PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN

ANNUAL CONFERENCE 9TH-11TH APRIL, 1999

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Michael Peters

School of Education

The University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland

New Zealand

Tel. 64 09 373 7599 Ext 5044

Fax 64 09 373 7455

Email: ma.peters@auckland.ac.nz

©1998

Michael Peters

The University of Auckland

©1998

It is probably true that Wittgenstein deliberately and self-consciously developed his way of philosophizing and his unmistakable philosophical style by drawing on a range of philosophical traditions and genres: the aphoristic and ironic tradition of Lichtenberg, Nietzsche and others, who emphasized the nature of philosophical insight; the significance of the parable and fable as literary elements to teach a moral or illustrate a point; the characteristic use of the thought-experiment; the distinctive use of a dialogical structure with an imaginary interlocutor; and, the use of the autobiographical genre interwoven with the resurrection of a religious mode of confession. Such a catalogue of some of the elements of Wittgenstein’s style does not either exhaust a possible list of characteristics or describe the effects of its overall arrangement. Wittgenstein uses jokes, riddles, puzzles, equations, pictures, figure drawings, a persistent stream of questions, rhetorical questions and gestures, analogies, metaphor upon metaphor; and he arranges his aphorisms or paragraphs, often numbering them, into sequences, as a poet might arrange the lines of his or her poetry, or a musician might compose his or her work. In this paper I want to comment upon one aspect of Wittgenstein’s style which we can call the confessional both as a mode of philosophizing and as a mode of ‘writing the self’. I shall argue that there are strong links between Wittgenstein’s confessional mode of philosophizing and his life -- philosophy is, for him, above all a form of life -- and I shall also argue that there are, similarly strong connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, such that we might profitably investigate the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice that encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico-poetical self-constitution.

Wittgenstein makes explicit reference to confession in both a personal sense and in terms of its language game. For instance, the remark I have chosen as the opening quotation that he makes in 1931 in the posthumous selection Culture and Value made by Georg von Wright (one of his three literary executors), or the remark he makes the same year:

Later, in the Investigations, Wittgenstein draws our attention to the language game of confession, making the following analysis:

These criteria belong to a particular language-game which is underwritten, as it were, by a set of practices constituting a cultural form of life. At the personal level Wittgenstein was, by all accounts, a tortured individual who needed to confess his ‘sins’. He was also a man, who though not a believer, saw the world from a religious point of view. It is well known that Wittgenstein discovered Tolstoy’s Gospels in a bookshop in Galacia while serving at the front and kept it with him constantly, memorizing by heart lengthy passages. During this period and afterwards he often thought of suicide, although it was not regarded as an ethical option. He remarks in the Notebooks: 1914-1916 (Wittgenstein, 1979: 91): "If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then suicide is not allowed. This throws light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin". Wittgenstein, early in his life, had thought deeply about the ethics of suicide and in many respects his philosophy can be regarded as a positive response to both the cultural pessimism and nihilism of fin-de-sèicle Vienna that had created cultural conditions for viewing suicide as an obligation. Yet Otto Weininger’s suicide (in Beethoven’s house) when he was twenty-three years old and those of his brothers -- three out of four committed suicide -- stayed with him for the rest of his life.

His biographer, Ray Monk (1990: 367-72) reconstructs the extraordinary events that surrounded his preparation for his own confession which he undertook in 1936 at the same time as completing sections 1-188 of what was to become the Investigations. The confession was to be read to a circle of close friends (Maurice Drury, G. E. Moore, Paul Engelmann, Fania Pascal and Francis Skinner) and family. He delivered his confession (read and recited it) to family and close friends in Vienna around Christmas 1936, and to intimate friends at Cambridge in the New Year. There were a number of minor sins describing his weaknesses and two major ‘sins’ remembered by Fania Pascal: what Wittgenstein saw as his attempt to cover up his Jewish ancestry (a sin of omission, as Monk notes) and the action where he lied to his school headmaster denying he hit a girl pupil in his charge. Wittgenstein surprised the villagers of Otterthal by appearing on their doorsteps that same year (i.e., 1936) to apologize personally to children he had hurt. Monk (1990: 372) quotes Wittgenstein’s reflections on his confessions as bringing him "into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness", and he suggests that Wittgenstein considered confession "as a kind of surgery, an operation to remove cowardice".

