The Philosopher as Exile
Michael A. Peters
Abstract
In the context of globalization and postmodernity the figure and concept of the exile has
the same theoretical legitimacy that “alienation” had in the context of the modern. This
paper begins by outlining the notion of exhilic thought as a central trope for
understanding writing in philosophy and for understanding Wittgenstein’s thinking and
the intimate connection between the geography of Wittgenstein’s movements and his
experience of other cultures, and his philosophy, his style of doing philosophy. It also
discusses the notion of the philosopher as exile and how we might begin to understand
the basis of exile and of being removed from one’s own culture as a basis for thought.
The paper proceeds to discuss Wittgenstein as exile and to suggest some lines of inquiry
in philosophy that might recognize the importance of location on thinking, especially in
relation to education in an age where increasingly globalization, multiculturalism and
internationalization are the norm rather than the exception.
The philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas
Wittgenstein (Z § 455)
I felt strange/a stranger/in the world. When you are bound neither to men nor to
God, then you are a stranger.
Wittgenstein (cited in Nedo et al, 2005, p. 11)
If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily
into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture? ... Modern western culture
is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.
Edward Said (1994, p. 138).
Wittgenstein as exile, wanderer, stranger1
Wittgenstein talked of himself as an exile not only from his home city in Vienna but also
of an age. He wrote of his alienation from the dominant spirit of the age and questioned
its status as “civilization” or even “culture”. He traveled a great deal often spending long
periods in isolation in foreign countries, mostly in Europe—in England, Norway,
1
Wittgenstein writes in the Preface to the Investigations: ‘The Philosophical remarks in this book are, as it
were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved
journeyings’ (p. vii). This is to be contrasted with Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) ‘logical geography’ of the concept.
Where Ryle believes the a more or less complete mapping of a concept is possible Wittgenstein emphasizes
the indeterminacy of maps and the dynamic character of what it means to understand and follow a map.
This paper is based on Chapter 1 of Wittgenstein as Pedagogical Philosopher (Peters et al, 2008).
Ireland—but also in the U.S.A. His work, he felt demanded a certain location and he used
the experience of travel, of finding one’s way about in a foreign country, negotiating
entry into a new culture, acquiring a new language, and learning the streets of a new city
as core operating metaphors as part of his philosophy that gave thought a spatial
dimension. This paper begins by outlining the notion of exhilic thought as a central trope
for understanding writing in philosophy and for understanding Wittgenstein’s thinking
and the intimate connection between the geography of Wittgenstein’s movements and his
experience of other cultures, and his philosophy, his style of doing philosophy. It also
discusses the notion of the philosopher as exile and how we might begin to understand
the basis of exile and of being removed from one’s own culture as a basis for thought.
The paper proceeds to discuss Wittgenstein as exile and to suggest some lines of inquiry
in philosophy that might recognize the importance of location on thinking, especially in
relation to education in an age where increasingly globalization, multiculturalism and
internationalization are the norm rather than the exception. This paper then is an
experiment in charting and thinking through the geography of ideas, not so much how
ideas travel, as the extent to which the experience of exile and being a stranger in another
culture can be the basis for a new understanding of thought that takes space and
movement as twin aspects of increasingly common experiences. It represents a first
attempt to extend theoretically the old saw that “travels broadens the mind” and to
examine the educational significance of movement across and between different locations
and cultures that has strong implication for questions of belonging and identity, even
powerfully foreshadowing a model of postmodern subjectivity.
Exhilic Thought: Exiles, émigrés, refugees
Exhilic thought is the thought and “education” of the exile, the wanderer, the stranger. It
is a kind of uprooted thought developed away from “home” under conditions of
displacement and uncertainty, often in a different mother tongue, language tradition and
culture. Exhilic thought is sometimes the self-imposed discipline of the “stranger” who
develops his or her identity as an “alien” or immigrant against the conventions of a host
culture and from the perspective of an outsider. The motif the exile/stranger in a foreign
land finding his or her way about for the first time is fable-ized in ancient accounts of
“first contacts” and early cultural exchanges.2 This notion of the exile invokes the model
of the anthropologist as “participant observer”, of someone perpetually looking in
through the window of another culture, who is both observer and participant, and its selftransformative aspects. At the same time “exile” often marks a complex ambivalence to
one’s own home culture and, therefore, also to questions of one’s own national, cultural
and personal identity and belongings. Exile is one of the central and most powerful
motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth century: it describes a profound existential
condition of cultural estrangement, and sometimes alienation that defines identity in
terms of migration, movement, departure, homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought
that is “nomadic”, formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once
2
This is true of the first oral-formulaic epic narratives in the western Homeric tradition including the Iliad
and the Odyssey that strongly influenced Plato and was a basis for Roman education. It is also the case with
Marco Polo’s travels in 1260 and his presence at the court of Kublai Khan. ‘First contact’ was later
systematized in the emerging discipline of anthropology during the early era of European colonization and
developed with the formalization of ‘ethnology’ and later ‘ethnography’, which while it had origins in the
Florentine Renaissance (especially archeology) and grew out of philosophical anthropology concern
principally with the nature of ‘Man’, took its modern form with Durkheim and Mauss (on primitive
classification), and later, with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski.
