Who Am I and If So How Many? (11 page)

Wittgenstein initially refused to acknowledge any criticism of the
Tractatus
. In his inimitable way, he claimed that the book had provided the definitive answers, so it would make no sense for him to continue in philosophy, where he had made such a momentous mark. He distributed his enormous fortune among his siblings and donated considerable sums of money to young writers, painters, and architects. The next stage was an excursion into practical pedagogy. This philosopher, who had enjoyed great renown, at least in England, attended a pedagogical institute in Vienna and spent several years quasi-incognito, working as an elementary schoolteacher in a rural area in Austria. His teaching stint was spectacularly unsuccessful, and the children appear to have loathed him. By 1926, he had had enough of teaching, and he resigned. Wittgenstein spent the next few months as a gardener’s assistant in a monastery, until he found a new project to throw himself into. Working with an architect, he designed and built his sister Margarete a Cubist villa in Vienna; he focused primarily on the interior design. The house became a gathering point for the Viennese intelligentsia, and the Vienna Circle often met there. In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge after an absence of fifteen years. He was finally awarded his doctorate for the
Tractatus
, but his subsequent work in many ways belied the claims in his earlier writings. He wrote and worked around the clock, but he did not consider any of the results suitable for publication. He cobbled together a paltry living from lecturing and stipends, but at the age of fifty he finally became a professor after all. During all
that time he was a ‘hermit, ascetic, guru, and
Führer
,’ as one of his students later recalled – a character in a novel who fell from riches to rags and was a legend unto himself even in his lifetime.

It eventually dawned on Wittgenstein that his theory of language as a picture of reality was incorrect. A colleague in Cambridge, the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, dealt his theory the final blow. When Wittgenstein emphasized that language
mirrored
the logical structure of reality, Sraffa brushed the underside of his chin with an outward sweep his fingertips and asked: ‘What is the logical form of
that
?’ Wittgenstein gave up his picture theory. He dedicated his final work, the
Philosophical Investigations
, which he began in earnest in 1936 after numerous false starts, to Sraffa. The book, which did not appear in print until 1953, two years after Wittgenstein’s death, relinquished not only the picture theory but also the idea that language can be grasped solely by means of logic. The most picturesque sentence in this book, which would later delight the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, reads: ‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a
multitude
of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.’ Wittgenstein realized that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’ Instead of pinning down meanings and sentence structure by means of logic, philosophers would have to endeavor to clarify the rules of language use, the various ‘language games.’ He now discovered the significance of psychology, which he had dismissed before. Since language games exist not in a vacuum but in human communities, they ought to be explained not logically but psychologically. The world needs
psycho
logists not to analyze our emotions, but to explain language games in their social context, because ‘a main source of our failure to understand is that we do not
command a clear view
of the use of our words.’ Later in the text, he gave this idea a nice metaphorical twist: ‘What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’

Wittgenstein enlisted in the army for World War II, as he had for World War I, although this time he was on the British side. As a medical orderly, he put his experience in building airplanes to good use by developing laboratory equipment to measure pulse, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and respiratory volume. He spent another four years in Cambridge teaching until taking early retirement at the age of fifty-eight. He spent his final years in Ireland and in Oxford, dying of cancer in 1951. His last known words were a greeting to his friends: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’

Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus
may have been a dead end, but the
Philosophical
Investigations
gave a tremendous impetus to both philosophy and the emerging field of linguistics. The new discipline of analytical philosophy, inspired by Wittgenstein, was quite possibly the most significant philosophical approach of the second half of the twentieth century. Philosophical problems, he argued, always need to be understood and analyzed as problems of linguistic expression, because the manner in which people experience the world is always influenced by their language. There are no ‘pure’ sensory perceptions uncolored by thinking (in language), nor is meaning ever unequivocal, because language is plurivalent. Analytical philosophy carves its paths through this intertwined jungle of sensory perception and language.

The field of linguistics took up Wittgenstein’s theory of ‘language games’ and explored the meaning of speech in its broader context. In the 1950s and 1960s, John Langshaw Austin in England and John Rogers Searle in the United States developed a theory of ‘speech acts.’ Austin realized that ‘by saying something, we
do
something.’ And the crucial question in understanding statements is not whether something is true or false, but rather whether the communication is successful or unsuccessful in the intended sense. A theory establishing the truth value of language had evolved into a theory of social communication.

