Studies in Philosophy and Education 20: 125–138, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Wittgensteinian Pedagogics: Cavell on the Figure ofthe Child in the Investigations

MICHAEL PETERSSchool of Education, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract. This paper discusses Stanley Cavell’s approach to the Investigations, focusing upon hisessay – ‘Notes and Afterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations’. First, the paperinvestigates the ways in which Cavell makes central the figure and ‘voice’ of the child to his readingof the opening of the Investigations. Second, it argues that Cavell’s Notes provides a basis for aWittgensteinian pedagogics, for not only does it hold up the figure of the child as central to theInvestigations but it does so in a philosophical style that, though distinctively Cavell’s own, comesclosest to the spirit of philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s sense. Third, the paper concludes by discuss-ing the complex vocal and figural structure of the Investigations which serves to highlight differentaspects of the figure of the child and the child’s ‘voice’.

Key words: figure of the child, Lugwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, the child’s ‘voice’, theInvestigations, Wittgensteinian pedagogics

1. Introduction: Cavell and American Philosophy

The Italian philosopher, Giovanna Borradori (1994) spins a narrative about thetrajectory of American postwar philosophy that casts Stanley Cavell in a leadingrole. He pictures Cavell as a neo-romantic or neo-transcendentalist who self-consciously attempts to heal the rupture of American public intellectualism andculture that was caused by a diasporic Viennese strain of analytic philosophy. Theway Borradori tells the story emphasizes that the American intellectual traditionestablished by such figures as Emerson, James, Pierce and Dewey, was fracturedat the point that a group of mitteleuropean (and mostly Jewish) thinkers, who werea part of the Vienna Circle, migrated to the United States to escape persecutionby the Third Reich. Such leading philosophers as Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl,Carl Hempel, Hans Reichenbach and Otto Neurath migrated to the United Statesto join and set up philosophy departments with a neo-positivist research direction.Quine himself, as a key figure in the second wave of analyticity and the father ofAmerican postwar philosophy, spent some time in Vienna in the early 1930s.

Borradori’s analysis is that postwar American philosophy, based upon the mainarticles of faith of the analytic creed, isolated the discipline from the other disci-plines (especially from history and literature) and from the rest of culture byencouraging the narrow pursuit of ‘technical’ questions in a professionalization of

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its own status and self-image within the academy. Such a separation was reinforcedby the analytic creed that in its desire to eliminate metaphysics tended to denyits own history and to carry on a war of attrition against so-called Continentalphilosophy which was pictured as hopelessly metaphysical.1 Borradori (1994, p. 7)writes:

In America, the definition of analytic philosophy has always been posed inopposition to European thought. In fact, the opposition between ‘analytic’ and‘Continental’ philosophy is one of the most important historical consequencesof the flight of logical positivism to the United States. Repudiating the previoustranscendentalist and pragmatist trajectory that engaged it deeply on the publicand interdisciplinary front, American philosophy changed face after the SecondWorld War. As for the anti-metaphysical will that had pushed the Vienna Circleto define themselves as ‘scientists’ rather than as humanists, philosophicalthought in America closed itself to Europe, and above all to the many currentsof existential and hermeneutic derivation, which are often branded even todayas obscurantist and nihilist.

Stanley Cavell, at least in Borradori’s eyes, is one of the preeminent Americanphilosophers, who along with Richard Rorty (though in very different ways), hasdeliberately attempted to heal the epistemological rupture not only by returning tothe origins of American philosophy – Emerson’s transcendentalism and Thoreau’sWalden – but also by openly engaging with other disciplines and with the leadingfigures of contemporary Continental philosophy. It is almost as though Borradori’sscript on the history of contemporary American philosophy was written especiallyfor Cavell, for he can be seen as writing in ways which fulfil the implied promiseof Borradori’s narrative for the future of American philosophy.

The reasons why he ought to be read in this way, I believe, lie, at least inpart, with his own appraisal of Wittgenstein’s work, particularly the Investiga-tions, but also, I would surmise, on Cavell’s interpretation of both Wittgenstein’shistorical place within the so-called analytic tradition and his relationship to theVienna Circle.2 Cavell attempts to rescue an ‘aesthetic-ethical’ Wittgenstein, tobe understood within the context of a European intellectual milieu, located atthe intersection of romanticism and skepticism and in relation to the question ofmodernism in the arts. Above all, he emphasizes, Wittgenstein as a man who livedhis philosophy; as someone whose philosophy is impossible to understand withoutunderstanding the man, and whose style is aesthetically speaking central to themeaning of the Investigations.

