. 116 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 6, 8, 26, 28–9. 117 Tully, “Dialogue,” 148. This is why Tully’s approach cannot accurately be characterized as non-foundational as Simpson and Forst suggest. Simpson, “‘Other Worlds Are Actual’”; Forst, “The Power of Critique.” 118 CV, 7e. 119 Tully makes this very clear regarding the question of ecological ethics: “I am not saying that agreements and institutions across the negotiated order of governance from the local to the global are not important. Quite the opposite. Because there is neither a definitive form of them nor a selfguaranteeing mode of implementation, they are too important to be left beyond the bounds of ecological theory and practice, as if they were some sort of separate and merely supplementary field. Ecological ethics does not come to a rest with an agreement or an institution. It is a permanent task.” Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 89. 120 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 135. 121 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 21, 26. See also 141. 122 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 15. 123 Among the many influential political theorists, it is worth mentioning Tully’s emphasis on the importance of Hannah Arendt. And he singles out Mahatma Gandhi among the notable exemplars of public philosophy. Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 8, ch. 4; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 308–9. 124 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 20. 125 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, “Introduction” and ch. 1; Tully “Dialogue,” 145. 126 Laden, “The Key to/of Public Philosophy.” 127 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 8–9; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, ch. 8. 128 Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 90. 129 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 9, 20, 25. 130 In this respect, my reading differs in emphasis from that of both Owen and Forst. Owen, “Political Philosophy”; Forst, “The Power of Critique.” 131 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 16. 132 Tully, “Introduction,” 23n6; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 18, 34, 36, 62–3. Tully cites Taylor’s Sources of the Self as a notable example of the survey method in PPNK, vol. 1, 34n31 and 36.

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133 For a more detailed exploration of these similarities, see my “Dialogical Approaches.” 134 “We may dream of utopian models … as we wish … But if we wish to confront the historical situation into which we are thrown, then … we need to situate our question in the existing field of relationships.” Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 186. Among the clearest articulations of the reality of ongoing dialogue is found in Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, chs. 8 and 9; and in Taylor’s case, this is the running theme of the 2008 report he co-authored. Bouchard and Taylor, “Building the Future.” 135 There are lots of other examples of Taylor’s participation in public dialogues. One can point, for example, to his role as a regular political commentator on Canadian television and radio. And he has contributed briefs to many commissions of inquiry, including the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the Commission on the Political and Constitutional Future of Quebec (Bélanger–Campeau Commission). 136 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 33n30. 137 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 17, 29–35; Tully, “Global Disorder,” 1–2. 138 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, chs. 1, 9. 139 Deveaux, “A Deliberative Approach,” 781. 140 McCarthy, “Dialogical Freedom,” 45. 141 Forst, “The Power of Critique”; Maclure, “Perspicuous Representation.” 142 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy, 276. 143 Maclure “Perspicuous Representation,” 56. 144 Maclure, “Perspicuous Representation,” 55. 145 Maclure, “Perspicuous Representation,” 55–6. 146 Maclure, “Perspicuous Representation,” 60. 147 Maclure, “Perspicuous Representation,” 283n12. 148 Maclure, “Perspicuous Representation,” 61. 149 Tully, “Struggles,” 476; Tully, “Identity Politics,” 532; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 102; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 29; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 313–14. 150 Tully, “Struggles”; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue”; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 16. This idea of reasonable disagreement, a central aspect of Tully’s approach to politics, is something he has learned principally from Foucault, Rawls, and Laden. Tully, “Struggles,” 472; Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 95; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 192; Tully, PPNK, vol. 2, 88; Laden, Reasonably Radical. 151 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 310. 152 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 133–5.



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153 Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 37–8. 154 Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 16–27; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 310. 155 Tully, “Recognition and Dialogue,” 99; Tully, “Reconciling Struggles,” 27; Tully, PPNK, vol. 1, 310. 156 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 17–22, 101, 113–14, 117–24, 141–5, 163, 209. 157 Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 18, 212.

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