make the familiar strange and the strange familiar--an anthropological theme that
Wittgenstein returns to again and again.
The condition of exile while a characteristic of a globalized late modernity has its
diasporic roots in pre-Biblical times, defining Judaic religious identity. It has been
revisited by each major ethnic and religious persecution down through the centuries. In
an essay called “Being Jewish” from Infinite Conversations Maurice Blanchot, for
example, argues that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience and of being Jewish is
that:
the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it
exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the
experience of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible
relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to
speak (p. 125).
Sauer-Thompson (2005) notes “Being Jewish affirms uprooting, the affirmation of
nomadic truth, exodus, the exile. For Blanchot being Jewish is being destined to
dispersion, to a sojourn without place, to a setting out on the road, a state of wandering,
and not being bound to the determination of place.”3 This metaphorical reading of
Blanchot’s “nomadic truth” that foreshadows Deleuze and Guattari’s notion suggests that
we take the notion of thinking as both a journey and “education” seriously.4 The forced or
self-imposed journey requires continual readjustment under new and changing cultural
3
See ‘Blanchot: limit-experience & being Jewish’ at http://sauerthompson.com/conversations/archives/002836.html.
4
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), nomads are characterized in opposition to the system of the State which
is sedentary; nomadism is, thus, a revolutionnary alternative to the State. The nomad is the ‘outsider’ and
nomadic thought is ‘outside’ thought (an expression borrowed from Blanchot). See also Delueze and
Guattari’s (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine.
conditions without the security or familiarity of “home” and thus, without the normal
structures that anchor and prop up identity. “Nomadic truth” is borne of the traveler’s
education, the exchange of ideas, and acquaintance with new landscapes of thought,
borne of encounters with the Other, with different cultures often producing new
hybridities that are not simply the result of grafted cultural stock. Michael J. Brogan
(2004), for instance, argues that the dominance of the question of “radical otherness” in
cultural and religious theory is due in no small measure to the influence of Levinas”
ethics of alterity, which he puts alongside Blanchot’s reflections on “being Jewish”.5
Both Levinas and Blanchot emphasize themes that tie truth to an existential condition of
Otherness; it is these very themes that have provided a series of metaphors for living and
being in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Jewishness, Blanchot says, is “uneasiness and affliction” which is not restored through
exile so much as attenuated and becomes the condition for the intellectual. As Levinas
says of Blanchot, his philosophy of art is a
“call to errancy,” a truth (or better, a “non-truth”) of “nomadism,” an affirmation
of the “authenticity of exile” which “uproots” the Heideggerian universe, this
fundamentally Greek world which remains stubbornly indifferent or altogether
deaf to the call issued by the Hebrew scriptures (cited in Brogan, 2004, p. 31).
The Jewish exodus, synonymous with freedom from persecution, serves to emphasize
“nomadic truth” of the exile against “sedentary truth” of the homelander. (There is a
5
He writes: “Blanchot finds the Levinasian meditation on radical otherness an invaluable corrective to a
philosophical tradition marred by an ethically and politically insidious predilection for sameness. Like his
friend, he regards the West’s suspicion and hatred of the Jew as paradigmatic of this fundamental allergy to
difference and even implicitly frames his own thought as a kind of Hebraic reproach to the monistic
metaphysics issuing from ancient Greece,” ‘Judaism and Alterity in Blanchot and Levinas’
at http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.1/brogan.pdf.
necessary connection here between freedom from persecution and freedom of thought).
Blanchot argues against Heidegger, and mobility and homelessness of the refugee against
settled nationalism, against the notion of “roots”, “homeland”, and “belonging” as a
natural condition.6 To adopt this orientation is also to set up a series of less desirable
parallels—the pilgrims” migration to America, the Afro-American slave fugitives, the
establishment of modern-day Israel, the “homelessness” of the Palestinians—seeking the
“homeland” or the “promised land”. The notion of exile and “exhilic” here refers to the
origin and to “return to the origin” as a source of identity and ethnic nationalism. Both
these ideas have a ready application to Wittgenstein who at one point, after the 1930s and
“40s, began to recognize his Jewish origins and who referred to himself as both Jewish
and someone in exile.
