.
P.227
AN INTERESTING CHARACTERISTIC Of the method
Wittgenstein employs in his later work is the use of
queer statements such as: (Can a machine have a
toothache!" "What is the color of the number three?"
and "How can you hang a thief who doesn't exist?"
These questions are calculated to produce a sort of
"shock" effect on our thinking, and they are used to
bring us to see that questions like "What is the
meaning of a word?" also may be queer if we properly
examine them in the light of the intricate variety of
meanings evident in our ordinary use of language. The
aim of the method is, by the use of intentional
nonsense, to bring one to see the sense underlying
the method.
The problem is here cast in terms of sense and
nonsense for a special reason. The sort of statements
and indeed the very method characteristic of
Wittgenstein's later period present a striking
similarity to a method of philosophy which would
ordinarily be considered too foreign to
Wittgenstein's to warrant serious comparison,
Reference is made, of course, to the methods employed
by Zen Buddhists in the instruction of their
disciples.
In this paper some of the similarities between
these two methods of philosophy will be pointed out.
This is not to suggest, of course, that the
comparison between the two goes any deeper than
similarity of method.
Zen is characteristically anti-intellectual and
a-systematic in its approach to life and the world.
To understand this approach, it is essential to
consider reality in terms of ineffability. Error,
confusion, pain, suffering, anxiety, and perplexity
stem from our effort to cut distinctions out of the
ineffable reality. Per haps the best way to describe
this effort is with reference to the Hindu term
"maayaa." Maayaa "the illusion superimposed upon
reality as an effect of ignorance."(1) And, in one
case, the whole visible cosmos is described as
maayaa, constituting nothing more than an "illusion
superimposed upon true being by man's deceitful
senses and unilluminated mind."(2) The rational dis-
tinctions we make represent a net we cast over the
ineffable in our effort to get at the truth. But the
truth is that concepts are not things, and all such
_____________________________________________________
(1) Heinrich Zimmer, philosophies of India, Joseph
Campbell, ed. (Cleveland: The world Publishing
Company, 1961), p. 19.
(2) Ibid., p. 19.
p.228
distinctions are false. The more we try to get at
reality by multiplying out concepts, the more we
become entangled in our own net.
The greatest error comes, however, when we begin
to consider our concepts as being teal in themselves,
or when we assume that for every concept there is a
thing which corresponds to it. Such a view leads to a
false dualism, of which the ultimate expression is
the subject-object split we make between ourselves
and the world about us. This form of dualism also
finds expression in conventional dualistic notions,
such as body-soul, idea-thing, mind-matter; etc.
These conventional dichotomies, enjoying the force of
convention, over-shadow our will to discover the
truth. D. T. Suzuki indicates the predicament of
dualism in the following way:
We believe in dualism chiefly because of our
traditional training. Whether ideas really correspond
to facts is another matter requiring a special
investigation. Ordinarily we do not inquire into the
matter, we just accept what is instilled into our
minds; for to accept is more convenient and
practical, and life is to a certain extent though not
in reality, made thereby easier.(3)
If ideas and concepts, or, for that matter, any
aspect of the intellect, are by their very nature
false and erroneous, then any effort to convey
ultimate truth about the world or ultimate reality by
means of concepts is obviously bound to fail. If we
are to get at the truth, we must employ a technique
not bound to the intellect, and one which is able to
go beyond the inherent limitation of the whole
conceptual scheme. The method, whatever form takes,
must be a radical departure from any conventional
mode of thought.
The techniques of Zen attempt to accomplish such
an overcoming. The aim of the method is not to
construct a body of intelligible concepts; it is
specifically devised to avoid such a procedure.
It would be erroneous to characterize
Wittgenstein's position as anti-intellectual or
a-systematic in the same sense that these terms are
applied to Zen. For Wittgenstein, the problem of
method is equally complex, but follows from a
distinctly different line of development.
Wittgenstein's later work is a reaction to the
early view he developed under the influence of
Russell and which culminated with the publication of
the Tractatus. The essential doctrines of his early
view may be summarized as follows:(4)
... first, that language is essentially used for one
purpose, the seating of facts; second that sentences
essentially get their meanings in one way, namely
through "Picturing"; and third, that any language
essentially has, though it may be hard to see it, the
clear and firm structure of the formulae in a logical
calculus.