This paper draws upon this general understanding of Cavell’s work and hisapproach to reading and teaching Wittgenstein. I begin with a brief discussionof Cavell’s approach to the Investigations, focusing upon one essay – ‘Notes andAfterthoughts on the Opening of Wittgenstein’s Investigations’ (referred hereafterto as Notes) – which demonstrates both the complexity of Cavell’s thinking andhow close it is to Wittgenstein’s own style of philosophizing. In the second partof the paper I investigate the ways in which Cavell makes central the figure and

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voice of the child to his reading of the opening of the Investigations. I argue thatCavell’s Notes provides a basis for a Wittgensteinian pedagogics for not only doesit hold up the figure of the child as central to the Investigations but it does soin a philosophical style that, though distinctively Cavell’s own, comes closest tothe spirit of philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s sense. (My essay attempts to captureand emulate something of the complexity of Cavell’s thinking and his Wittgen-steinian style.) The text of the Investigations is, itself, an exemplary pedagogic textshowing us how to do philosophy in a new way. Cavell’s Notes provides us withthe rare opportunity, as Michael Payne (1995, p. 5) argues, ‘of witnessing Cavellin the act of teaching a philosophical text’. Cavell (1995, p. 126), himself, directlyaddresses this issue when he indicates that part of the reason for publishing theNotes, was that some who had attended his lectures suggested that they would beof pedagogical help; yet he also says ‘There is still, I believe, no canonical way ofteaching the Investigations’. A Wittgensteinian pedagogics, we might say, not onlymakes central to philosophy the figure of the child – and all that that entails3 – butit does so in a self-consistent pedagogical style, in a way that construes philosophyas pedagogy (see Peters and Marshall, 1999, Chapter 10). Finally, I shall suggestin terms of sympathetic to Cavell other elements of the vocal and figural structureof the Investigations that highlights different aspects of the figure of the child andthe child’s voice.

2. Cavell’s Investigations

Cavell’s uniqueness as a philosopher is evidenced by his capacity to write acrossa range of topics and mediums. I am thinking particularly of his Shakespearecriticism and his work on film.4 Yet of all his achievements it is, I believe, his inter-pretation of Wittgenstein that distinguishes him as a contemporary philosopher, assomeone who knows how to practice or ‘do’ philosophy in age of uncertainty, inan age when logic and science, perhaps, have eclipsed philosophy as the unifyingdiscipline or metanarrative.

Cavell is a philosopher, one of the few within the analytic tradition (if westill regard both Austin and Wittgenstein as somehow part of that tradition), whoembodies Rorty’s notion of ‘philosophy as a kind of writing’. Certainly, likeperhaps, Derrida in respect to philosophy itself, Cavell regards the Investigationsas a text rather than a set of problems to be worked through. This is not to deny thatthere are also problems surrounding, as Wittgenstein says in the Investigations, “theconcepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundationsof mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things” (1972, p. vii). Yet these‘subjects’ are not approached in traditional philosophical ways: Wittgenstein doesnot employ standard or recognizable forms of argumentation nor does he proposetheories about them.

Payne (1995, p. 2) encapsulates a set of interrelated features that characterizeCavell’s reading, focusing his attention on the notion of the human voice – its

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fiction and dissimulations – as a means for engaging an audience, creating acommunity and developing a process of reasoning.

Cavell advises that Philosophical Investigations should be considered as a textrather than a set of problems; that its quality may be inferred from the quality ofother texts it arouses or stimulates others to write; that it is essentially a writtentext, however much Wittgenstein’s human voice may be heard in it; that it isnot simply a text which can be ‘approached’ as though it stood forever at somedistance from the reader; that its language not only invokes ordinary notionsand experience but also discrepancies from the ordinary; that Wittgenstein’simmediate audience – grounded in the empiricist tradition of philosophy –includes precisely those who will be most intimately offended by his text; thathe appeals to his readers to form a community around his text, the search forsuch a community being also the search for reason.

Cavell’s Notes formed the basis of a course he gave on the Investigations atBerkeley in 1960. These notes were later amplified and developed at Harvard wherehe gave lectures based upon them some half a dozen times during the 1960s and1970s. Cavell (1996, p. 369) writes of that period:

That first time around, I presented it [the Investigations] as what I called amodernist work, meaning to say that its incessant and explicit self-reflectionstruck me as unlike the self-consciousness of any other undoubted work ofphilosophy I knew. I did not then take the cue to ask whether, or how, or towhat extent, philosophy on the whole can escape issues of modernity.

He gave the last set of lectures based on Notes, which had undergone furtherdevelopment, especially in light of his Claim to Reason, in 1984. In 1991 hehad occasion to make a presentation that included both the Notes and his after-thoughts concerning them but it was not until the Spring of 1993 that he beganto recall his earliest thoughts on the Investigations. The final version appears inPhilosophical Passages (1995) and in Hans Sluga’s (1996) Cambridge Companionto Wittgenstein.

