Augustine and Wittgenstein on the Will

I have a draft of a paper on this subject at academia.edu. Comments (or constructive criticism, anyway) are welcome.

Here's the gist:

In Wittgenstein: Mind and Will (p. 593) P. M. S. Hacker writes that:

one cannot will voluntarily, cannot will to will. But that does not mean that willing is like the subsiding of the thudding of one’s heart – something that just happens to one. What it means is that willing is not the name of an action at all. And to say that one cannot will voluntarily, or will to will, is not to say that it is beyond one’s powers, as wiggling their ears is beyond most people’s powers, but rather that it is senseless to speak of willing.

The last part of this ("it is senseless to speak of willing") strikes me as clearly wrong. And the idea that willing is not the same of an action seems pretty dubious too. At least it sounds like a claim that might be debated. And I don't think of Wittgenstein as being in the business of putting forward such claims. So the questions that motivate the paper, although I don't present it this way (maybe I should), are really: How has Hacker arrived at this point? Does his thinking match Wittgenstein's? And what, if anything, does this have to do with Augustine, whom Wittgenstein mentions in connection with some of the thoughts that Hacker is attempting to explain.

The questions I have about my paper are mainly these (in order of concern, from most to least):

1. Do I misrepresent Hacker, Wittgenstein, or Augustine?
2. Is what I say comprehensible and easy enough to follow?
3. Is this of any interest? 

A and B

I should perhaps now compare Wittgenstein's treatment of Augustine's text with Mulhall's treatment of various texts, but I don't think I've got to a sufficiently clear or complete view of what Wittgenstein says about Augustine (if he says anything at all about him) to do that. So I'll press on with Wittgenstein instead.

The first paragraph of §2 begins with a reference to "that philosophical concept of meaning," which seems slightly ambiguous. Does the concept in question belong to the interlocutor who asks about the meaning of "five" in the shopkeeper example? Or to the narrator, who says that only the use of the word "five" was in question, not its meaning? Or do these two share an understanding of what "meaning" means? The matter seems to be cleared up in the next paragraph, which mentions Augustine again. Having said that the philosophical concept of meaning belongs in a primitive idea of how language functions, the narrator says that we could also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours. Then he tells us to think of a language for which the description given by Augustine would be fitting. This is not quite the same as the shopkeeper story, and it is introduced in way that suggests the shopkeeper story was not intended to fit Augustine's description. After all, why invent a new example/story to do this job if we have just been given one?

The story we get now is of the builders A and B. The first thing we are told is what the language is for: A is building and B is his assistant. When A calls for a particular stone, B brings it to him. There are four kinds of stone, each with its own name. And this is the whole language, we are asked to imagine.

As with the shopkeeper, there is something strange about this story. Why are there only two people doing the building? Why isn't their work done more cooperatively? How heavy can the blocks be if B is carrying them single-handedly (is he Obelix?)? Both this building and the shopping in the previous section sound a lot like children's games. Whether that matters I don't know.

A second thing to note is that in the Augustinian picture, the meanings of words are supposed to be the objects for which they stand. But here the meaning of "slab" seems clearly not to be a kind of object. It means something more like "Bring me a slab!" Is Wittgenstein trying to show how embedded language/meaning is in activities or forms of life? Or is he getting his own interpretation of what Augustine says wrong? Even if he got it wrong deliberately, this would be weird, so I expect he's trying to make a point about purpose and practice in connection with language, but it's still too early to draw definite conclusions.

Wittgenstein's shopkeeper

I have been trying to read what Wittgenstein writes about Augustine and the shopkeeper and the rest as if for the first time, but also slowly and carefully. As well as the danger of failing to do this, of not being careful enough, there is also the danger of going too slowly, trying too hard to be careful, and seeing things or imagining problems that are not really there. But Wittgenstein advised philosophers to take their time, so I think that slowly is the right way to read him. (This does not guarantee success, of course.)

Another danger is that of being influenced by others one has read, including Wittgenstein himself. If we have already been convinced that meaning and use are closely related, perhaps even the same thing, and that explanations do indeed come to an end somewhere, then we might be too unquestioning of the shopkeeper example. If we have read Stephen Mulhall on this example (in Inheritance and Originality or Philosophical Myths of the Fall--the relevant pages can be read online using either Google Books or amazon's "look inside" feature (search for "shopkeeper)) then we might be too quick to regard the shopkeeper as mechanical or zombie-like. Perhaps I have made that mistake.

So let me try to treat the example as realistic. People do use written notes in shopping sometimes. Online shoppers send written lists to shops, in places where goods are hard to find one might hand one's shopping list to the shopkeeper, foreigners might write down what they want, and so on. We can imagine the apples being kept in a drawer of some kind of refrigerator, with different draws for different fruits. People do count out loud, or under their breath. Looking up "red" on a chart sounds a bit odd, but wouldn't be if there were many similar colours (think of all the redlike paint shades you can buy). But we do, I think, have to imagine quite a bit to make the story credible as a scene from anyone's actual life. Wittgenstein has not done anything like this with the quotation from Augustine. Should he have, or is it OK, when doing philosophy at least, to ignore or forget about context?

This remains to be seen as far as the Philosophical Investigations goes. (Or so it seems to me.)

Back to §1

One question I didn't address in my last post is whether the picture that Wittgenstein finds in Augustine's words supports the portrayal of language use in the shopkeeper story. Augustine's evil baby genius (who is selfish and whiny, and can think but has not yet cracked the code of the Latin-speaking grown-ups) is quite different from the robotic/zombie shopkeeper. One has an implausibly rich inner life, while the other is hard to imagine as having any inner life at all. But in each case we get the idea that words are correlated with things and that these things are the meanings of those words. Wittgenstein describes the idea as this: "Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."