John G. Cawelti (2001) makes the most general theological and existential case when he
writes: “Exile is, perhaps, the central story told in European civilization: the human estate
as exile from God, the garden of Eden, the homeland, the womb, or even oneself.” He
goes on to make the following pertinent observation:
It may be true that exile is the central myth of European civilization, but it takes a
twentieth-century mind to make such an observation and to realize its full
significance. Exile is both a central theme and a characteristic biographical pattern
of artistic modernism. In all the arts, a surprising number of the central figures of
high modernism were exiles from their native countries: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold
Schonberg, Bela Bartok, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Pier
Mondrian, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford
Madox Ford, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Paul Gropius, Mies
van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy--the list is extraordinary.7
6
Remember that Heidegger’s analysis of nihilism is that ‘man’ has lost all connections with beings and
within the present technological enframing that represents the modern age (modernity) ‘man’ is homeless.
7
It is strange he does not mention Wittgenstein.
“Exile”, in the context of postmodernity, has the same theoretical legitimacy that
“alienation” had in the context of the modern. “Alienation” in Marxist theory refers to the
way in which human beings become estranged from the products of their labor under
capitalism, the labor process and their own nature. (“Work” in this context is viewed in
Hegelian terms as self-realization.) In On the Jewish Question Marx saw “alienation” as
originating in the Judeo-Christian problematic and the Christian accomplishment of the
alienation of man from himself and from nature. Marx takes the notion of alienation from
Feuerbach who shows the alienation of man from God. Thus, both concepts have their
source in the Judeo-Christian problematic but where alienation in particular seems more
wedded to an industrial age, exile is emblematic of the age of globalization with its
problems arising from (often forced) human movement and its consequences:
displacement, uprootedness, and homelessness—the effects of a space-time compression
that both enables greater movement and also demands it.
As Eva Hoffman (1999: 44) explains, “today, at least within the framework of
postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile
demands--uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual
framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and diasporism
have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse. Mark Taylor (1984), the
postmodern theologian, describes the postmodern self as a “wanderer,” a “drifter,”
“attached to no home,” and “always suspicious of stopping, staying and dwelling.” This
“rootless and homeless” self is no more than a “careless wanderer” yearning for neither
“completion” nor “fulfillment” and therefore is not unhappy.8 The figures of the exile, the
refugee, the nomad, the stranger, the wanderer and the diasporic intellectual bring into
play a set of concepts that politically help to define the major movements of romanticism,
nationalism, and imperialism: “home”, “homeland”, “homelessness”, “roots”, “tradition”,
and “national identity”.
Multiculturalism defined against Kant’s universalism and “culture” as the human
capacity to will moral laws is an affirmation of the belief in the value of other cultures
and of group belonging. In its radical pluralistic form it also signals a belief in the
incommensurability of different cultures and societies. In one sense as a late twentieth
century ideal expressed in the notion of cultural diversity which the modern state can
accommodate constitutionally it is not just “the politics of recognition” expressed through
the claims of nationalist movements, supranational associations, ethnic minorities but
also the cross-cutting and sometimes conflicting “multicultural or “intercultural” voices
of hundred of millions of citizens, immigrants, exiles and refugees of the twentieth
century” (Tully, 1995: 2).9 In this sense we might argue figures of the wanderer, the
stranger, and the exile increasingly characterizes the shifting metaphysics of identity in
an era globalization and of “constitutionalism in an age of diversity.” As Tully (1995: 11)
puts it so forcefully “cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously
contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members
8
We take both sources from an excellent essay by Farhang Erfani “Being-There and Being-FromElsewhere: An Existential-Analytic of Exile” at http://www.reconstruction.ws/023/erfani.htm.
9
Tully also mentions feminist and indigenous peoples movements in this light.
and through interaction with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is,
thus, aspectival rather than essential.”10
The Philosopher as Exile
In relation to exhilic thought we can usefully talk of the thought of the outsider, thought
in its home context—its linguistic tradition—as against its border-crossings and, not
least, the globalization (and spatialization) of philosophy. How ideas travel and are
received—the geography of ideas—is a philosophical trope of some significance,
especially with the rise of global science the the international knowledge system.