The Notes themselves appear in italics in the text and Cavell’s afterthoughtsappear in a standard upright font. What we are presented with is a lengthy essay ofsome fifty-nine pages that comprises Cavell’s reflections over at least thirty yearsand a text that resembles Wittgenstein’s own manuscripts in the complexity of itscomposition: a set of remarks worked and reworked, interspersed in a variety oftype faces not only with the original Notes and afterthoughts but also with extensivequotations from his earlier works, from a number of other authors (including,Augustine, Hume, and Foucault) and, in addition, references to both traditions –the so-called Anglo-American tradition (e.g., Emerson, Austin, Kripke) and theContinental (e.g., Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida).

The result is a rich textual layering that presents the reader with an elaborate,labrythrine structure echoing the process of Cavell’s thinking – a kind of spatializedconceptual mapping or soft ‘architecture’ – that at one and the same time utilizes

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some of the gestures of Wittgensteinian philosophizing: the incessant questioning,the rhetorical flourishes, the thought experiments, the theatrical asides, the sametentativeness in suggestion and yet boldness in concept, the poetizing interpreta-tions, the mini-narratives. This has led some critics to comment negatively upon his‘self-indulgent style’, while others, perhaps more attuned to Cavell’s project, talkof ‘the philosopher as novelist’ or suggest that Cavell is developing ‘a new kindof storytelling.’5 Cavell (1996, p. 370) suggests that, motivated by his readings ofNietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, it was only in his most recent rethinking didhe begin ‘to move more systematically toward an articulation of Wittgenstein’smanner, the sheer sense of deliberateness and beauty of his writing, as internal tothe sense of his philosophical aims.’

3. The ‘Voice’ and Figure of the Child in the Investigations

Cavell’s work as a whole is concerned with the finding or recovery of the humanvoice, and of finding one’s own voice. In ‘The Melodrama of the UnknownWoman: A Reading of Gaslight’ he talks of ‘reinserting or replacing the humanvoice in philosophical thinking, that voice that philosophy finds itself to need todeny’ and in ‘The Philosopher in American Life’ he suggests that logical analysis‘has depended upon the suppression of the human voice’, the voice that ordinarylanguage philosophy aims at recovering (cited in Fischer, 1989). Payne (1995, p. 3)suggests that Cavell elaborates on Wittgenstein’s philosophical style in two ways.The first involves the imitation of the human voice and the way his writing involvesa continuity with his spoken voice, suggesting a ‘naturalness’ or ‘ordinariness’ andrecalling the ancient form of the Platonic dialogue, a fictionalized spoken voice.6

Cavell (1996, p. 381) himself writes on this matter by focusing upon the conceptof the modern self:

Part of my sense of the Investigations as a modernist work is that its portraitof the human is recognizable as one of the modern self, or, as we are given tosay, the modern subject. Since we are considering a work of philosophy, thisportrait will not be unrelated to a classical portrait of the subject of philosophy,say that to be found in Plato’s Republic, where a human soul finds itself chainedin illusion, so estranged from itself and lost to reality that it attacks the one whocomes to turn it around and free it by a way of speaking to it, thus inciting it toseek the pleasures of the clear light of day.

At this first level of style, Payne suggests that Cavell adopts Emersonian oracularconventions, especially that of ‘Man Thinking’, representing both the privilegeand responsibility of the intellect. On the second level, Payne (1995, p. 4) arguesthat Cavell’s style ‘makes precise demands and sets exact terms of his reader’sparticipatin’ in establishing a community that shares both pleasure and agon.

Cavell approaches the ‘figure of the child’ as a recent turn in his thinking andindicates that this turn was one of the original reasons to publish the Notes. Hewrites that the publication will:

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help me place a recent turn in my thinking about the state of the child‘learning’ language, as presented in Augustine’s portrait of (that is, his literary-philosophical remembering of himself as) such a child, which Wittgensteinuses to open his own book (his ‘album’, he calls it) of literary-philosophicalreminders (Cavell, 1995, p. 127).

Reading the Notes one gets a clear impression that the figure of the child developsand flowers into something both more considered and philosophical as Cavellproceeds to elaborate its substance in the afterthoughts. I shall trace and markout some of the more important passages concerning the figure of the childin the original notes, and move through to section II of the Notes, comprisedentirely of afterthoughts, where Cavell approaches the figure of the child in fruitfuland instructive ways for those interested in the possibility of a Wittgensteinianpedagogics.

