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“This Is Simply What I Do”: Wittgenstein and Oakeshott on the Practices of Individual Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2013

Luke Philip Plotica
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Abstract

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Oakeshott are often labeled conservative thinkers, and taken to theorize rigid limits to individual agency and criticism. Tracing several modes of affinity between the work of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, one can recognize the conventionality and rule-governed character of linguistic practices and yet affirm a deeply individualistic account of agency and action. Each thinker respectively characterizes the individual as located within a context of action that is richly structured by intersubjective rules and practices. Yet each also recognizes an ineluctable dimension of individuality and contingency to action that surpasses mere rule following or the reprise of conventional practice. The very situatedness of the individual agent within a framework of linguistic practices shared with others provides the friction that enables individual criticism and transgressive political action. Wittgenstein and Oakeshott thus present a perspective on political agency and criticism that is a salient alternative to both conservative and radical views.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , Winter 2013 , pp. 45 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2013 

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References

1 The ascription is canonical with regard to Oakeshott, who is identified as a conservative by thinkers right, left, and center. See, for instance, Devigne, Robert, Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Kekes, John, “What Is Conservatism?,” Philosophy 72, no. 281 (1997): 351–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pitkin, Hanna F., “The Roots of Conservatism: Michael Oakeshott and the Denial of Politics,” Dissent (Fall 1973): 496–525Google Scholar; Quinton, Anthony, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London: Faber and Faber, 1978)Google Scholar. The ascription is somewhat more varied and contested with regard to Wittgenstein. As I will explore below, David Bloor and J. C. Nyíri are among the most thoroughgoing advocates of Wittgenstein's conservatism, with the latter suggesting that Wittgenstein and Oakeshott have precisely this in common. See also Hammer, Dean C., “Meaning & Tradition,” Polity 24, no. 4 (1992): 551–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Kekes, “What Is Conservatism?”; Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 80, no. 10 (1983): 583–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Oakeshott and Wittgenstein have been discussed in connection to one another, to various ends. Some seek to establish the connection between Wittgenstein and Oakeshott as conservatives of a certain character (e.g., David Bloor, Dean C. Hammer, and J. C. Nyíri), while others seek to challenge the charge of conservatism by denying or recasting the affinity between Wittgenstein and Oakeshott (e.g., David R. Cerbone, Hanna Pitkin, and Peter Winch). Still others reside somewhere in the middle ground, acknowledging the affinity while accepting some allegedly conservative consequences (e.g., Richard Rorty and Theodore R. Schatzki). My own view—that Wittgenstein's and Oakeshott's significant intellectual affinities do not amount to full-blown political or philosophical conservatism—rests closer to the work of Alice Crary, Richard Flathman, and Andrew Norris.

3 Bloor, David, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions (London: Routledge, 1997)Google Scholar; Nyíri, J. C., “Wittgenstein's New Traditionalism,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 (1976): 501–12Google Scholar and “Wittgenstein's Later Work in Relation to Conservatism,” in Wittgenstein and his Times, ed. McGuinness, Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 44–68Google Scholar. Yet, as Andrew Norris suggests, Richard Rorty approvingly attributes a similar view of agency, community, and membership to Wittgenstein and Oakeshott in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 58–60 (Norris, Andrew, “‘La chaîne des raisons a une fin’: Wittgenstein et Oakeshott sur le rationalisme et la pratique,” Cités, no. 38 [2009]: 95–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar). I thank the author for sharing the original essay on which the French translation was based.

4 For the sake of terminological economy and consistency I will use the term “theories of agency” to cover both theoretical accounts of agency (understood as a capacity to act) and of action (understood as a particular kind of event authored by or attributable to an agent).

5 E.g., Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riker, William H., Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco, CA: W. H. Freeman, 1982)Google Scholar; Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)Google Scholar.

6 E.g., the work of conservative sociologists (such as Karl Mannheim), communitarian political and moral theorists (such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor), and Left political and social theories influenced by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger (such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze).

7 There is no clear indication that the two ever met during their overlapping time at Cambridge, and the extent of their textual engagement is exhausted by a single oblique quotation from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Oakeshott's 1929 essay “The Authority of the State,” in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. Fuller, Timothy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 79Google Scholar.

8 As will become apparent, the connections I will draw between the intellectual styles and conclusions of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott obtain in respect of their later works. As has been extensively explored (though far from settled) in the secondary literatures, both thinkers underwent a variety of changes of philosophical vocabulary and viewpoint throughout their careers. The affinities that I find are between the Wittgenstein of the 1930s to the 1950s and the Oakeshott of the 1950s to the 1980s.

9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958), §199Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as PI.