I have begun this section in a contentious way by deliberately confusing the categories of (auto)biography and philosophy in order to generate and name a ‘third space’ where they meet and commingle: that set of practices which in the West concerns the constitution of the self -- and that which Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche and Heidegger’s genealogical investigations, calls technologies of the self.

While critics like F. R. Leavis have been contemptuous of Wittgenstein’s literariness, belittling the narrowness of his reading and demarcating strict disciplinary boundaries between literature and philosophy, it is clear that Wittgenstein, himself, was more aware than Leavis was to give him credit not only of questions of form and style but their central relevance to philosophy as a form of life. In particular, Wittgenstein thought deeply about the literary genre of autobiography as a practice of writing and talking about oneself. Béla Szabados (1992: 2) claims that "Wittgenstein, in his observations on the roles and functions and possibility of autobiography, sees the death of traditional autobiography and points to ways of transforming it to suit our present needs". Szabados notes that Wittgenstein had contemplated writing his own autobiography. He argues that the eclipse of traditional autobiography, anticipated and initiated by Wittgenstein, is an exhaustion of cultural forms that previously anchored or shored up confessional practices and this exhaustion can be seen in changes to the autobiographical form that have occurred since Augustine and Rousseau.

We can suggest with Szabados that in respect to the autobiographical form, most importantly, Wittgenstein attacks the Cartesian idea of self-knowledge, as something incorrigible or indubitable and as depending upon the distinction of mind/body -- an inner self to which only ‘I’ have privileged access (along with God). Wittgenstein not only wants to rid us of this picture of self-knowledge -- there is knowledge only where it makes sense also to talk of doubt -- but also to overcome the very possibility of a private language. Thus, for Wittgenstein, autobiography as a form based upon the public truthful disclosure and expiation of the private self, conceived of as a unity or an essence, is an exercise in self-deception. Indeed, the notion of self-disclosure has become suspect, especially as philosophers and social scientists have become aware of the extent to which selves are constituted through discourse and cultural practices. The notion of a self-transparency based upon an epistemically privileged access to one’s own inner thoughts, beliefs and motivations not only begins to look a little naïve after Freud but also tends to reveal itself as yet another form of self-policing or self-monitoring that advances certain doctrines that are inherently manipulative.

Rather for Wittgenstein these quaint notions of self and the now exhausted forms of life of life that once anchored them have been replaced by new practices. Szabados (1992: 6) suggests that Wittgenstein takes a characteristic turn through the "contextualization of self-writing" revealing an irreducible plurality and complexity of language games that are played in the autobiographical enterprise: "confessing, complaining, bragging, accusing, blaming, apologizing, expressing, and so on". On this basis the conventional notion of autobiography (or confession as a particular truthful instantiation of the game of self-writing) as giving a truthful, full, consistent and coherent self-account, looks decidedly outmoded. Szabados (1992: 7) writes:

The demise of traditional autobiography does not imply that Wittgenstein has given up on the self, either its acceptance or its transformation, but only that there are a myriad of ways that self-deception intrudes to prevent us from truthful self-expression, self-understanding or self-description. Like philosophy itself, there is no final resting place for the autobiographical subject, no final self-overcoming: the subject in relation to itself must continually work on its self on the understanding that such work is worthwhile but is never completed and that, inescapably, as such subjects ‘we’ return to our selves everyday. This, perhaps, it the best way to interpret Wittgenstein’s remarks about himself in his conversations, notebooks and letters.