Cavell is interested in how the Investigations begins (and how philosophyitself begins and ends). It begins, as he relates, by someone talking of his child-hood. There is an homology here (not noted by Cavell), between how philosophybegins and how the subject/self begins: a question of growth, of development, ofbeginnings, and of genealogy.7 We are all familiar with a child’s questions aboutbeginnings or origins, at least in popular portrayals. There is always another ques-tion. Once an answer has been provided it seems that it only serves to generateanother series of questions to which there is no end. It comprises an originalbut naive and innocent skepticism. The child’s question can be the philosopher’squestion, preserving its freshness of insight and its original skepticism but withthe benefit of disciplined reflection. We might say that the ‘why?-game’ is thelanguage game in which children learn the philosophical power of the question.Perhaps, Wittgenstein (1969) had this in mind when at #204 in On Certainty, hesays ‘Giving grounds . . . comes to an end . . . its is our acting, which lies at thebottom of our language-game.’8

In a Wittgensteinian-type comment in the original Notes and in relation to thepassage from Augustine, Cavell says, in parentheses: ‘We don’t, I believe, say thatwe learn out first language, our mother tongue. We say of a child who cannot talkyet that he or she cannot talk yet, not that he hasn’t learned his native language.’And he adds, as an afterthought, ‘If not (quite) as a feat of learning, how do weconceive of our coming into language, or “acquiring” it?’ (p. 144). Later he recordsthat fact that Wittgenstein (at section 5), speaking of the ‘builder’s’ language he hasinvented, remarks that

‘A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk.’ Andit does seem easy to imagine a child with only four words . . . And is therea question of whether the child ‘understands’ the words? . . . The child has afuture with language, the builders have, without luck, or the genius of invention,none – only their repetitions (p. 146).

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He says in the last paragraph of the original notes, having analyzed the builder’slanguage: ‘the training of children is a process of stupefying them into a state inwhich we encounter the grown-up builders.’ But, he explains, this may not meanadopting brutal means; indeed, if children are ‘recalcitrant’, that is, they do notparticipate in the language game, or do so slowly or wrong-headedly, then it maybe simply that

the elders will not speak to them, or pay them full attention, or else that theyperpetually express disappointment in the children, and tell them they are bad.As our kind mostly does (p. 165)

In his afterthoughts, beginning section II of the essay, Cavell reflects on the wayin which these early observations about the figure of the child became more crit-ical for him. As he says: ‘It is not a figure one expects to find in philosophicaltexts’ and he speculates that upon the causes for its absence within the Continentaltradition as opposed to the analytic.9 Its absence from the latter, Cavell maintains,has prevented analytic philosophy ‘from recognizing psychoanalysis as one of itsothers’ (a remark one could not easily direct at Wittgenstein given his treatment ofFreud and his view of philosophy as a kind of therapy). He claims that his interestin ordinary language philosophy was from the beginning interwoven with the figureof the child and he proceeds to provide some examples of this preoccupation: thediscussion of knowing how to continue a series at the end of Part One of The Claimto Reason; and what he calls Wittgenstein’s ‘scene of instruction’ in ConditionsHandsome and Unhandsome.

In the first excerpt that Cavell (1995b: p. 168) highlights, he writes:

Children’s intellectual reactions are easy to find ways to dismiss; anxiety overtheir ‘errors’ can be covered by the natural charms of childhood and by ouraccepting as the right answer the answer the child learns we want to hear . . . Bythe time the charm fades their education takes place out of sight.

He talks of the stream of incessant questions that flow from the child – a kind ofnatural skepticism – and in relation to which we feel that we run out of reasons‘without being willing to say “This is what I do” . . . and honour that’ (p. 168). Inthe second excerpt, Cavell defines the importance of the figure of the child moreprecisely:

Haunting the entire Investigations, the opening scene and its figure of the childsignals the question ‘Where did you learn – what is the home of – a concept?’may at any time arise (and not only in the couple of dozen sections in whichthe child explicitly appears), that the inheritance of culture – the process ofcultivation (or what is the point of spading?) – comes not to a natural end,or rather to its own end, but to one ended, by poor resources, or by power;that when explanations in particular circumstances run out, teaching becomesheightened while control over what it is that is taught, say shown, is lessened(pp. 169–70).10

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Reflecting on the child’s isolation, or how isolated the child appears in Augustine’sdescription, Cavell is led to notice something permanent about the child’s isolation,a sense of ‘the absoluteness in its initial incapacity to make itself known’, that, ashe says, ‘leads me to understand the child as mad, not exactly deranged, but in thecondition of derangement’ (p. 170). Cavell has identified another voice apart fromthe child’s, a ‘double’ voice – one that is at the same time, child-like, skeptical andmad.

Cavell argues that the ‘interlocutor’s voice can sometimes be heard as the voiceof madness, and sometimes as the voice of childhood’ (p. 171). And when heequates the voice of childhood with that of madness, he is drawing upon a richvein of psychoanalytic and philosophic work: Melanie Klein’s account of pre-verbal development in terms of paranoia and depression; Laplanche’s descriptionof the way in which the infant’s instincts are ‘perverted’ into drives as it makes thetransition from animal to human; and, above all, Kant’s account of the traumaticadvent of the human in terms of reason doing violence to the voice of nature.Wittgenstein himself is not unaware of the psychic forces at work in the transitionbetween nature and reason, as they play themselves out during childhood: he writesin Culture and Value, ‘Anyone who listens to a child’s crying and understands whathe hears will know that it harbors dormant psychic forces, terrible forces differentfrom anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain and lust for destruction’(Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 2e).