Philosophers increasingly have begun to pay attention to philosophy as biography and the
influence of biography on philosophy such as with Ray Monk’s (1990) splendid
biography of Wittgenstein. By contrast, they have paid little attention to the question of
exile (or travel, movement, space), with the exception of Albert Camus,11 which has been
left to poets, novelists and historians. Yet the theme of exile and stranger which
emphasizes the relation between place and thought, its place in linguistic and cultural
traditions, and, perhaps strangely, the materiality and geography of thought, is a
philosopheme that characterizes the present age and calls out for further analysis.12 As
Micheal Dummett (2001, p. 7) argues place does not only refer to a land. It also refers to
10
Interestingly Tully (1995) uses Wittgenstein’s thought and his notion of ‘family resemblances’ for
understanding the ‘strange multiplicity’ of the modern state.
11
Camus’s collection of short stories entitled Exile and the Kingdom most of which are set against an
Algerian and clearly involve a strong autobiographical quality (Camus was born in Algeria in 1913) and
Camus construction of Algerian Arab as Other. Camus also write the novel L’etranger (The Stranger) in
1941 at the same point that he meets Sartre and the essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’which explore the futility
of human existence in the face of its absurdity and absence of any rational structure after the ‘death of
God’. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1957.
12
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in What is Philosophy? theorize the connection between geography
and philosophy in ‘geophilosophy’, a term they neologize to analyze the flows, lines, grids, and spaces of
our world. A Thousand Plateaus provided the basis for their ‘geophilosophy’ as a new materialism that
employed many geographical terms (such as ‘territory’ and its processes).
what gives people an identity, which if “it is not grounded in a common ethnicity,
religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it
is striving to create”. Place, “home”, is that which offers a grid for identity, not merely a
spatial-temporal location which individuates, but a broad cultural milieu that frames our
identities. The exile, the refugee, the émigré, thus is someone who becomes dis-placed.13
This chapter focuses on the figure, the trope and the thought of exile—the wanderer and
the stranger--in relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein, both the man and his work, as a means
to discuss its contemporary philosophical significance. Wittgenstein was a self-imposed
exile; one might say a “refugee” from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The bare bones
and chronology of his movements tell a story of ceaseless mobility, of the stranger
working and living in a foreign land, of a man who deliberately removed himself from his
home, his family, his fortune, his country and his native culture. He left home early to
enroll in the Realschule in Linz where he studied for three years beginning in 1903,
before going to Berlin to get a degree in engineering. At nineteen years old in 1908 he
moved to England to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. In
1911 he moved to Cambridge University to study the foundations of mathematics with
Bertrand Russell. Later he went to live briefly in Skjolden in Norway with Pinsent where
he lived in isolation in order to study logic. When war broke out in 1914 he joined the
Austrian army to end the war in an Italian prisoner of war camp in Cassino. Released
13
We owe this insight to Farhang Erfani in the excellent essay ‘Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere:
An Existential-Analytic of Exile’ at http://www.reconstruction.ws/023/erfani.htm (accessed August 15
2005). Erfani, to whom we also owe the reference to Dummett, quotes Judith Shklar (1998: 57) as ‘one of
the very few political thinkers who sought to understand exile” thus: there "has been rather little said [by
philosophers] about exiles. They have been left to the historians and poets, and that is a pity. Perhaps their
numbers and variety have discouraged philosophical inquiry. It is not easy to generalize about exiles, nor
do they land themselves to abstraction"
from detention he trained as a primary school teacher in Vienna under the Austrian
School Reform Movement teaching for seven years in three mountain village schools in
Austria. He gave up teaching, thinking he had failed in 1925, to take a variety of jobs first
as a gardener’s assistant in the Hüsseldorf monastery near Vienna and later as architect of
his sister’s mansion house near Vienna. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 where he
remained until he resigned in 1947, except for a brief period as a porter at Guy’s Hospital
(London) during WWII. During this period he returned to Norway in 1931 to work on the
Philosophical Grammar and visited Ireland with Skinner in 1934. In 1935 he visited
Russia and Dublin in 1936 with Skinner and again in 1938. In 1948 after his resignation
he moved to Ireland; visited Norman Malcolm in the U.S. in 1949, and returned to
Norway briefly in 1950 with Ben Richards, before his death from prostate cancer on
April 29 1951.
This is the chronology of Wittgenstein’s life and the bare bones of his movements but it
belies the connection between his life, his movements and his philosophy. Wittgenstein
did not draw a sharp line between personal and philosophical problems and his work is
sprinkled with references and shot through with metaphors that detail the significance of
the exile both for his work—as a fertile starting point for philosophy—and for him as a
person. He referred and thought of himself as an exile—someone who belongs to another
time and he employed the idea of the Other, of an individual located in another culture, as
a constant working hypothesis not only for his conception of “primitive” language-games
and, therefore, for the acquisition of language and culture, but also more broadly as a
condition of being and learning, and of becoming a philosopher.