Human language is an outstanding means of communication, but Wittgenstein showed that language does not provide our exclusive access to the truth. It is only when we recognize that
thinking and language, the organizational tools of the mind, do not organize reality per se, but act as models to explain the world in accordance with their own rules, that we gain a better
understanding
of man. As we notice different things, our experience takes a different path, which shapes our thinking and makes us employ a different mode of expression. The fact that our differing
perceptions
result in different ways of thinking and speaking is what truly distinguishes man from the other animals. The boundaries of our sensory apparatus and our language are the boundaries of our world, because the words we choose to clothe our thinking in come from a neatly organized closet of the human species. We might say that the tacit mandate of language is to ‘fool’ us about the realistic nature of its statements. It was made to ‘construct’ reality and the world according to the needs of human species. If the serpent had needed a language for orientation – which it did not, because it connected sense perceptions without the aid of language – it would have been a ‘serpent language,’ altogether unsuitable for man, just as ‘human language’ would serve no purpose for a serpent. ‘If a lion could talk,’ Wittgenstein noted astutely in the
Philosophical Investigations
, ‘we would not
understand
him.’

Our philosophical, psychological, and biological journey to the capabilities and the limits of our cognition now comes to a temporary conclusion. We have learned about the origin and function of the brain. We have seen its potential and its limitations, and we have noted that feelings and intellect are often inseparably bound up in our brains. In doing so, we have touched on the question of how a sense of self develops. We have seen how conscious and unconscious intermingle, and that we still know very little about how the brain stores and forgets meanings. We have learned that the brain is a highly complex and ingenious organ of self-understanding, albeit one that was not constructed for the purpose of an objective knowledge of the world. We have seen what purpose our language serves, and the difficulties it has in being ‘objective.’ Contemplating ourselves and the world is like
crossing a river by car, or the Sahara by tricycle. It can be done, but it is quite a laborious process. Still, we now know several important pieces of the puzzle, and we are gaining some insight into what makes us tick.

Now our journey inside ourselves will venture in another direction and explore the question of how we assess our actions. Neuroscience, which has come in handy along the way, will now step back for a bit and cede center stage to philosophy. We will continue to return to it on occasion, even when considering the question of good and evil. But whatever biology has to tell us, questions of morality are first and foremost philosophical, and at times psychological as well: where do our criteria for right and wrong originate? What do we use to gauge our behavior, and why do we do so?

The receptionist at the broadcasting company where I sometimes work is a middle-aged woman whose grouchiness is legendary. Her abrasive manner annoys everyone who comes in expecting to receive a friendly greeting. But whenever she sees my son Oskar, she becomes a different person. Her eyes sparkle, her face lights up, and she showers Oskar with affection. It doesn’t seem to matter to her that my son doesn’t reciprocate her enthusiasm. When we leave, she hovers in the doorway with a look of bliss on her face.

I know nothing about this woman’s personal life, but I can’t imagine that she has many close friends. I assume that even with the social interaction required by her job, she is deeply lonely. Her plight seems downright depressing to me – yet the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau might well have disagreed.

Rousseau was a true eccentric. Born in 1712 in Geneva, he was apprenticed to an engraver, but he left after a short time and took to the road. He dreamed of becoming a musician, but he did not play an instrument. The only thing that came of his dream was a strange new system of musical notation that did not interest anyone. For most of his adult life, he wandered about aimlessly, living off women who found his dark hair and big brown eyes
handsome and supported him despite his nuttiness. Rousseau never stayed in one place for very long. In Paris he met the leaders of the Enlightenment, but they did not take well to him.

One day in October 1749, when Rousseau was thirty-seven, his life changed so drastically that he later referred to that day as a true ‘illumination.’ The vagrant music critic was heading southeast on a country road from Paris to the castle of Vincennes, which was then a state prison that housed several famous inmates, most notably Count Mirabeau, the Marquis de Sade, and the
Enlightenment
philosopher Denis Diderot. Rousseau was on his way to visit the latter because he was writing brief entries for inclusion in Diderot’s famous comprehensive encyclopedia, the
Encyclopédie
. Somewhere along the way to Vincennes, Rousseau came across a copy of the
Mercure de France
, the most influential newspaper in Paris at the time, and read an announcement for a prize being offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay answering the question of whether advances in science and art had led to moral progress. In a histrionic letter to his friend Malesherbes, Rousseau conveyed the sense of epiphany and mission he felt when he saw the essay question. As is evident from his letter, modesty and restraint were not his strong suits:

Rousseau’s submission –
A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
– earned him first prize and made him famous overnight, but more famous still was his astonishing submission to another essay competition a few years later, which came to be known as
A
Discourse on Inequality
. This second essay, which put Rousseau’s quarrelsome temperament on full display, was not what the judges were expecting, and he did not win the prize. In the essay, Rousseau declared in no uncertain terms that culture and society made man not better, but worse: ‘Men are wicked; a sad and constant experience makes proof unnecessary; yet man is naturally good, I believe I have proved it … Let human Society be ever so much admired, it remains none the less true that it necessarily moves men to hate one another in proportion as their interests clash.’