Cavell’s analysis of the figure of the child sets up a series of suggestive associ-ations, in particular, with Derrida on Artaud and Foucault on Laplanche’s study ofHölderlin. From these sources Cavell gets some further soundings for the idea ofthe child and its relation to that of madness: in learning language the problem ofother minds and the idea that one’s thought is not one’s own, and; Foucault’s notionof the ‘mad’ philosopher, as supporting the notion of the child as the opening figuresubject to a kind of philosophical madness. This set of speculations encouragesCavell to make his last substantial point in relation to the figure of the child: theopening passage of the Investigations is also a passage about the teaching of alanguage, which in Wittgenstein’s philosophical dialect, means that ‘the concept ofteaching language is grammatically related to the concept of language’ (p. 176).

The remainder of Cavell’s essay traverses – in marvellously speculative andsuggestive ways – the ground of the autobiographical/confession, the rift betweenAnglo-American and Continental philosophy, Heidegger’s critique of Westernmetaphysics, the culture of philosophy, and, in a kind of symmetry, the endingof philosophy. These philosophemes are suggestive of where the figure of thechild leads Cavell. For the purposes of this essay I want to conclude by criticallyexamining Cavell’s interpretation of the figure of the child and its centrality tothe Investigations. I shall suggest a way of advancing Cavell’s interpretation byidentifying a dynamic structure that puts the figure of the child and the child’s voiceinto play with other figures (and voices) which serve to elucidate linguistic limitsand cultural otherness: the ‘madman’; the foreigner or cultural other, and; animals

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that cannot speak. Together these ‘voices’ and their interplay in the Investigations –this vocal and figural structure – provides a basis for reflecting further not only onthe problems and nature of philosophy but also upon the complexity of the figureof the child. Given the difficulty of this final section and the confines of space, Ishall limit myself to a programmatic interpretation, suggesting only the possibleoutlines of a future inquiry by focusing upon the figure and voice of the culturalother, leaving the question of exploring the voices and figures for another occasion.

4. Concluding Comments: The Figural and Vocal Structure of theInvestigations

Cavell has opened up a textual problematic for the Investigations – its begin-ning and its vocal surface structures – and for philosophy itself. He has not onlycommented (progressively and more clearly with each advancement) upon thecentrality of the figure of the child to the Investigations, but also has commentedupon its vocal complexity, its ‘psychoanalytic’ otherness, its harmonization ordiscordance with other ‘voices’, its conceptual relatedness to issues concerning thelearning and teaching of language (and, thereby, to the major themes of Part I of theInvestigations), and its virtual absence in (analytic) philosophy. These are, in myopinion, extraordinary gains, especially for a philosophy which is concerned withpassages: from ‘baby’ to ‘child’, ‘child’ to ‘teenager’ or ‘adolescent’, ‘teenager’ to‘adult’ (in a pattern of ever finer graduations and transitions from one designatedstate to another). In modernity, these passages have been characterized as episodesin the movement from unreason (but not madness) to reason. The Kantian metaphorof enlightenment as the attainment of adulthood in the public use of reason is adominant philosophical metaphor that borrows from the figure of the child.

Cavell helpfully remarks that the Investigations has been written under threespecific pressures or forces: ‘first, the voice of temptation; second, the voice ofcorrectness; and third, the attainment of silence’ (p. 178). Yet he does not suggesthow these ‘voices’ help to constitute the figure of the chld. By contrast but notin disagreement, I want to suggest four figures with their asosciated ‘voices’(including a ‘non-voice’): the voice of the child – it is naive, truthful, innocent,transparent, native, incessantly questioning (often without serious cause); the voiceof the ‘madman’, that occurs at the limits of language and thought, that epitomizesthe philosopher’s craft and questions, especially when listened to from the view-point of ordinary, everyday language; the voice of the cultural or tribal other, theforeigner or alien, the adult learner of a new or different language – the figure thathighlights the cultural familiarity and strangeness of our own form of life; and,the non-voice of animals (#25, pp. 174, 203–5), who cannot speak: the dog (#250,357, 650, pp. 174, 229), and the famous lion (‘If a lion could talk, we could notunderstand him’, p. 223).