As Michael Nedo (2005, p. 11) argues:
Wittgenstein’s wanderings are the expression of a lifelong quest for his vocation,
his place in the world. They take him from Vienna via Berlin to Manchester,
Cambridge and Norway, then back to Vienna; and from engineering to philosophy
And he quotes Wittgenstein
You first have to travel all over before you can return to your native land; and
then you will understand the others (cited in Nedo, 2005:, p.11)
Consider the some of the main movements of Wittgenstein throughout his life organized
roughly chronologically, a kind of spatial analysis that can be mapped onto
Wittgenstein’s thought:
•
Vienna, Linz, Berlin
•
Manchester (Glossop), Jena, Cambridge, Norway (Skjolden)
•
Vienna, Vistula (river), Cracow, Galicia, Olmütz, Vienna, Asiago, Trento,
Cassino
•
Vienna, The Hague, Trattenbach, Puchberg, Cambridge, Vienna
•
Leningrad, Moscow, Cambridge, Dublin, Norway (Skjolden), Cambridge,
Vienna, Norway (Skjolden), Dublin
•
Cambridge, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Cambridge, London, Swansea,
Newcaste-upon-Tyne, Swansea, Cambridge, Swansea
•
Dublin, Rosro, Cambridge, Dublin, Vienna, Dublin, Cambridge, Ithaca
(NY), Cambridge, Vienna, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Norway, Vienna,
Cambridge
For the era before and after the war, as can be seen, Wittgenstein travels a great deal,
returning to Vienna, Skjolden, Cambridge and Dublin. Norway and Ireland are places of
retreat for him where there is no noise and they provide a place for thinking. Vienna is of
course his “hometown” where his family is located and Cambridge, more often than not
his place of employment. He becomes a British citizen in 1939 after much deliberation.
He is keenly aware of himself as a wanderer, as a stranger, and as an exile. These
metaphors-- the Other or outsider—appear as major tropes in his work as do spatial,
landscape and journey metaphors, for example, of finding one’s away around or where he
compares language to a labyrinth (PI, 203) or an ancient city (PI, 8). In fact these ideas of
being lost in a city, finding one’s way around, interpreting the meaning of a signpost (and
signs in general) as core operating metaphors. Wittgenstein writes “A rule stands there
like a signpost.—Does the sign-post leave open a doubt open about the way I have to go?
Does it shew which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road
or the footpath or cross-country?” (PI, 85)
Wittgenstein as Exile
There are a number of senses of “exile” in relation to Wittgenstein the man and his work.
James Klagge (2005) reports in a footnote to a paper that considers “Wittgenstein in
Exile” that “exile” was a term that Wittgenstein used to describe his himself and his
condition of cultural isolation. As he writes,
Upon contemplating a move to Norway in 1913 to continue his research,
Wittgenstein was cited by his friend David Pinsent as follows: “he swears he can
never do his best except in exile” (October 1st, 1913 diary entry, in A Portrait of
Wittgenstein as a Young Man, ed. G.H. von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, p.
85, and cf. p. 89).
What is interesting about this remark is the way it privileges Wittgenstein’s work rather
than himself as an individual. It is almost as though Wittgenstein is saying in this cryptic
remark that he requires an isolation and insulation from normal or familiar conditions of
work in order to focus his intellect. Klagge (2005) in the same footnote records two other
occasions when Wittgenstein referred to himself in terms of “exile”.
In his coded wartime notebook Wittgenstein wrote: “This kind, friendly letter
[from Pinsent] opens my eyes to the fact that I am living in exile [Verbannung]
here. It may be a healing exile, but I now feel it as an exile all the same”
(Geheime Tagebücher: 1914-1916, ed. W. Baum, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1991,
26.7.16, p. 74). And also his comment in his diary: “In my room I feel not alone
but exiled [exiliert]” (“Movements of Thought,” PPO, 9.10.30, p. 55).
Both these fragmentary thoughts highlight elements about Wittgenstein’s self-imposed
condition of exile: first that the condition of exile may be healing or therapeutic for a
writer or philosopher; and second, that exile does not necessarily mean being alone for
one can indeed feel loneliness in a room full of people. Both of these features point to an
aspect of philosophy as a chosen form of life for Wittgenstein—not only did he believe
that philosophy required renouncement of wealth and trappings of privilege but also that
it required a kind of distance from “community” and an attitude that refused the comfort
of belonging to a community.