He seems to be against this idea. But is he against all of it? Should he be? For instance, how often does anyone suggest that the first part of the idea ("Every word has a meaning") is objectionable? But the idea of nonsense is important to Wittgenstein, so perhaps we should question this idea.

The important thing might be, not so much who or what is right, but that Augustine has described learning language as if it were a matter of becoming like the shopkeeper, despite the fact that he very clearly does not think of our lives as being like the shopkeeper's. So he has somehow said something that he does not really mean. Or else his words have been misinterpreted.

Wittgenstein reads Augustine

First, it would be a mistake to skip the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, but I will note just a few things about it: 1. like the Tractatus, it contains thoughts but is not meant to tell people what to think (rather, Wittgenstein says he wants to "stimulate someone to thoughts of his own"), 2. speaking of ownership, Wittgenstein says that: "If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, then I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property," and 3. he expresses pessimism about the quality of what he has produced (it is only an album of halfway decent sketches) and the likelihood of its being understood (the times are too dark and one can understand the thoughts in the book properly only "by contrast with and against the background of" the thoughts in the Tractatus).

After the preface the book begins with a quotation in Latin from Augustine's Confessions. If the preface has not made us go back and read the Tractatus, and if trying to read that book has not made us stop and go back to Frege and Russell, and possibly Schopenhauer, Kant, and others too, then this Latin passage might prompt us to brush up our Latin or read Augustine. Otherwise we have to trust the narrator, who has already warned us that we are unlikely to understand what he has written.

Augustine's words are addressed to God, and they emphasize the role of the body in learning language. Bodily movements and gestures constitute a natural language, and one has to learn to use one's tongue in order to pronounce words. What drives this learning, as Augustine expresses it, is the desire to express one's will in order that one might get what one wills. There is something sinful about this: Augustine takes a rather dim view of babies and their willfulness. It is God's will we should want to be done, after all, not our own. Augustine also writes as if babies have a fully developed will (maybe not at first--when they know only to suck, to enjoy what they like, and to cry at what they dislike--but soon after this), capable of thinking and desiring a range of things. So simply watching what Latin-speakers call by what names enables one to learn Latin. Readers are probably aware that it takes more to understand the quotation from Augustine than a knowledge of the meanings of the main nouns in the passage.

There is something off about Augustine's portrayal of babies, something we might laugh at, except that it is clearly bound up with his religious beliefs. The Confessions is not a funny book. And Augustine's seemingly questionable psychology is perhaps best understood not as psychology at all but as an attempt to express our fallen nature. In this sense it sounds like the kind of thing that, at the end of the Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein said he would not ridicule for the life of him. So I doubt we are meant to laugh--or to keep laughing, at any rate--but we might if we fail, or refuse, to take the speaker of these words into account.

Wittgenstein's response is to say that it seems to him (so this is a personal reaction) that these words give us a certain picture of the essence of language. In this picture, he continues, we find the roots of an idea about language. This mixed metaphor might (should?) give us pause. Not to criticize Wittgenstein's writing but to think about what he might mean. What is a picture in this sense? How could it contain roots? How can he know there are these roots in this picture? Is he telling us what he thinks is going on in Augustine's mind? He doesn't say.

The next paragraph points out some things that Augustine does not mention, without any explicit criticism of him for this, and then says what Wittgenstein believes someone who describes learning language like this believes. He is thinking primarily of certain obvious nouns (the names of concrete types of objects, such as chairs) and people's names. Wittgenstein gives no reason to think that Augustine in particular is thinking this way (although it would seem reasonable enough to think this of him), and in general treats Augustine's words as if their author and original context did not matter. Perhaps that is OK, but a case could certainly be made that it isn't. Is context never important? Is Wittgenstein reading into Augustine's work ideas that he previously believed in? We don't have much basis on which to decide yet, but it seems reasonable to ask the questions.

In the next paragraph Wittgenstein changes tack (at least seemingly) and tells us to think of a use of language: Wittgenstein sends someone (who? someone he outranks? a child? a foreigner?) shopping with a piece of paper marked "five red apples." The shopkeeper does not simply hand over the apples--he looks up what colour red is and uses this information to identify which apples he should take from the drawer (!) in which he keeps them. He has memorized the number series, but still has to count up to five to know how many apples to hand over. Then Wittgenstein remarks that, "It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words." Is this claim part of what we are simply being told to imagine? Or is Wittgenstein really claiming that this story is similar to the way we operate with words? Who are "we" though? Is "operate" really what we do with words? And how similar must two things be to count as genuinely similar? Wittgenstein does not say, and there isn't really an answer to any of these questions I can think of that isn't arbitrary.

An interlocutor then asks none of these questions but one about how the shopkeeper knows what to do in response to the words "five" and "red." These would be reasonable questions if the shopkeeper were a robot and we wanted to know how he has been programmed, but otherwise they sound a bit odd to me. Wittgenstein (or the narrator) takes them in his stride, though, and brushes them aside with a mere stipulation that the shopkeeper acts as described and that "Explanations come to an end somewhere." The interlocutor then wants to know what the word "five" means (in this story, presumably, but perhaps more generally), but is told that this was not in question. The question was only how the word "five" is used.

So was it unreasonable to ask about the meaning of "five"? Does the story-teller get to dictate what the story was about? Perhaps he does, but then what is the point of the story if it does not answer the questions that other people have?

So far, then, we have been told something that Augustine wrote, told what Wittgenstein thinks in response to words like these, and told to imagine a strange story. We have not been told what we should think about anything, but have been given plenty of food for thought. Which is what Wittgenstein told us he was aiming to do in the preface.