We might say with Wittgenstein and Cavell that the figure of the child is subjectto the voice of temptation11 and correctness, morally and pedagogically; that, at

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an early age, somehow s(he) miraculously emerges out of the ‘mystical’ state ofsilence to make sounds (and gestures) and, later, to learn a language. Yet the figureis not static nor staged: in Wittgenstein, the child becomes ‘children’ playing ring-a-ring-a-roses (#7), the ‘schoolboy’ (p. 175), ‘the learner’ or ‘the pupil’ (e.g., #7).The voice of madness is instructive: we learn philosophically through nonsense– through words without meaning (as in Lewis Caroll’s poems, #13) or throughnourishing ourselves on the right kind of examples (#593) at the limits of language(“The results of language are the uncovering of one or another piece of plainnonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head upagainst the limits of language”, #119). But it also a voice that springs out of havingto deal with illusions, grammatical and otherwise (#96, 110, p. 215), and as suchrequires therapy (#133) or treatment (#254): ‘The philosopher’s treatment of aquestion is like the treatment of an illness’ (#255).12

The voice of the cultural or tribal other is, perhaps, less pronounced, moreschematic and interspersed, but, nevertheless, important for the light it shines onlinguistic practices as cultural practices belonging to and having life only in a formof life; and that has ways of acting as its foundation.13 It surfaces in Wittgenstein’sreference to ‘customs’ (#198), that help us to determine meanings: as he saysat #199 ‘To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game ofchess, are customs (uses, institutions)’. It surfaces again in Wittgenstein’s thoughtexperiments: ‘Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with alanguage quite strange to you’ (#205); in his discussions of intention (‘An inten-tion is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions’ #337) andconvention (#355). And it also surfaces in his emphasis on primitive forms oflanguage and primitive language-games (where the figures of the child and thecultural other, intermingle) and in explicit references such as: ‘We could imaginethat the language of #2 [the ‘slab’ or builder’s language mentioned at section 2]was the whole language of A and B; even the whole language of a tribe’ (#6)and ‘To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’ (#19). Wittgen-stein talks of ‘our language’ and asks us to think of a ‘foreigner’ who ‘did notunderstand our language’ in an extended example at section #20. He experimentswith Russian locutions (#20) and tells us the story of how someone ‘coming into astrange country’ learns the native language through guessing at meanings offeredby ostensive definition and he writes:

Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came intoa strange country and did not understand the language of that country; that is,as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child couldalready think, only not yet speak. And ‘think’ would mean here something like‘talk to itself’ (#32).

I have said enough, I believe, to establish the figure of the cultural other and itssignificance for Wittgenstein. In the above example it is clear that it is not onlythe ‘voice over’ technique or the complexity of ‘double voices’ – the voice ofthe child and cultural other – it is also their entanglement and contrast that offers

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philosophical insight. Similar cases, I believe, can be made for the voice and figureof the ‘madman’ and for the non-voice or silence of Wittgenstein’s animals.

Cavell makes a convincing case for the dominance of the figure of the childin Part I of the Investigations and by doing so he has produced a differentreading of Wittgenstein: one that is biographically consistent with Wittgenstein’slife-experiences as a teacher and, no doubt, draws upon them14; one that in the liter-ariness of its interpretation differs from the analytic attempt to extract a theory; andone that opens up new possibilities for philosophy as a whole and for philosophyof education.

Acknowledgements

I wrote this essay while a Visiting Scholar at the Department of EducationalPolicy Studies at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in theFall semester 1998. I would like to thank Nick Burbules for his kind supportand hospitality. I would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for Studies inPhilosophy and Education and Jim Garrison for his helpful editorial suggestions.

Notes1 I am reminded of the messianic ethos of the Wiener Kreis’s manifesto with its faith in science tosolve all problems, its extension of scientific method to philosophy itself, conceived in the form of arigorous ‘verificationist’ empiricism, and its underlying liberal world view. Rudolph Carnap’s “TheOvercoming of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language”, published in Erkenntnis in1932, is the paradigm example of the analytic attack upon the Continental tradition. Carnap takesHeidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” to demonstrate what he considers to be pseudo-statements.2 Wittgenstein’s relationship to the Vienna Circle is complex. According to Monk (1990, p. 253)Wittgenstein initially could not be persuaded to join the Circle’s regular discussions but by 1927Wittgenstein was meeting with a carefully selected group from the Circle. Wittgenstein discon-tinued the practice soon after and members of the Circle were dismayed when they discoveredthat Wittgenstein, the author of the Tractatus, did not regard philosophy as ‘scientific’ in any way.Wittgenstein also expressed his disapproval of the Circle’s manifesto (see Monk, 1990, p. 283).Whether Wittgenstein should properly be viewed as an analytic philosopher has occasioned muchcomment and debate. Janik and Toulmin (1973, pp. 19–21) first raised the heretical idea that the‘analytical’ Wittgenstein was a Cambridge construction: “By labeling Wittgenstein as a foreigner ofodd personal habits, with an extraordinary, phenomenal, and possibly unique, talent for philosophicalinvention, the English thus defused the impact of his personality and moral passion as completelyas they had neutralized Shaw’s social and political teachings” (p. 20). For a more recent account seeHacker’s (1996) Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, and Sluga’s (1998)review discussion. Sluga (1998) first questions “what is analytic philosophy?”, then makes a pleafor the importance of the history of analytic philosophy as genuine philosophically and useful anti-dote to the ahistoricism of analytic philosophy, before he criticizes the Anglocentrism and nostalgicperspective that characterizes Hacker’s account. In particular, Sluga (1998, p. 109) suggests thatHacker’s reductive account “does not take proper note of the array of ideas that Wittgenstein broughtwith him from his Viennese background, such as his anti-metaphysical positivism, his concern formodels and representations, his interest in ordinary language, his minimalist concern with formalstructures . . . By the time he wrote the Tractatus, he had also come under the spell of Tolstoy