The selection from Culture and Value are littered with remarks that Wittgenstein made at different times on the relation of ‘sins’ and personal virtues to writing and practicing philosophy. Here is a representative sample, mentioning pride and the importance of both truthfulness and courage to philosophy as a way of life, which come from the last fourteen years of his life (1937 to 1951):

These comments are supplemented in Culture and Value by reference to ‘sins’ of envy (58e), pettiness (86e), and vanity (47e, 48e, 57e 67e), and remarks concerning the relations between truthfulness, the necessity for self-scrutiny or self-understanding, on the one hand, and questions of style, on the other. Some of the most poignant passages that act as a further witness to Wittgenstein’s confessional tone are given in his prefaces and forewords. In the Foreword to Philosophical Remarks, for instance, Wittgenstein (1975: 7) writes:

Wittgenstein was undoubtedly influenced by the confessional form adopted, in different ways, by both Augustine and Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, Wittgenstein was strongly influenced by Tolstoy, certainly by his Gospels but also, in a critical way, in terms of Tolstoy assertion that " a thing’s significance (importance) lies in its being something everyone can understand" (Culture and Value, p. 17e). Wittgenstein puzzles over the way in which people import meanings in their understanding a subject and the way that "what most people want to see" obscures their understanding, especially self-understanding. As Wittgenstein (1980: 17e) comments further: "the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty to do with the will, rather than the intellect" (my emphasis). Happiness is to be found only by doing the "will of God" (Notebooks: 76). Wittgenstein echoes Tolstoy’s view that "idle reflection" is a metaphysical temptation that we must purge ourselves of, and that knowledge of truth is to be found only in the practical life -- in getting on with one’s life, engaging in a form of life rather than attempting to resolve worries and anxieties in the abstract. We might also say that, like Tolstoy, Wittgenstein romantically valorizes the life of working people. It is highly probable that Wittgenstein read Tolstoy’s Confession and quite clear that Wittgenstein admired Tolstoy’s courage and fortitude in honestly reassessing his own life at fifty-one, believing that he (even as the author of the highly acclaimed War and Peace and Anna Karenina) had accomplished nothing. Tolstoy’s mid-life spiritual crisis served as a model for Wittgenstein -- not one to emulate, not a literary, autobiographical or confessional model, but rather a model of faith, or the regaining of faith, of the ‘way back’, and of the honesty and integrity with which Tolstoy confronts himself.

Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk makes a useful observation upon the question of confession as a philosophical form. He notes that Wittgenstein not only begins the Investigations with a quote from Augustine’s Confessions because it contains a picture of language learning that must be examined and uprooted, but also because, "for Wittgenstein, all philosophy, in so far as it is pursued honestly and decently, begins with a confession" (Monk, 1990: 366). Philosophy modeled on Augustine’s Confessions becomes ritual purification and quest for forgiveness. Monk’s claim might be inflated but it does focus attention upon Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy as a way of life, its existential demands and the torments he, himself, suffered. Wittgenstein writes at one point (circa 1944) that "the whole planet can suffer no greater torment than a single soul" and suggests the confessional mode as remedy: "Anyone in such torment who has the gift of opening his heart, rather than contracting it, accepts the means of salvation in his heart". And someone who "penitently opens his heart to God in confession lays it open for other men too". By doing so, "he loses the dignity that goes with his personal prestige and becomes like a child" (CV, 46e).

The Latin word confessio means something like "acknowledging". Confession is both a declaration and disclosure, an acknowledgment or admission of a crime, fault, or weakness. The acknowledgment is, in part, an act to make oneself known, to disclose one’s identity which focuses on the form of a discourse of private feeling or opinion. In its religious form, confession involves the acknowledgment of one’s sins orally as a duty, with repentance and desire of absolution. In the literary sense, "confession is the deliberate, self-conscious attempt of an individual to identity himself, to explain his nature to the audience who represents the kind of community he needs to exist in and confirm him" (Doody, 1980: 185). As such it is both a communicative as well as expressive act. Confession is a narrative in which we create ourselves; in which we create our own narrative, reworking the past, but we must do it in public. It seems when the subject is creating itself through writing, culturally it feels compelled to tell the truth about itself.