10 Oakeshott, Michael, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 55Google Scholar. Hereafter OHC.

11 Wittgenstein speaks of a language-game as grounding and structuring agential “capacity” (Können) in Zettel, ed. Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), §421Google Scholar. Hereafter Z.

12 As with language-games, Wittgenstein stops short of fully specifying or defining “forms of life” (Lebensformen), though he variously illustrates aspects of the concept. Stanley Cavell provides a useful statement, faithful to the breadth and scope of Wittgenstein's discussions of forms of life and what it means to be “attuned” or “in agreement” in respect of them. As Cavell puts it, “We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’ Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this” (Cavell, Stanley, Must We Mean What We Say?, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

13 For further discussion of this learning process as Wittgenstein presents it, see Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 168–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Peter Winch describes Wittgenstein's view in this way, yet accuses Oakeshott of disregarding the importance of rules and their role in reflection (Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 1990], 62Google Scholar). However, if one considers On Human Conduct, published almost two decades after Winch's original assessment, Oakeshott's position appears quite consistent with Wittgenstein's.

15 Many attributions to Wittgenstein of a social theory of agency draw extensively upon his discussion of rules and rule following. The common argumentative thread in the secondary literature is that agency manifests in following rules in speech and action; rule following is a social activity; hence agency is derivative of conformity to intersubjective conventions. See David Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions; Kripke, Saul, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 96Google Scholar; and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.”

16 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, ed. Anscombe, G. E. M. and von Wright, G. H., trans. Paul, Denis and Anscombe, G. E. M. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), §229Google Scholar. Hereafter OC.

17 Oakeshott, Michael, “The Study of ‘Politics’ in a University,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 187Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as RP.

18 Such interpretations flourish among thinkers who enlist or classify Wittgenstein and Oakeshott as conservative figures (e.g., Bloor, Nyíri, Kekes, and Hammer), as well as among thinkers who employ Wittgenstein and Oakeshott as iconoclastic or even radical figures in larger debates about the individual and society (e.g., Pitkin, Rorty, and Winch).

19 I draw what immediately follows from J. C. Nyíri and David Bloor, see note 3, above.

20 For example, Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, 30. The conservative reading thus understands a “form of life” as a complex of empirical patterns of behavior that felicitous individual action follows and reproduces. Alice Crary argues that Rorty's reading of Wittgenstein (and, I would add, of Oakeshott) arrives at similar conclusions by way of similar, if more sophisticated, claims. See Crary, Alice, “Wittgenstein's Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Crary, Alice and Read, Rupert (London: Routledge, 2000), 118–45, esp. 119–30Google Scholar; also Norris, “‘La chaîne des raisons a une fin.’”

21 Nyíri, “Wittgenstein's Later Work,” 58.

22 Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge, 1; Nyíri, “Wittgenstein's Later Work,” 59.

23 Nyíri, “Wittgenstein's Later Work,” 58–59. The apparent force of this conclusion stems from a highly questionable conflation of agreements of truly basic and rudimentary conceptual kinds (e.g., agreements on the proper practice of addition) and agreements of highly complex and ambiguous conceptual kinds (e.g., agreements on the proper meaning of freedom or equality or obligation). Identifying and challenging this conflation is Jones, K., “Is Wittgenstein a Conservative Philosopher?,” Philosophical Investigations 9, no. 4 (1986): 274–87, esp. 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more complex, less rigid, yet nonetheless fundamentally similar view of the constitutive function of traditions for individual agency, see Shils, Edward, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

24 Bloor, Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge, 166. Similar claims, some indebted to Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, some not, have been carried forward in social and political thought by Richard Rorty and by a number of postmodern thinkers who, in their attempt to reject certain universalistic doctrines of the Enlightenment, slide into a form of relativism that is often closely akin to the conservatism articulated by Bloor and Nyíri. George Kateb traces this philosophical Laffer Curve in The Inner Ocean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 222–39Google Scholar and in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 3–20Google Scholar.

25 Nyíri, “Wittgenstein's New Traditionalism,” 505.

26 Cressida J. Heyes presents an informative overview of the debate surrounding this reading in her introduction to The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, ed. Heyes, Cressida J. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1–13, esp. 3–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Crary, “Wittgenstein's Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought,” 140.

28 Williams, Bernard, “Pluralism, Community and Left Wittgensteinianism,” in In the Beginning Was the Deed, ed. Hawthorn, Geoffrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 35Google Scholar.

29 Williams, “Left Wittgensteinianism,” 36.

30 Ibid., 36–37.

31 See Connolly, William E., The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Allan Janik approvingly discusses Connolly's Wittgensteinian treatment of contestation, stating that Connolly “demonstrate[s] that these conceptual conflicts are the very stuff of political life” (Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” in The Grammar of Politics, 105).

