John Cook, 2005

Humanity Books

Review by:

Ronald E. Hustwit Sr., The College of Wooster

Lt. Ronald E. Hustwit Jr., USAF

The Undiscovered Wittgenstein is John Cook`s third book aimed at explaining Wittgenstein`s philosophy. The first, Wittgenstein`s Metaphysics, presented and defended Cook`s claim that, in spite of denials, Wittgenstein has a metaphysical theory – neutral monism – that he maintained early and late. The second, Wittgenstein: Language and Empiricism, elaborated and further explained Cook`s claim by asserting that Wittgenstein`s neutral monism amounts to a phenomenalism like Berkeley`s. And further, what has been read as Wittgenstein`s ``ordinary language philosophy`` should more accurately be called ``metaphysical ordinary language philosophy,`` because Wittgenstein reduces ordinary language to sense-data language, i.e. phenomenalism. Ordinary language philosophers such as Malcolm and Bouwsma misunderstood Wittgenstein to be the successor to G.E. Moore`s common sense philosophy. In doing so, they blindly followed Moore to uncritically believe that ordinary language held no metaphysical assumptions, when actually they presupposed that it reflects reality. Only Cook`s view, which he calls ``investigative ordinary language philosophy,`` uncovers philosophical confusions by returning words to their everyday use.

This, the third book in the ongoing attempt to elucidate the misunderstood Wittgenstein, begins with the same theses about Wittgenstein: that he was a neutral monist, phenomenalist, empiricist, and behaviorist. In the first of three sections of this book, Cook presents some additional support for these theses, but does not provide much new beyond this support. He does add that Wittgenstein is a verificationalist. While that idea is consistent with his supposed empiricism, it is one more startling claim to make and defend. Cook`s claims are elaborated, defended, and supported by numerous passages from the Wittgenstein texts and by Cook`s reading of other readers of Wittgenstein. But the results are always the same – that Wittgenstein holds all these forms of empiricism. We must add that Cook seems to have worked tirelessly to make all these ``isms`` fit together and has supported them with passages from an impressive knowledge of Wittgenstein`s texts. The support passages, however, are often taken out of context and given the oddest interpretations to make them fit Cook`s reading. The Cook theory of reading Wittgenstein looks to us like an unverifiable hypothesis. When a fact of what Wittgenstein said or meant does not fit with Cook`s thesis, he reads it in a way that shows how it does fit. (For a thorough examination of Cook`s ideas in Wittgenstein: Language and Empiricism, see Ronald Hustwit Jr.`s doctoral dissertation, Meaning As Use: Why Wittgenstein Is Not An Empiricist)

Having reiterated the claim that Wittgenstein is an empiricist in the first section, Cook sets out in the second section of his book to ``investigate`` certain aspects of Wittgenstein`s ``practice`` – aspects that Wittgenstein`s philosophy has raised among various readers. In each of these cases, Cook considers what other thinkers have said about Wittgenstein. Cook either cites them approvingly, if they agree with his empiricist reading or disapprovingly, if they do not. About neither group, however, does he believe that they have grasped Wittgenstein`s phenomenalism. These issues of ``practice`` are: unconscious thought, conceptual relativism, language-games, and objectivity in science. If one reads Wittgenstein as an empiricist, phenomenalist, etc., Cook argues, each of these difficult and misunderstood issues in Wittgenstein will become clear.

The following is a brief sketch of Cook`s discussions of these issues, corresponding to the chapters in which he presents them, with occasional editorial comments:

Unconscious thought. Cook takes up Wittgenstein`s interest in William James and Freud on unconscious thought. He pays particular attention to Wittgenstein`s analysis of ``the word was on the tip of my tongue,`` in which James too had an interest. Wittgenstein`s analysis of this expression, according to Cook, can be reduced to feelings (phenomena) and behavior. The same is true of Wittgenstein`s analysis of Freud`s unconscious thought. Cook, however, ignores the context in which Wittgenstein`s analysis of unconscious thought takes place. Wittgenstein, in fact, takes both up as objections to his work against meaning as hidden and unspoken thoughts. In this context, his noticing, for example, that we feel as if we ``know the word we can`t think of`` is done to show that an analysis can be made that does not require some hidden stream of words that parallel our spoken sentences.

Conceptual Relativism. Cook claims that Wittgenstein is a conceptual relativist – that members of one conceptual community cannot grasp what it is like to be a member of another conceptual community. Further, he says that this relativism is implied by Wittgenstein`s phenomenalism. Such an account of Wittgenstein is patently false and Cook`s argument for this view is impossible to follow. On the one hand, he credits Wittgenstein with saying that trees and tables are not ``encountered prior to the formation of our concepts.`` While not expressed clearly, this is an acceptable account of Wittgenstein. But then Cook attributes the following confused idea to Wittgenstein: ``our senses are flooded with sense-data, and we, by means of the concepts we invent, organize certain collections of sense-data to suit our needs and interests.`` Wittgenstein would not say such a thing. Does this make him an empiricist? How does it follow from his starting with sense-data that he is a conceptual relativist? The claims of the chapter are confused and unsupported.