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and Nietzsche – a fact not acknowledged by Hacker” (p. 109). Sluga also notes an emerging newconception of Wittgenstein which sees him less as a “producer of philosophical masterpieces” and,rather, more as “exemplifying a performative and process-oriented understanding of philosophy”(p. 115).3 This may include the following kinds of questions: (1) the focus on learning a language, ontraining, on acquiring concepts, on rule-following, on becoming part of a culture and form of life;(2) the relative absence in analytic or Anglo-American philosophy of the figure of the child, ofthe question of the child’s identity, of a concern for the child, and, perhaps, in terms of politicalphilosophy, an absence for the rights of the child; (3) a new appreciation and understanding of thosetexts in the Western philosophical tradition that make the figure of the child and a concern for thechild central to philosophy.4 See, for example, Cavell (1992, 1979, 1971). See also Cavell (1996) for a reader and Fischer(1989) and Mulhall (1994) for critical commentaries.5 I take these comments from a footnote by Michael Fischer (1989, fn 6, pp. 144–145). Fischermentions a number of critics, including Anthony Kenny, Mary Mothersill, Anthony Palmer, and M.Glouberman, who criticize Cavell fore stylistic self-indulgence. By contrast, Fischer also mentions inan earlier footnote (1989, fn 4, p. 144), that Michael Wood, John Hollander and Jay Cantor, appraiseCavell’s work positively. Wood is reported as commenting of The Claim to Reason: ‘The writingis remarkable here, the philosopher and novelist gives density of detail to fleshless old questions’.Hollander comments that Cavell’s ‘anecdotes, scenarios, little parables, and exemplary stories arebetter than most novelists’. Cantor suggests that in Cavell’s work we find “a new kind of storytelling”.It seems to me that the same old hoary distinctions which separate philosophy from literature andanalytic philosophy from Continental philosophy are being implicitly invoked with the first groupof critics. They failed to see, with the second group, that Cavell, ‘after Wittgenstein’, in textuallyself-conscious ways, was/is attempting to practice philosophy in a new way.6 The continuity between the spoken and written ‘voices’ of Wittgenstein is a feature which deservescomment. From the point of view of composition, we might say that some of Wittgenstein’s worksthat have been published posthumously, are the result of dictations or are assemblages from notestaken by students or are strictly speaking, lectures. There are obvious parallels between Wittgensteinand Cavell in relation to the notion, stylistically speaking, of ‘notes’, that involves Wittgenstein’spenchant for the aphorism. Cavell (1996, pp. 385–89) holds that the aphorism to the aesthetics of theInvestigations and the aesthetics is central to its sense.7 The quotation from St Augustine’s Confessions (I.8) used by Wittgenstein is: ‘When they (myelders) named some object, and accordingly moved toward something, I saw this and I grasped thatthe thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention wasshown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of theface, the play of the eyes, the movement of the other parts of the body, and the tone of voice whichexpresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heardwords repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understandwhat objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them toexpress my own desires’.8 See the stream of observations Wittgenstein makes in On Certainty concerning doubts of theearth’s existence at #209, and around #231 through #240. While these are doubts of the child,Wittgenstein is not commenting on the philosophical nature of the child’s “why?–game” but ratherthe nature of our doubting behavior and how ‘What we believe depends on what we learn’ (#286).Note also Wittgenstein’s figure of the doubting schoolboy at #310 through #316. He does remarkin Culture and Value: ‘Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks ona piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up “What’s that?” – It happened like this: thegrown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: “this is a man”, “this is a house”,etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what’s this then?’9 It is not clear to me that there is an absence in the Continental tradition. It could be argued that the