Clearly, Wittgenstein thought of himself as in exile and he also indicates in his letters that
this condition of cultural isolation was necessary for his work. For example, the
frequency with which he went to Norway and Ireland to seek solitude, silence and the
right conditions to work. I want to argue that exile was a condition that Wittgenstein
thought necessary to a way of life as philosopher. This idea took on a particular hue when
Wittgenstein “returned” to philosophy (at least in a formal sense) to focus upon cultural
questions. It is as though Wittgenstein’s focus on cultural questions—on questions that
stand at the heart of human culture—rather than questions of strict logic, required a
simulation of the anthropologist’s “observer-participant” attitude and sense of
detachment in order to analyze “language-games” and develop “perspicuous
representations”. As Wittgenstein says in “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” (in
Philosophical Occasions, p. 133):
The concept of perspicuous representation is of fundamental importance for us. It
denotes the form of our representation, the way we see things. (A kind of “Worldview” as it is apparently typical of our time. Spengler.)
This perspicuous representation brings about the understanding which consists
precisely in the fact that we “see the connections”. Hence the importance of
finding connecting links.
The philosophical work involved in describing our form of representation seemingly
requires the cultivation of an attitude that demands cultural distance. Wittgenstein
elaborates in the same passage, highlighting “similarity” and “relatedness” as an aspect of
noting formal connections.
But an hypothetical connecting link should in this case do nothing but direct the
attention to the similarity, the relatedness, of the facts. As one might illustrate an
internal relation of a circle to an ellipse by gradually converting an ellipse into a
circle; but not in order to assert that a certain ellipse actually, historically, had
originated from a circle (evolutionary hypothesis), but only in order to sharpen
our eye for a formal connection.
It is an idea he repeats in the Philosophical Investigations at §122 where he talks about
getting “a clear view of the use of our words”, asserting,
A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear
view of the use of our words —Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.
A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in
“seeing the connexions.” Hence the importance of finding and inventing
intermediate cases
Klagge’s interpretation emphasizes the cultural isolation of Wittgenstein which is not
merely a matter of space or of traveling across territorial boundaries but rather a matter of
historical time and change—and one that depends crucially on a distinction that
Wittgenstein makes between culture and civilization. As Klagge (2005, p. 3) remarks,
commenting upon the influence on Wittgenstein of Spengler’s reading of cultures as
organic wholes that flourish and decline:
Clearly Wittgenstein saw the era up through Schumann as the flowering of
Western culture, and the time since, his and our own time, as deteriorating
Western civilization (p. 3).
This thought Klagge traces in the personal note that Wittgenstein strikes in his forewords
and letters.
The notion of Wittgenstein as a self imposed exile also links with a number of other
themes in his work and, in particular, the position of the anthropologist who in fieldwork
as shaped by the ethnographic tradition adopts a position of “outside observer” and has to
wrestle with the problem of intercultural truth and the difficulties surrounding their own
narrative standpoint in relation to representations of other cultures. When the modern
discipline of anthropology belonged to Europe and America—before the postcolonial
critique—it was relatively easy to locate the anthropological subject against the backdrop
of “objective” and “scientific” epistemologies that reflected social scientific positivism
and later structural-functionalism as it emerged from natural history. Wittgenstein often
used anthropological thought experiments and raised philosophical issues that arose at the
intersection of two cultures or where an individual need to find their way about in a
culture different from their own. He also commented on Frazer’s The Golden Bough
thinking that his account of magic and religious practices was entirely mistaken by
making these practices appear as errors. For Wittgenstein true and falsity are properties of
propositions or theories and insofar as these religious and magical practices do not claim
to be theoretical in this sense they are not liable to be changed to the power of
argumentation. In essence Wittgenstein provides an epistemological critique of Frazer.
Wittgenstein is also suspicious of the way in which Frazer talks of rituals as springing
from false beliefs which is to misunderstand the nature of ritual and culture (but not of
various biological processes).
Exile, Culture and Learning
In relation to the aims and themes of this book we can ask what is educational in travel
and in the experience and notion of exile, beyond the obvious truism that “travel
broadens the mind” or even the historical significance of the “European tour” which was
seen as an essential aspect of a gentleman’s education during the nineteenth century
especially in England.