32 de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Bally, Charles and Sechehay, Albert, trans. Baskin, Wade (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 9–17Google Scholar. Interesting similarities notwithstanding, I should not like to press the analogy between Wittgenstein and Saussure too far, first, because Saussure regards the individuality of utterance to be “accessory and more or less accidental” to the reproduction of the language of the speaker (Saussure, Course, 14) and, second, because Saussure does not recognize as fully as Wittgenstein and Oakeshott the way in which language and concepts penetrate word and deed. I believe that these potential points of disanalogy can be explained by the social-scientific approach taken by Saussure, as distinct from the analytic-philosophical approach taken by Wittgenstein. Each approach carries with it conceptual pictures that foreground certain aspects of language use, while obscuring others. Without adjudicating between Saussure and Wittgenstein, I suppose Wittgenstein to offer a distinctive and adequate picture. For a more extensive discussion of Wittgenstein and Saussure, see Harris, Roy, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with Words (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

33 For Wittgenstein, the notional “we say” entailed by all language use may be best understood as akin to the transcendental “I think” that Kant believed must be able to accompany all of one's representations—a formal condition of possibility but not an empirical fact or event. Taking the “we say” too literally and empirically, as the conservative reading demands that we do, leaves us unable to account for eccentric utterance and action that nonetheless “works.” See Williams, Bernard, “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 144–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Putnam, Hilary, “Rules, attunement, and ‘applying words to the world’: The struggle to understand Wittgenstein's vision of language,” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction, ed. Mouffe, Chantal and Nagl, Ludwig (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 21Google Scholar.

35 A telling passage from Wittgenstein is: “And does this mean e.g. that the definition of ‘same’ would be this: same is what all or most human beings with one voice take for the same? —Of course not.

“For of course I don't make use of the agreement of human beings to affirm identity. What criterion do you use, then? None at all” (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. von Wright, G. H, Rhees, Rush, and Anscombe, G. E. M., trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956], VII, §40Google Scholar).

36 E.g., McGinn, Colin, Wittgenstein on Meaning: An Interpretation and Evaluation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 23Google Scholar.

37 See, to this effect, PI, §325 and Culture and Value, ed. von Wright, G. H., trans. Winch, Peter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 16eGoogle Scholar. Stanley Cavell offers a similar, yet more consensual, interpretation of “This is simply what I do,” claiming that “what justifies what I say and do is, I feel like saying, me—the fact that I can respond to an indefinite range of responses of the other, and that the other, for my spade not to be stopped, must respond to me” (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 77Google Scholar).

38 This insight may also find some analogue in Saussure's claim that “among all the individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce—not exactly of course, but approximately—the same signs united with the same concepts” (Course in General Linguistics, 13). I am not entirely confident, however, that the Saussurean gap between conventional language and individual speech admits the sort of genuine critical agency that Wittgenstein and Oakeshott recognize.

39 Not only does this emphasis of the first-person singular pronoun exist in Wittgenstein's original German, it is even capitalized, contrary to the normal German orthography: “aber Ich stimme mit ihnen überein.” The emphasis, it seems, is on the individual who agrees rather than on the community with whom the individual agrees.

40 Flathman, Richard E., The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 23Google Scholar; see Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” 104.

41 McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, 200. That Oakeshott also falls on the individualist side is clear from On Human Conduct.

42 Such projects have been fruitfully undertaken by Richard Flathman, Andrew Norris, Hanna Pitkin, Gaile Polhaus and John Wright, Christopher C. Robinson, James Tully, and Bernard Williams.

43 This, I suggest, is the principal shortcoming of Polhaus and Wright's interpretation of Wittgenstein (which is indebted primarily to their reading of Stanley Cavell). See Polhaus, Gaile and Wright, John R., “Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy,” Political Theory 30, no. 6 (2002): 800–827CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Oakeshott makes a fundamentally similar claim in “On Misunderstanding Human Conduct,” Political Theory 4, no. 3 (1976): 353–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and he discusses the conditionality of understanding and action extensively in On Human Conduct.

45 Nyíri and Bloor are not alone, however. Though much more nuanced and measured in its formulations, Rorty's reading of Wittgenstein and Oakeshott ultimately arrives at these conclusions as well. Criticism of our practices (e.g., of democracy) can ultimately be nothing more than ironic, as we are already committed to them at a level more fundamental than criticism can reach.

46 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 18. Crary discusses Rorty's position in different terms and for different reasons in “Wittgenstein's Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought,” 125–26.

47 This dimension of criticism, in and out of politics, is discussed in David R. Cerbone, “The Limits of Conservatism: Wittgenstein on ‘Our Life’ and ‘Our Concepts,’” in The Grammar of Politics, 58–59; and Janik, “Notes on the Natural History of Politics,” 101. See also Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 5–69 and On Human Conduct, 31–107.