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figure of the child is present in the Continental tradition from Rousseau’s Emile and Sophie throughto Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.10 We must not underestimate the extent of Wittgenstein’s references in the Investigations to thefigure of the child (#5, 6, 7, 9, 27, 32, 282, 420, pp. 194, 200, 206, 208) and to related conceptsof ‘teaching’ (#6, 9, 53, 143, 185, 190, 197, 362, 556, pp. 185, 208), ‘learning’ (#26, 31, 32, 35,77, 143, 244, 246, 376, 384, 385, 381, 560, 590), ‘train’ (#5, 6, 9, 86, 143, 630), ‘technique’ (#51,125, 150, 137, 199, 205, 262, 520, 557, 692, pp. 208–9, 227), ‘master’ and ‘mastery’ (#20, 31, 33,150, 199, 338, 508, 692, p. 192), ‘dolls’ (#27, 282, 360, p. 194), ‘schoolboy’ (p. 175). It is thefamily resemblance of related concepts that begins to map in bibliographical terms the importanceof Wittgenstein’s references to the child. A total of 71 references in the Investigations on the basisof concepts mentioned. This is not to suggest that the philosophical importance of an idea can becharted in terms of a bibliographic count – that they are directly or arithmetically related – but onlythat there is some relationship between the two. In On Certainty I counted some 46 references to thechild (or directly related ideas) out of some 676 numbered statements.11 See, as corroborating textual evidence, Wittgenstein’s references to temptation (and confession),and in relation to the child, in Culture and Value, especially at 18e, 46e, 86e.12 Wittgenstein is reported by various close friends as wrestling with madness. It is a philosophicaltrope that is often associated with the notion of innerness – in terms of a picture of the lonelysoul brooding over experiences that are incommunicable to others – with skepticism per se, andwith solipsism. It is one of the possible objections Descartes considers against his ‘method’ inThe Discourse on Method. Wittgenstein, himself, speaks of ‘religious’ madness (the madness ofa tormented soul) in terms related to himself on several occasions in Culture and Value. See inparticular, sections: 32e–33e, 44e, 53e (where he says: “I am often afraid of madness” relating it toan optical illusion), and 65e. Since Descartes’ Discourse on Method the theme of madness cannotbe easily separated from traditional philosophical treats to certainty: illusions of various sorts anddreams (or other states of unconsciousness).13 Since writing this essay I subsequently came across Kojin Karatani’s (1995, pp. 114ff) – theJapanese critic – references to Wittgenstein’s ‘others’ in the Investigations in his study of the wayarchitecture as metaphor pervades Western thought and, particularly, twentieth century formalism.He interprets Wittgenstein’s Investigations as providing an ‘external’ critique (as opposed to Gödel’sinternal critique based on undecidability) to the complete formalization of systems. (He quotesWittgenstein in The Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics [part 3, #46, 176] as saying “mathe-matics is a MOTLEY of techniques of proofs”.) Karantani (1995, pp. 114–115) notes the persistentreferences in the Investigations to teaching children: “For Wittgenstein, children, like foreigners,represent the other who does not hold the same rule in common . . . one could say that communicationwith the other – the one who does not share a common set of rules – invariably forms a teaching-learning relationship” which Karanti argues is necessary for “primary communication” and evennecessary for everyday communication because it entails some degree of incommensurability. Hegoes on to say: ‘If a common rule surfaces, it appears only as a result of this teaching-learning rela-tionship that forms the fundamental precondition for communication . . . Wittgenstein’s introductionof the other is tantamount to introducing the asymmetical relationship’.14 See the essay on Wittgenstein’s philosophy as pedagogy, Chapter 10 in Peters and Marshall(1998).

References

Borradiori, G.: 1994, The American Philosopher (trans., Rosanna Crocitto), The University ofChicago Press, Chicago and London.

Cavell, S.: 1977, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Penguin, New York.

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Cavell, S.: 1979, The Claim of Reasons: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, ClarendonPress, Oxford.

Cavell, S.: 1996a, The Cavell Reader (ed., S. Mulhall), Blackwell, Oxford.Cavell, S.: 1996b, ‘ “Epilogue: the Investigations” Everyday Aesthetics of Itself’, in S. Mulhall (ed.),

The Cavell Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 369–389.Cavell, S.: 1995a, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Blackwell,

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Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 124–186.

Fishcer, M.: 1989, Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago andLondon.

Hacker, P.M.S.: 1996, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analtyic Philosophy, Blackwell,Oxford.

Janik, A. and Toulmin, S.: 1973, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Simon and Schuster, New York.Karatani, K.: 1995, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money (trans., S. Kohso and ed.,

M. Speaks), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Monk, R.: 1990, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Cape, London.Mulhall, S.: 1994, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Clarendon Press,

Oxford.Payne, M.: 1995, ‘Introduction’, to S. Cavell’s Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson,

Austin, Emerson, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–11.Peters, M. and Marshall, J.: 1998, ‘Wittgenstein: Philosophy as Pedagogy’, in Wittgenstein:

Philosophy, Postmodernism, Pedagogy, Bergin and Garvey, Westport, CT and London.Sluga, H.: 1998, ‘What Has History to Do with Me? Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy’, Inquiry

41, 99–121.Wittgenstein, L.: 1969, On Certainty, Blackwell, Oxford.Wittgenstein, L.: 1972, Philosophical Investigations (trans., G.E.M. Anscombe), Oxford, Blackwell

(Reprint of English Text with index).Wittgenstein, L.: 1980, Culture and Value, 2nd edn. (ed., G.H. von Wright (with H. Nyman) and

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Address for correspondence: Michael Peters, School of Education, University of Auckland, PrivateBag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand (E-mail: ma.peters@auckland.ac.nz)