A preliminary response to the question might focus upon the differences between the
meanings of “travel” and “exile”, yet a consideration of both in relation to the experience
of another culture. Clearly, the notion of travel per se does not necessarily entail learning
the language and customs of another culture. Indeed, travel as in the experience of the
tourist may involve the security of group travel, package tours, and the prospect of never
having one”s comfort or security threaten or risked. Unlike exile, either forced or selfimposed, the tourist is distinguished by the fact that curiosity and a kind of cultural
consumption is the hallmark rather than cultural immersion, and the tourist generally
does not have his or her zone of comfort and cultural identification threatened. With
tourism generally there is not the same prospect of learning the rules, norms and mores of
another culture through a constant engagement or encounter with the Other in their own
home cultural environment. Exile, in other words, is distinguished by the fact that it is an
“othering” experience. It demands a certain kind of learning at the level of practice that is
necessary for knowing how to go on within a culture. Generally also it involves the risk
and prospect of failure: both failure of communication at the simple level of conversation
but also failure at the deeper cultural level that helps to determine a sense of what is
culturally appropriate. This continual risk of failure and lack of understanding of the
underlying agreed cultural judgments requires a kind of learning that can only be
obtained through practical encounters. It necessarily involves the experience of being lost
and at times of not knowing how to proceed or what to do. Invariably this kind of
learning takes places around the aspects of daily life, the ordinary and the everyday
events of eating, talking, queuing, exchanging pleasantries, greeting people of different
age, sex and gender, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing and so on. The tourist by
comparison never allows his or his sense of ontological security to be threatened and
while the intelligent or perceptive tourist might learn something about others and other
cultures, generally it is not a learning that takes place under conditions of uncertainty
involving the risk of being lost away from home and from familiar structures of
familiarity. Study abroad programs that are now an increasingly important aspect of
education need to be located closer to the experience of the exile than the tourist, with
appropriate formal instruction related to the local context.
Veena Das (1998, pp. 171-2) in an article entitled “Wittgenstein and Anthropology”
argues that there is “a certain kinship in the questions that Wittgenstein asks of his
philosophy and the puzzles of anthropology” and goes on to note:
Consider his formulation. A philosophical problem has the form: I don”t know
my way about (Wittgenstein 1953: para. 123). For Wittgenstein, then,
philosophical problems have their beginnings in the feeling of being lost and in a
unfamiliar place, and philosophical answers are in the nature of finding one”s way
back. This image of turning back, of finding not as moving forward as toward a
goal but as being led back, is pervasive in the later writings of Wittgenstein.
How can anthropology receive this way of philosophizing? Is there something
familiar in the feeling of being lost in anthropological experience?
Das (1998) embraces Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture and
goes on to explore some Wittgensteinian themes in relation to the idea of culture, limits
to forms of life, concepts of the everyday in the face of skepticism and the complexity of
inner life, especially in relation to questions of belief and pain. Certainly, Wittgenstein
notion of forms of life does signal a kind of availability of Wittgenstein’s thought to
anthropology, as Das suggests.
This reading might also be deepened into an understanding of the ontological dimensions
of multicultural education and pedagogy, as well as refugee education and what we might
call a pedagogy of the Other. By ontological relational dimensions we mean focusing on
the configuration and dynamic of self and other, of encounter with the other, and of
oneself as another. In a work of that exact title Paul Ricoeur (1992) explores the notion of
selfhood and the question of personal identity in a way that posits that selfhood implies
otherness and that it cannot be understood by itself, as with Descartes lonely cogito. Exile
forces one to live as the other, as another. It is not simply a matter of learning the
language and customs but rather it is about finding the self in the Other, of being lost in
relation to the self in a way that creates a rupture with familiar things that shore up
ontological security and an of identity understood as a form of self-knowledge.
We might say that the “hermeneutics of the self” (Foucault, 2004) differs from the
philosophy of the subject: where the latter seeks certainty and truth as the foundation of
the self, self knowledge and also knowledge of the external world, the former sees selfunderstanding as a cultural act that can only take place within the dynamic or dialectic of
self and other—an active cultural reading and re-reading of self-interpretation. Foucault
hermeneutics of technologies of the self is precisely an attempt to avoid the history of
beliefs and to substitute a history of practices which, unlike hermeneutics of the text, was
never based on a body of doctrine. Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self examines a
hermeneutics in Greco-Roman philosophy of the first two centuries AD and Christian
spiritual and monastic practices of the fourth and fifth centuries.
In a way we can talk of finding the stranger in oneself, not knowing how one might act in
new situations or how one is expected to act. This is a very Cavellian scene: this kind of
learning is a deep cultural learning that seeks to find the self in the other and the other in
oneself; it is a process of self-knowledge and identity formation that involves the
possibility and risk of being lost, of an identity constantly on the move likes the pilgrim
always being on the way. This theme of an encounter with the other taken up in various
ways by Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Levinas, Foucault, Cavell, Ricoeur and Gadamer also
focuses on what the possibilities of understanding across culture and across difference
means; an endless process of confronting the other in oneself and with luck of
discovering something new about ourselves; of finding the other in ourselves and
recognize the stranger in oneself.