_____________________________________________________
(3) D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, William Barrett, ed.
(Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Company, Inc.,
1956), p. 112.
(4) G. J. Warnock, English Philosophy Since 1900
(London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 67.
p.229
The conclusion of his early view is expressed in the
now famous statement, "Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent."
Wittgenstein rejected all three of these views in
his later work. He realized that he had driven
himself (and perhaps a great many of his ardent
followers) into a blind alley. His effort to recover
from the perplexity brought about by the consequences
of his own views resulted in the development of his
radical new method of philosophy.
Why had he been led up a blind alley! What led
him to develop such an untenable view? The answer
came to him when he realized that he had been
"bewitched" by language itself. In his rigorous
effort to deal with problems of language, logic, and
reality, he had bent, distorted, and forced language
into functions for which it was inherently
unsuitable. In short, he came to realize that
...laguage is not--not even "essentially" or in some
covert way--as he himself and others had once
represented it. There is no one pattern to be
revealed, no single account to be offered, no small
set of definite rules. On the contrary, the forms and
uses of language are inexhaustibly flexible and
various; a language is not like a game, but like a
whole family of games, and the rules for, the
purposes of, the ways of playing these games are
themselves endlessly diverse.(5)
This discovery led him to the view that "The
application (every application) of every word is
arbitrary."(6) In one sense, this discovery "freed"
language and tended to render the traditional
approach to philosophy topsy-turvy. Since tile uses
Of language are "flexible and various, " it is
fruitless to search for the meaning of a word, and
from this follows Wittgenstein's famous statement,
"'The meaning of a word is its use."(6a) This
discovery also placed on Wittgenstein a rather severe
limitation. The problem is clear. If the application
of every word is arbitrary, how can this truth about
language be communicated intelligibly? Certainly not
by any conventional use of language, because
bewitchment and superstition are always lurking to
trap us. To convey the significance of his own
insight, Wittgenstein had to resort to an
unconventional method.
Basic to both of these methods of philosophy,
then, is some form of limitation rendering the
communication of the central idea of each view
seemingly impossible. In the case of Zen, the
limitation is inherent in the intellect itself. There
is a tendency to distort "true" reality by false
distinctions. And, in the case of Wittgenstein, the
limitation is in language. Language is essentially
diverse in its application; so diverse, in fact, that
we are
_____________________________________________________
(5) Ibid., p. 72.
(6) John Wisdom, "VIII.--Ludwig Wittgenstein,
1934-1937, " Mind, LXI, No. 242, (April, 1952),
259.
(6a) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (New
York: The Macmillan Co., 1953), p. 200.
p.230
readily misled in our effort to solve philosophical
problems by assuming that words have definite
meanings and problems have definite solutions.
Consider this example taken from Suzuki's
"Practical Methods of Zen Instruction":
... Joshu [Chao-chou, Chinese, a famous Zen master]
was asked..., "One light divides itself into hundreds
of thousands of lights; may I ask where this one
light originates?" This question... is one of the
deepest and most baffling problem of philosophy. But
the old master did not waste much time in answering
the question, nor did he resort to any wordy
discussion. He simply threw off one of his shoes
without a remark.(7)
In trying to make sense out of this, it seems
that a baffling problem is met with an even more
baffling reaction. Does such a reply make sense at
all? "To understand all this," Suzuki tells us, "it
is necessary that we should acquire a 'third eye,' as
they say, and learn to look at things from a new
point of view."(8) The fact is, we cannot make sense
out of such a reply, and any effort to do so
heightens our perplexity. The intellect is useless in
dealing with such a problem. Our trouble is that we
think t he problem must have an answer and that our
failure to discover the answer is due to an
inadequate set of concepts. In either case, Joshu's
reply seems only to compound our difficulty.
Behind Joshu's queer reply is the notion that the
question and not the answer contains the nonsense. By
throwing off his shoe he is communicating the
profoundest of all truths. The question is bound to
false concepts and tied to a false notion of logic,
both of which have nothing to do with true reality.
His nonsensical action is geared to the world as it
really is, and to truth in its profoundest form. That
is to say, the world can be grasped only by direct
means. Joshu's reply indicates this truth,
unqualified and unmediated by any form of
conceptualization. The method makes its appeal to
"the faculty of seeing (darsana) or knowing (vidya)
though not in the sense of reasoning out, but in that
of intuitively grasping."(9)
Zen utilizes ail the intellectual oddities that
tend to stymie our ordinary way of seeing the world.