Augustine’s double purpose was to acknowledge his own weakness and the power of God manifested or (shewn) in his own life. There are some strong similarities between Augustine and Wittgenstein, although Wittgenstein’s achievement in the Investigations is precisely a renewal of the confessional genre, without its modernist assumptions concerning the unity and transparency of the self. There are also some significant continuities.

Augustine’s self-awareness may signal perhaps the first modern form of self-description, distinct from those that survive from the Roman or Greek worlds. Certainly, there is in Wittgenstein’s Investigations nothing of Augustine’s descriptions of his relationship with God. Yet, in Augustine writing as much as in Wittgenstein’s, there is the same awareness of the author-function, of their respective statuses as both writers and readers, of their relation to their audience and the way one’s life is shaped by language.

It could be argued that both Augustine and Wittgenstein move between narrative and reflection; that their styles are similar in the sense that they shift among different registers and styles; that they both epitomize a ‘polyphonic’ discourse rather than a single, clear, melodic line. We might say that Wittgenstein’s Investigations is a spiritual autobiography and a pedagogical text that teaches us that the question "who am I?" cannot be pursued separately from the questions "who are we?".

In The Confessions (Ch. 10 3.3), Augustine writes:

We might say that the Investigations is also about truth in this autobiographical sense but that Wittgenstein believed it could only be shewn by the nature of his investigations; it could not be said or stated. It could be said that the same uncertainly and self-examination that characterizes Augustine also characterizes Wittgenstein; that truthfulness resides in the uniqueness of ‘voice’ and personal style. In the same way both Wittgenstein and Augustine wanted their readers to use their works to begin the process of looking at themselves.

Phillip Shields (1997: 5) in his book Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, writes:

Shields (1997: x) suggests in his Preface:

Other scholars have also noted the importance of confession and the confessional mode to Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings and to philosophy considered as both an ascetic practice and spiritual exercise. They have noted, for instance, the influences upon him of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, of Tolstoy’s Gospels. They have noted his search for forgiveness, his continual battle with his conscience, his on-going struggle with God, his monk-like hemiticism, his early mysticism and his emphasis on the ineffable or inexpressible, his ‘religious point of view’, his view of philosophy as therapy, and his courageous attempt to live the pure spiritual life (see, for example, Malcolm, 1994; Sontag, 1995; Shields, 1997).

Von Wright (1962: 21) notes that "The philosophical sections of St. Augustine’s Confessions show a strong resemblance to Wittgenstein’s own way of doing philosophy". Stanley Cavell (1995: 177) in a set notes on the opening paragraphs of the Investigations provides a stunning analysis which interweaves the form and substance of Augustine’s confession with Wittgenstein’s own style and philosophical concerns, when he suggests that

Such first-person narratives or language games, abstracted and systematized, are, Cavell claims, part of ordinary language philosophy; they must be games that "I imagine myself to play".

In a later essay, Cavell (1996: 381) expands upon this conception when he considers the Investigations a modernist work -- "an everyday aesthetics of itself" -- in the sense that "its portrait of the human is recognizable as one of the modern self" or subject. Cavell’s interpretation resists easy formulation: he suggests that the literary ‘gestures’ in the Investigations and its connection with a modern portrait of the self

Certainly, in the English-speaking philosophy world Cavell’s insights come closest, in my opinion, to capturing the spirit and significance of Wittgenstein’s style of philosophizing and the ways it resonates with older forms of philosophy reviving the confession and the meditation as forms -- as genres --that still offer a way to practice philosophy as a form of life.