Wittgenstein regarded himself as an exile and in a double sense as we have seen. His
exile was both temporal and spatial. While his “exile” from his home Vienna and from
his family and way of life was self-imposed he felt that he was living as an exile in a
different time and in a culture which he despised. Wittgenstein was rooted in the
intellectual life of Vienna at the turn of the century (Janik and Toulmin, 1973) and he was
preoccupied with the intellectual values that emanated from that culture: language and the
purity of language, what could be said and what could not be said, the relation between
the health of a culture and its language. Many of these issues center on the birth of
modernism in turn of the century Vienna as evidence in the work of Karl Krauss, Adolf
Loos, Otto Weininger, Gustav Mahler, Gustav Klimt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and
Stefan Zweig. The difficulties for Wittgenstein also revolved around the collapse of the
Habsburg Empire that incorporated Germans, Ruthenes, Italians, Slovaks, Rumanians,
Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. For Krauss as for Wittgenstein
Vienna was culturally bankrupt. The answer in part was through the imagination of the
arts and philosophy that could provide a renewed and authentic self through symbolic
expression: music, poetry, art, architecture and philosophy that focused on the relations
between language, ethics and representation. Gellner (1998) argues that both
Wittgenstein and Malinowski shared many of the Hapsburg Empire’s contradictions such
as a deep affinity with a local tradition or one’s ethnic roots as well as a sophisticated and
fluent command of a universal culture. These influences shaped Wittgenstein and
Malinowski resulting in their particular versions of a solitary individualism and a
romantic communalism.
Wittgenstein as Welch (1999: 202) points out develops a “pragmatically based concept of
culture” that is remarkable “free of ethnic consolidation and unreasonable demands for
homogeneity.” Language is central to culture and to a kind of authenticity. Culture is
based on based on shared practices that create a form of life. Welch argues:
The basic task is not to be conceived as an understanding of foreign cultures, but
as an interaction with foreignness. Understanding may be helpful, but is never
sufficient alone, it has to enhance progress in interaction. We must change the
pattern from hermeneutic conceptualizations with their beloved presumption of
foreignness on the one hand and the unfortunate appropriating dialectics of
understanding on the other to decidedly pragmatic efforts to interact. And there is
always a good chance for such interactions, because there exist at least some
entanglements, intersections and transitions between the different ways of life. It
is precisely this which Wittgenstein’s concept of culture takes into account.
Culture in Wittgenstein’s sense is, by its very structure, open to new connections
and to further feats of integration. To this extent, a cultural concept reformulated
along Wittgenstein’s lines seems to me to be particularly apt to today’s conditions
(pp. 202-3).
Wittgenstein’s notion a concept of culture that challenges the concept of a single unified
culture (or nation) – internally uniform and geographically separate -- and emphasises, by
contrast, the view of cultures “as overlapping, interactive and internally differentiated…”
(Tully, 1995, p. 9). Cultures overlap geographically; they are mutually defined through
complex historical patterns of historical interaction, and they are continuously
transformed in interaction with other cultures, a process that occurs through a variety of
exchange mechanisms including trade, tourism, and exile.
James Tully (1995, p. 11) explains: “The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is
thus aspectival rather than essential: like many complex human phenomena, such as
language and games, cultural identity changes as it is approached from different paths
and a variety of aspects come into view.” He goes on to argue for a dynamic view of
culture that emphasizes that difference is also internal to cultures:
As a consequence of the overlap, interaction and negotiation of cultures, the
experience of cultural difference is internal to a culture. This is the most difficult
aspect of the new view of culture to grasp. On the older, essentialist view, the
“other” and the experience of otherness were by definition associated with
another culture… On the aspectival view, cultural horizons change as one moves
about, just like natural horizons. The experience of otherness is internal to one’s
own identity, which consists in being oriented in an aspectival intercultural space
… (p. 13).
Exile is an educational experience based on finding oneself in another of shoring up one’s
identity in other cultural terms. Exhilic thought is that discourse in philosophy that
recognizes the spatial dimension of thought and its necessary complement when one
travels and settles, initially a stranger in the community but also one who brings new
perspectives even though it may be one and the many or the few and the many that
precipitates a kind of cultural learning that is pronounced not only in understanding
others and other cultures but also at the heart of cultural process of self and other that rest
on differences within and between cultures.
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