Wittgenstein and Heidegger

Why Wittgenstein and Heidegger? Wittgenstein mentioned Heidegger only once, telling Waismann that he understood what Heidegger meant by being and anxiety. (One thing Wittgenstein and Heidegger shared was dislike of Carnap.) Heidegger mentions Wittgenstein twice, but late in his career. In his Heraclitus Seminar, he expressed approval of Wittgenstein's comparison of philosophical thinking to someone's attempting to escape from a room, not noticing that the door is already open. In the Le Thor Seminars, he expresses severe disapproval for the first proposition of the Tractatus (‘The world is all that is the case’)—a ‘truly eerie statement’. However, the fifteen contributors to this volume give ample evidence that the confrontation of the two iconic philosophers can be fruitful. Stephen Mulhall argues that Heidegger and Wittgenstein assign, to fundamental ontology and grammatical investigation, respectively, the supervisory role in our culture once occupied by theology. Simon Glendinning invokes Wittgenstein to defend Heidegger's seemingly undifferentiated concept of being. Denis McManus elucidates Heidegger's mysterious ‘formal indication’ by comparing it to Wittgenstein's policy of ‘assembling reminders’. David Egan argues that Wittgenstein's situation of language in ordinary social practices is not, despite appearances, an inauthentic submission to das Man: the ungroundedness of our social practices (Wittgenstein) gives rise to anxiety and uncanniness (Heidegger). Charles Guignon finds a kinship between Heidegger's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's depth grammar, both being averse to the Cartesian and Husserlian ego, and ‘seeing human intelligibility as always contextualized and holistic’ (p. 90). Edward Minar explores Wittgenstein and Heidegger attraction to, but ultimate rejection of, idealism. Idealism, and realism, presupposes that there is something—I, we, mind, etc.—independent of and unaffected by the world, on which the world may, or may not, depend. But this is not so: the self, we, and all the concepts in terms of which idealism and realism might be expressed, are indelibly world-saturated. Herman Philipse considers Wittgenstein and Heidegger dismissal of external world scepticism. He locates its source in scientists’ claim that secondary qualities are subjective and in the consequent popularity of the representational theory of perception. Heidegger stumbles on his misconceived underplaying of science, while Wittgenstein provides materials for a more benign interpretation of science. However, brain-in-vat scepticism eludes the clutches of both philosophers. Taylor Carman compares the Tractatus, with its picture theory of meaning, and Heidegger's ‘The Age of the World Picture’. Both maintain that the language of modern science pictures the world, but whereas Heidegger has no qualms about saying this, Wittgenstein regards claims about the relationship between words and the world as unsayable—including such Heidegger-sounding dicta as ‘The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man’. Wittgenstein and Heidegger both began their careers as logicians, but Lee Braver records their disillusionment with a transcendent logic free of human control and human finitude. Wittgenstein is happy to live with contradictions as long as they cause no trouble, and both thinkers suspend the principle of sufficient reason, accepting the ultimate groundlessness of our forms of life, etc. Finitude reappears in Joseph Shear's account of our understanding as a ‘finite ability’, endorsed by both Wittgenstein and Heidegger—in contrast to the infinite intellect postulated by Kant, an intellect that produces its own objects and/or takes them in with a single gulp. Shear connects this finitude with the finitude involved in death, not death in the usual sense but as ‘the possibility of the comprehensive breakdown of the understanding in terms of which entities make sense’ (p. 175). In the view of Theodore R.Schatzki, Heidegger and Wittgenstein complement each other to provide a decent conception of action. For Heidegger an action is an ‘indeterminate, three-dimensional temporal event’ (p. 179), an event involving past, present, and future, but not determined in advance. Wittgenstein adds, more explicitly than Heidegger, that an action is socially constituted, though not socially determined. Stephen Reynolds argues that Heidegger's analysis of the call of conscience ‘articulates a Lutheran conception of human existence’ (p. 195), exemplifying Wittgenstein's conception of a ‘religious picture’ in his Lectures on Religious Belief and in Culture and Value. Hence, ‘Heidegger's existential analytic remains religious in a peculiarly Wittgensteinian sense’ (p. 195). Aaron James Wendland explicates Heidegger's claim, in The Origin of the Work of Art, that ‘All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry [Dichtung]’. His quest leads to a wide-ranging exploration of Heidegger's views on truth and language, especially on the way in which words open up a world and therefore function as works of art. Language enables us to let beings be, to see e.g., a horse in terms of its intrinsic properties, not simply as a means of transport or a potential hamburger. Anthony Rudd finds a deep affinity between Wittgenstein and Heidegger in their ‘romantic modernism’—in contrast to ‘scientific rationalism, utilitarianism, secularism’ (p. 232). Both longed for a re-enchantment of a world disenchanted by science and by the accompanying technological mindset. Their romanticism clashed with other tendencies—Heidegger's temporary ‘voluntarism’ or ‘Prometheanism’ and Wittgenstein's scientific training. But modern romanticism is inevitably more conflicted than Wordsworth's version. David R. Cerbone examines Wittgenstein and Heidegger response to a stark symbol of modernism, Le Corbusier's House-Machine. To justify their resistance, both appeal to language, Heidegger to the etymology of words such as ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’, Wittgenstein to language's open-ended organic life. The house-machine is comparable to a language constructed from scratch. Carnap's espousal of Esperanto was one of Wittgenstein's grievances against him.

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