Contradiction, paradox, identity of opposites, and
even common, ordinary garden-variety nonsense ate all
central in the method. But the method itself is only
a means to an end. The end to which the method is
employed is to bring one to see the world as it
really is, to shock one out of the indolence of
conventional thought. The moment we "grasp" the truth
is the moment when the false distinctions are effaced
from
_____________________________________________________
(7) Suzuki, op. cit., p. 114.
(8) Ibid., p. 114.
(9) Ibid., p. 112.
p.231
our minds and we begin to experience the world rather
than think about it.
The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and
exhaust the intellect until it is realized that
intellection is only thinking about; it will provoke,
irritate and again exhaust the emotions until it is
realized that emotion is only feeling about, and then
it contrives, when the disciple has been brought to
an intellectual and emotional impasse, to bridge the
gap between second-hand, conceptual contact with
reality, and first-hand experience.(10)
Wittgenstein's problem is not in the nature of
the intellect as such, but in the "bewitching" nature
of language. Associated with this problem are a great
many superstitions which have persisted about the
function of language. His method is appropriately
devised to avoid these inherent pitfalls.
Wittgenstein's faith in his method is clearly
shown in the following remark noted by G. E. Moore in
his account of Wittgenstein's lectures in 1930-1933:
He [Wittgenstein] went on to say that, though
philosophy had now been "reduced to a matter of
skill," yet this skill, like other skills is very
difficult to acquire. One difficulty was that it
required a "sort of thinking" to which we are not
accustomed and to which we have not been trained--a
sort of thinking very different from what is required
in the sciences. And he said that the required skill
could not be acquired merely by hearing lectures:
discussion was essential. As regards his own work, he
said it did not matter whether his results were true
or not: what mattered was that "a method had been
found."(11)
Wittgenstein's method, or the "sort of thinking"
he suggests we adopt, deals with what he called the
"language-game." By means of these games, it is shown
that words are used in diverse ways. Despite this
diversity, however, we clearly understand what a
particular word means in any special instance of its
use. The upshot of the game is to point out that it
is impossible to take one instance of the use of any
word as the meaning of the word. Consequently, it is
meaningless to ask the meaning of a word.
Wittgenstein describes this technique in the
following way:
What I give is the morphology of the use of an
expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which
you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced
to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is
to suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at
it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not
previously thought. You thought that there was one
possibility, or only two at most. But I made you
think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it
was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those
narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is
relieved, and you are free to look
_____________________________________________________
(10) Alan W. Watts, The spirit of Zen (New York:
Grove Press, Inc., 1960), p. 19.
(11) G. E. Moore, "Wittgenstein's Lectures in
1930-33, " Mind, LXIV, No. 253, (January, 1955),
26.
p.232
around the field of use of the expression and to
describe the different kinds of use of it.(12)
As clear as this statement seems to be, to say
that we understand it would be a contradiction. In
professing to understand it, we are necessarily
assigning definite meanings to at least some of the
words in the statement. We cannot assume that the
application of every word is arbitrary and make sense
out of the statement. Perhaps Wittgenstein made the
statement in an unguarded moment, but, even if this
is the case, his later works were produced in more
rigidly guarded moments, and he attempts in them to
avoid such a pitfall.
Wittgenstein's effort to maintain a sense of
discussion in these later works is significant. The
Blue and Brown Books are in the form of dictations.
The objective is, it seems, to maintain a looseness
of subject-matter and a disarming looseness in
development. These works are not to be taken as an
effort to achieve any sort of systematic
presentation. They can best be described as a kind of
"verbal lolling."
O. K. Bouwsma, in his article "The Blue Book,"
describes the form of the book as follows:
This book, notes, discussions, investigations,
dictations, contains no introduction, no conclusion,
no chapters, no chapter headings, no helpful title.
So at the outset there is no guide, no warning, no
preparation, no cautionary remark. Perhaps the
students to whom these dictations were dictated were
better prepared. I doubt it, however. The author may
very well have considered and said that a bump is
also education, a bump of the right sort, of
course--bumping one's head, for instance, against
such a question as "What is the meaning of a
word?"(13)
Bouwsma also tells us that what Wittgenstein says is
not so important as what he is doing. Thus, if we
come to understand the subject-matter, we
misunderstand the author's intention. But, if we
understand what he is doing, the "truth" of the
method is revealed to us. We can recall
Wittgenstein's statement that the results of his own
work are irrelevant; it is the method which is
important.