I am also struck by the work of Pierre Hadot -- the renown French scholar of ancient Greek and Latin philosophical texts -- in both emphasizing the spiritual phenomenon of ancient philosophy and in interpreting Wittgenstein in this light, playing upon the resemblances to Augustine. Arnold Davidson (1995: 17) comments that Hadot’s interpretation of Augustine and Wittgenstein share the same insistence of uniting conceptual and literary structure or, at least, of not treating them separately. He suggests that Hadot argues that the Investigations requires a certain literary genre which cannot be divorced from Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, and he quotes Hadot’s early review as follows:

I have cited it from Davidson because Hadot’s interpretation is remarkable in Wittgensteinian criticism and certainly a very early recognition of the importance of questions of form and style to Wittgenstein, the man -- to his ethics and aesthetics --- and also to his view of philosophy. As Davidson (1995: 18) remarks, it was no doubt Hadot’s understanding of ancient philosophy as involving ‘spiritual exercises’ that enabled him to recognize in Wittgenstein aspects that represent a continuity with an ancient conception of philosophy as a way of life. Hadot, Davidson informs us, used Wittgenstein’s idea of language games to argue that we must locate the meaning of positions adopted by philosophers within their historical language game. For instance, we must avoid the temptation to read ancient texts as expressions of an author’s psychological states or character. Applying his insights to his own interpretation of Augustine’s confessions, Hadot, who had originally believed that Augustine’s use of the ‘I’ characterizes the appearance of the modern self, comes to realize that the autobiographical part of the Confessions, he argues, is not as important as one might be led to believe. The ‘I’ of the Confessions continues the same function as the ‘I’ of Job, David or Paul, that is, it functions as the ideal psychology of Adam.

In his investigations of "spiritual exercises" in Latin antiquity Hadot (1995: 81) describes in the philosophy of the Stoics the way in which "thought, as it were, takes itself as its own subject-matter" as the basis for an art of living where the individual is transformed into an authentic state of heightened self-consciousness providing both inner peace and freedom. No systematic treatise of these exercises has come down to us and Hadot reconstructs them from a close reading of ancient texts in order to emphasize the consequences of such thought for philosophy itself. By reference to Philo of Alexandria Hadot enumerates the following list: research (zetesis), thorough investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening (akroasis), attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), indifference to indifferent things; meditations (meletai), therapies of the passions, remembrance of good things, and the accomplishment of duties. The specifically intellectual exercises of reading, listening, research, and investigation provide the substance for meditation, which can be distinguished from attention (the fundamental spiritual attitude of the Stoics), and from the practical exercises designed to create habits. In this context, Hadot analyses the Hellenistic and Roman spiritual exercises in terms of learning to live, learning to dialogue (first brought to Western consciousness in the figure of Socrates), learning to die, and learning how to read. It is especially this last notion that is worth pondering in relation to Wittgenstein and pedagogy. The quest for self-realization and improvement is the final goal of the spiritual exercises and this goal, Hadot (1995: 102) informs us is shared by all philosophical schools of antiquity. Through ‘spiritual exercises’ -- including ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ -- the self is liberated from its egoism, its passions and its anxieties. This thought must sound so familiar to us late moderns, especially in a post-Wittgensteinian (and post-Foucauldian) age, at a time when the self as subject (and object of its own gaze) has been the basis of so much debate in terms of both the Cartesian picture (the self as a unified, transparent, essence) that held us captive and technologies of self.

In saying this I am aware that Foucault (1986) drew heavily on Hadot’s work on ‘spiritual exercises’ when he was completing The Care of the Self , and Hadot (1995), in a piece entitled "Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the self’" (pp. 206-213), takes Foucault to task for the inaccuracies of his interpretation of Greco-Roman ethics as "an ethics of the pleasure one takes in oneself" (p. 207). I am also aware that Foucault (1997) writes a stunning essay entitled "Writing the Self" that also, it seems, draws on Hadot’s ground-breaking work. Foucault’s essay is part of what he calls his studies of "arts of the self" which are designed to explore the "aesthetics of existence" and to inquire into the government of self and others that characterizes his later work. I mention it here because there is an obvious connection both to Hadot and to Wittgenstein: his essay provides a fruitful way of making sense of Wittgenstein’s confessional, autobiographical, work as work on the self and also links firmly to the question of pedagogy as that set of cultural discipleship that has passed through many transitions.