Language games. Cook interprets Wittgenstein`s ``language-games`` as presupposing his empiricism and behaviorism. His evidence for this is that Wittgenstein often compares human linguistic behavior to the behavior of animals and, further, the remark in PI # 5 where Wittgenstein says, ``the teaching of language is not explanation, but training.`` So, allegedly, Wittgenstein thinks that humans learn to play language-games by being trained like animals. Further, Wittgenstein often invents language-games that are not played, but might be, in order to shed light on some problem. Cook refers to them ``bizarre.`` [Showing different ways of reasoning in Remarks on Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein invents a language-game in which people treat the same amount of wood differently because one is stacked and the other is not.] These language-games, too, are reducible to behaviorism. About this language-game Wittgenstein comments: ``they go through the motions of buying and selling firewood, albeit according to a logic different from our own.`` From this Cook concludes that Wittgenstein`s view of language is that speaking ``involves two things: bodies making noises and the behavior accompanying those noises.`` Hence, language-games are based in behaviorism. It remains a mystery to us how someone who has read as much Wittgenstein as Cook could make such a claim.

Objectivity in science. In the most interesting chapter in the book, Cook examines and objects to Wittgenstein`s ``relativistic`` picture of science. He focuses on remarks of Wittgenstein on causality. Wittgenstein notices that science presupposes causal explanations. Scientists do this without considering what they are doing and have no grounds for doing it. Cook calls Wittgenstein`s observation about the scientist`s attitude ``curious`` and ``optional.`` He contrasts this scientific attitude with a religious attitude, which he defends over against the scientific. Wittgenstein thought that primitive religious people could be quite rational within their framework – not simply bad scientists as Frazier suggests. Cook disagrees. Primitive people can be convinced that their views are wrong (falsified by evidence) and thereby persuaded by objective standards to adopt a scientific worldview. Cook asserts that in a day when pseudo-scientific nonsense is abundant, Wittgenstein`s relativistic views are dangerous as they offer aid to the enemy. In reality, his conclusions about Wittgenstein`s relativism are themselves off the mark and dangerous. While his organization of Wittgenstein`s thoughts on causality are basically accurate, Cook`s misguided conclusions follow from the attribution of the word ``optional`` to Wittgenstein`s ideas. ``Optional`` suggests that Wittgenstein meant that one makes a choice from several options in accepting the causal-scientific worldview, while in fact he was merely taking notice of a presupposition of how the scientist thinks.

The issues of objectivism and relativism are carried over to the third main section of The Undiscovered Wittgenstein, subtitled, ``Belief, Superstition, and Religion.`` As the subtitle suggests, Cook explores Wittgenstein`s various remarks on religious belief. In aid of this study, he examines the work of three prominent philosophers who have made use of Wittgenstein in their work on religious belief: Peter Winch, D.Z. Phillips, and O.K. Bouwsma. Each, according Cook, suffers from a blindness to Wittgenstein`s phenomenalism, which determined the course of Wittgenstein`s thinking on religious belief and religious language.

Wittgenstein`s phenomenalism, Cook says, meant that he believed in nothing beyond phenomena, hence there is no transcendent God. Religious language – the language of those who do believe in a transcendent God – is therefore the expression of an ``attitude`` toward life. Accordingly, religious language is specific to those communities, and idiosyncratic to them (i.e. fideism results from Wittgenstein`s views). And, though Wittgenstein claims that he discovered this by examining the use of the language of religious believers, he failed in this regard. Had he actually examined their language, he would have seen that they talk of a transcendent God and His appearance in time – miracles.

In his remarks on the primitive practices of people, Wittgenstein held an emotivist view rather than an instrumentalist view. Cook means that Wittgenstein did not understand those primitive practices as primitive science, but rather as making those who performed those practices feel good. He ascribes these views to Peter Winch as well. Cook counters this emotivist view by citing ethnologists who describe primitive peoples as instrumentalists – that primitives thought they were actually affecting changes in the natural world. Though he accuses Wittgenstein and Winch of deciding this issue apriori, we fail to see how the favoring of the instrumentalist ethnologist`s account is anything other than an apriori commitment itself.