In Rousseau’s view, people were good by nature, but all the lying and killing in the world were evidence that something had prompted the rise of evil. Rousseau regarded man as inherently unsocial. Like other animals, he argued, human beings by nature try to avoid confrontation and conflict. Aside from caring for his
own well-being, the only pronounced feeling that comes naturally to man is empathy with others. Unfortunately, however, man does not have the luxury of remaining in solitude. Natural catastrophes and other external circumstances force people to join forces, but living together in a community also pits them against one another. They grow distrustful and malevolent; in comparing themselves to others, their own sense of self twists into narcissism, and their ‘innate goodness’ breaks down.

Rousseau’s essay was criticized harshly, although most
Enlightenment
philosophers shared his critical stance regarding western European feudal society. In the mid-eighteenth century, both the nobility and the peasants lived off the fields, with the nobility getting the wheat and the peasants the chaff. But few could accept Rousseau’s proposition that society and culture themselves turned man bad. The intellectuals at that time cherished the arts and the social sphere, and they hailed and supported scientific progress. Science in particular seemed to be the key to liberating the bourgeoisie from the dominance of the nobility. In place of the omnipresent feudal society, many dreamed of a society that valued vigorous discussion and knowledge over social hierarchies.

Rousseau was furious at the reception of his essay, and he defended his position stridently. He was a talented writer, and several of his books had become quite popular; indeed, he was the most widely discussed philosopher among the European
intellectuals
of his day. But he could not tolerate criticism, and he became increasingly abrasive. Wherever he turned up on his travels through western Europe, he was sure to spark controversy. As a father he was a total failure; his five children wound up in a foundling hospital, where they apparently died soon after. By the final years of his life, Rousseau had become so antisocial that he seemed to be making himself a test case for the ruinous nature of civilization. He sought solitude at the castle of Ermenonville, outside Paris, and devoted his days to gathering and identifying plants.

Which of Rousseau’s claims proved correct? Is man good by nature? And does man really not need other people in order to be
happy? The question of whether people are happier in society or in solitude is more of a psychological question than a philosophical one, and one that was overlooked for quite some time after Rousseau. In the early 1970s, a discipline known as ‘loneliness research’ was established. Its founder was Robert Weiss, now professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. He
contended
that loneliness was one of the chief problems in society, particularly in urban areas. Were people happier in solitude because they did not have to contend with anyone else?

Weiss was certain that Rousseau was mistaken. Lonely people suffer when few or no people take an interest in their well-being, and their suffering is most intense when no one connects emotionally with them. This fact was already common knowledge and is relatively intuitive. But Weiss discovered something far more exciting: more frustrating than the lack of outreach from others is the lack of outreach we ourselves extend. Not being loved is difficult, but, Weiss discovered, having no one to love is even worse. Weiss’s contention explains why a dog or a cat can be so important to lonely senior citizens who have lost a spouse, even though these pets are clearly not adequate substitutes for their deceased loved one.

Weiss’s discovery brings us back to the receptionist who was happy to see my son even though he paid no attention to her, let alone loved her. Simple interactions with him – touching and complimenting him – were all she needed to brighten her day. Loving someone or showering attention on another person is a very nice way of doing yourself some good in the process, which goes against Rousseau’s theory that people can be truly happy only in solitude.

People, like all other primates, are social by nature. Among the more than two hundred species of apes, not a single one lives in complete isolation. Some people are naturally more social than others, but people who do not engage with others at all invariably suffer from a clear behavioral disorder. Frustration and
disappointment
may have embittered them and driven them to behave in an
abnormal manner. Normal people seek out other people because they are interested in them (in some more than others, of course), and because their interest in other people does them good. People trapped within their own narrowly defined confines have stunted psyches and typically become claustrophobic, rigid, inflexible, and less able to cope with outside pressures. Because they lack the opportunity to compare their perceptions to those of other people, they misjudge many things about others and themselves.

A willingness to interact with and care for others is a way of reaching beyond one’s own boundaries. Doing unto others gives your own psyche a boost. If you pick out a nice present for someone and witness the recipient’s pleasure, you have given yourself a gift. This pleasure in giving and in doing good deeds goes back to the roots of mankind. But where does the pleasure in caring for and helping others and the joy in doing good deeds come from? Does this mean that man is ‘good,’ as Rousseau thought? Was he right in at least that regard?