Let me see if I can make good these claims. Foucault’s essay analyzes a passage from Athanasius’s Vita Antoni. I shall repeat only the opening sentence of the text to which Foucault refers for it weighs so precisely on the preceding discussion:

Foucault notes that this "self-writing" "offsets the dangers of solitude" and exposes our deeds to a possible gaze; at the same time the practice works on thoughts as well as actions, which brings it into line with the role of confession (in the early Christian literature). It permits, at the same time, a retrospective analysis of

These elements are to be found in Seneca and Plutarch but take a different form and are based upon different values. As he says,

Exercises in this sense involve essentially a form of pedagogy and Foucault’s remarks here seem to me peculiarly relevant to learning how to read Wittgenstein -- his "self-writings" -- and to the question of pedagogy.

In relation to the ancients Hadot suggests we must learn how to read them. Whether it be the dialogues of Plato, the class notes of Aristotle, or the treatises of Plotinus we must learn to take into account the concrete situation in which they were produced. As he writes:

We must also, I would suggest, learn how to read Wittgenstein, precisely because he is too close to us, too familiar and yet also too distant; because he, like the ancients (and Nietzsche, Bergson and existentialism, as Hadot remarks), resurrects and embodies the notion of philosophy as a way of life -- yet he provides no easy disciple relationship to those who seek to understand him or to follow his way of philosophizing.

I think the conjunction between Wittgenstein and Foucault to be instructive when investigating modern forms of pedagogy, and the historical transition from church- to state-based forms of formal schooling. Foucault (1986:29) in The Use of Pleasure talks of technologies of the self as "models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for deciphering the self by oneself, for the transformation one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object."

Nicholas Rose (1989: 240) comments:

Foucault reminds us that confession originated with Catholicism. He views it as the principal technology that emerge for Catholicism to manage the sexual lives of believers. It was restricted to monasteries in the 17th century. With the counterreformation confession underwent a profound change applying not just acts but also to one’s thoughts. In the 18th century confession became a complex technology of secular discourses developing in pedagogy, medicine, psychiatry, and literature, and reaching its secular highpoint in Freud’s ‘taking cure’. Since Freud one might say that the secularization of confession was ‘scientized’ through clinical codifications, personal examinations, histological techniques, the general documentation and date collection of personal data, the proliferation of interpretive schemas and the development of a whole host of therapeutic techniques for normalization.

With these new techniques for normalization and individualization we are "obliged to be free": self-inspection replaces the confessional as new forms of self-regulation become manifest. As Rose (1989: 220) writes:

Discipline "entails training in the minute arts of self-scrutiny, self-evaluation, and self-regulation ranging from the control of the body, speech, and movement in school, through the mental drill inculcated in school and university, to the Puritan practices of self-inspection and obedience to divine reason" (Rose, 1989: 222)

Where Foucault alerts us to the way that modern pedagogies are a secular technology of the self in which self-regulation and self-examination comes to occupy center ground, Wittgenstein teaches us that philosophy in a pedagogical sense is always autobiographical and that, insofar as we belong to a particular form of life, we are compelled to narratively recreate ourselves. Where Foucault emphasizes the power/knowledge grid in which we turn the gaze of examination back upon our selves as objects, Wittgenstein shifts the language-game of confession from one of truth-seeking to one of the meaning we might give our lives.

In terms of the Wittgenstein-Foucault construction made in this essay we might pose the following questions as a starting point for a problematic that takes seriously questions of "reading and writing the self" as they embody historical and changing forms of pedagogy:

• In what pedagogical language-games does the child learn to tell the truth about itself?
• Which are inimical to the child’s interests and which promote the interests of the institution or the teacher over that of the child’s?
• How central are these language-games to the language or narrative creation and reconstruction of the self?
• What cultural forms of autobiographical truth-telling are represented in pedagogical language-games? (What, for instance, is the role of the sculptural, plastic and visual arts here, especially self-portraiture?)
• What are the significance of these confessional forms to teaching and learning?
• How appropriate is it for teachers and students to become conscious of these confessional forms by making them the object of analysis, and what are consequences in shifting the emphasis in pedagogy from truth-telling to meaning-making?