On the long misunderstood subject of the applicability of Wittgenstein`s language–games to religious language, Cook adds to the confusion rather than subtracting from it. He claims that Wittgenstein was wrong in his view that religious people do not have beliefs about the world. They do, and their language reflects these transcendental beliefs. Wittgenstein, Cook says, interprets religious language as merely about the believer, but if he had actually looked at their language, he would have seen that it was about a transcendent God and His presence in the world. The language of religious belief, therefore, is no different from any other language. It is intended to put forward a belief about some object and should be verified like any other language of belief. We take it that Cook`s unstated conclusion is that religious language is false or nonsense.

Both Wittgenstein and D.Z. Phillips have recommended that we not take a realist view of religious language. If we do not take a realist view, i.e. that it refers to some real object, then we reduce it to something about the way we feel – phenomenalism. But what then becomes of the future and past tenses in religious language? – ``God will do … and God did … .`` The phenomenalist view then must deny that there is any meaningful use of future and past tenses in religious language. This is, according to Cook, exactly what Wittgenstein and Phillips do. And again, if they had followed Wittgenstein`s own advice and actually examined the language of religious believers, they would have given up this view. Consider the believer`s language of the last judgment – that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. Wittgenstein says, according to Cook, that this is not a statement about what will happen in the future. It looks like: ``I believe that I will be fined, if I do not pay my taxes on April 15^th,`` but though it looks like this on the face of it, it is not. Cook, in contrast to Wittgenstein, believes that it is like it.

Finally, Cook takes up the essays of O.K. Bouwsma on religious language. As Bouwsma involves Kierkegaard in his essays, Cook takes up Kierkegaard and Bouwsma together. Bouwsma reads Kierkegaard as returning us to ``the language of scripture`` to understand the philosophically absurd language of Christianity. The language of scripture becomes Wittgenstein`s ordinary language to which we must return for philosophical clarity. But Cook says of Kierkegaard too that he did not actually do this. Like Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard supposes that the ordinary language of the Bible, which seems to be temporal language, has a non-temporal meaning – Kierkegaard`s ``Absolute Paradox.`` Kierkegaard, as a result, denies that miracles are grounds for belief in God. Cook says that Bouwsma makes the same mistake: miracles can`t – logically can`t – be evidence for belief. Both Kierkegaard and Bouwsma are wrong. An actual study of biblical language shows that miracles are not merely ``attention getters,`` but the basis of belief for those who witness them. Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Bouwsma are wrong on this matter. Each has denied that biblical language and generally the language of believers is about the transcendent and is tensed in ordinary ways. Each has been deceived by his own respective metaphysical views to asserting that miracles are not grounds for belief in the transcendent and to denying what is plainly in front of them in the actual language of believers. (Cook: Bouwsma`s metaphysical belief is that ordinary language presents the real world.)

The Undiscovered Wittgenstein, like Cook`s first two books, is a fantasy – an elaborate philosophical fantasy, created, no doubt, on an extensive reading of every word that Wittgenstein wrote. Armed with this fantastical theory that Wittgenstein was a neutral monist-phenomenalist, Cook, with painstaking determination, interprets every passage of Wittgenstein and of his followers as evidence for his theory of reading Wittgenstein. His theory, like all metaphysical theories, is irrefutable. This is the great fault of the book. One could catch Cook in contradictions – for example, how can the conceptual relativist be a neutral monist? But pointing out contradictions overlooks and excuses the great fault of the book. Cook`s book is ordinary philosophy treating Wittgenstein`s radical break with ordinary philosophy as more ordinary philosophy. The ordinary philosophy Wittgenstein urges that we give up, Cook takes up. What Wittgenstein writes with practiced indirection, Cook reads as direct claims. What Wittgenstein offers as method for uncovering the hidden analogies that produce our philosophical discomfiture, Cook treats as more theory making. When Wittgenstein offers a grammatical distinction as a way of treating a philosophical malady, we are told that Wittgenstein somehow reduced grammar to phenomena, the explanation of which is never given. He leaves us with a cold, dead Wittgenstein who treated consistency flippantly.

Nevertheless, we recommend this book to those serious readers who would understand Wittgenstein. There are two reasons for this commendation. The first is that if one returns to read the passages from Wittgenstein that Cook uses to support his theory, one could make progress in understanding Wittgenstein. If that is, one can say how Cook has misunderstood Wittgenstein, one can come to understand something of Wittgenstein for oneself. Cook`s misreadings of Wittgenstein are common ones. Each has been said before. But Cook is better at presenting and defending those misreadings than others. The second commendation for reading Cook`s book is that it provides a striking contrast to the radical nature of Wittgenstein`s project. Cook sees Wittgenstein as presenting theories in contrast to his presenting a method for relief of philosophical discomfiture. Cook`s reading of Wittgenstein can serve as a warning label to be attached to each of Wittgenstein`s books : ``Do not read this book, as I have, as a book of theories: it may cause severe disorientation and aspect blindness.``

Philosophy Department, The College of Wooster

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