Now, it is possible to see the significance of
some of the queer statements we meet in these works.
"Do we think with our feet?" "What is the color of
the number three?" These statements are devised to
produce a "bump." We quickly sense the queerness of
these statements. But they are calculated to bring us
to see that such statements as "What is the meaning
of a word?" are equally queer. Our failure to see
this in the first place is simply because
_____________________________________________________
(12) Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 50.
(13) O. K. Bouwsma, "The Blue Rook," The Journal of
Philolophy, LVIII, No. 6, (March, 1961), 143.
p.233
we assume that a statement such as "What is the
meaning of a word?" does make sense. Herein lies the
real nonsense. We have been bewitched by our
lauguage, and we need a "bump" to bring us around to
seeing our error.
Wittgenstein's method, similar to the method of
Zen, is devised to lead one to a "direct grasping."
But, in Wittgenstein, what is grasped is not
"reality," but the "real nature" of language. The
method is an aid in helping us to overcome the
inadequacies of conventional ways of looking at our
language. The object of the method is
to assist some individual, always an individual, to
help him discover what misleads and has misled him.
And what misled him is to be seen only when he is no
longer misled. When he says: "Now, I see" and
breathes a sigh of relief, even though it may be a
bit sheepishly, that is the moment to which the art
is directed.(14)
In the case of both Zen and Wittgenstein, to
speak of method alone seems to leave out the most
important consideration. A method is a means to an
end, and it is the end result of each method to which
we must now turn our attention.
Zen method is employed to bring the disciple to
enlightenment. What is achieved, if the method is
successfully employed, is the direct grasping of
ultimate reality. In the moment of enlightenment,
there is a sense of release from all that is false
and illusory, and consequently the overcoming of all
the pain and anxiety brought about by false
conceptions. Once one sees the word as it "really
is," there is no need for method. To the enlightened,
there are no puzzles, no paradoxes, no
contradictions, and n o more perplexity and anxiety.
To say that there is a "religious" element in
Wittgenstein's later work would certainly be
stretching the point, despite the fact that from
several reports he sometimes behaved with the
uncompromising temperament of a saint. There is,
however, a strong therapeutic element in his method,
and one definite aim of his method is to bring about
a kind of release, if not from the cares of the
world, at least from the cares and perplexities of
the conventional way of doing philosophy. It does s
eem somewhat apocalyptic that a method has been
discovered which is able to cure a kind of
perplexity, rooted deeply in language and associated
with philosophical argument, that has persisted for
over two thousand years.
A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like
a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn't know
how. He cries the window but it is too high. He tries
the chimney but it is too narrow. And if he would
only turn around, he would see that the door has been
open all the time!(15)
_____________________________________________________
(14) Ibid., p. 153.
(15) Malcolm, op. cit., p. 51.
p.234
Even if salvation unto the everlasting is not
guaranteed for our souls, at least the dissolution of
any and every philosophical problem is an implicit
result of the new method of doing philosophy. (On
Wisdom's report, Wittgenstein once said that he did
not solve philosophical problems; he dissolved
them.(16)) There are some philosophers, no doubt, who
would find having all their philosophical problems
dissolved more satisfying than having their souls
saved. There seems, then, to be a strong similarity
be tween Zen and Wittgenstein even on this point.
Some form of salvation is the end result of each
method. "It is language itself which works to prevent
the realization of its own character. To see how this
is so is to have defeated the superstition. It is
comparable rather with conversion than with the
detection of error."(17)
In this comparison, no attempt has been made to
offer any criticism of either method. The attempt has
been to focus attention on each method itself and to
draw parallels where the similarities are most
evident. Both methods attempt to present a profound
truth by indirect means. The necessity of indirection
is brought about by fundamental limitations which
constitute the presuppositions central to each
approach.
It is quite clear that some degree of violence is
done to each view by assuming that a certain amount
of "talking about" is necessary to describe a process
which in final analysis can only be done. Ardent
disciples of both views may possibly disclaim any
significance to the necessity of "talking about."
(The Zen master's standard reply to such presumption
is, in som>