Chapter 4 - Understanding the Lion for Real

Summary

‘Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.’ It was of course the Lion's voice. The children had long felt sure that he could speak: yet it was a lovely and terrible shock when it did.

C. S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew, 1955

We gazed at each other his implacable yellow eye in the red halo of fur

Waxed rheumy on my own but he stopped roaring and bared a fang greeting.

I turned my back and cooked broccoli for supper on an iron gas stove

Allen Ginsberg, ‘The Lion for Real’, 1958

Prologue

Is it an accident that one of the most frequently quoted remarks by Wittgenstein is also one of the least understood? I do not propose to answer this question by conducting an investigation into our reasons for quoting, although such a study would not be irrelevant to certain aspects of the one below. My focus will instead be on the contrast between the original philosophical context of § 327 of the typescript previously known as Part II of Philosophical Investigations (hereinafter PPF, § 327) and some of the conditions surrounding its incredibly muddled reception.

The published version of the remark in question is:

Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehn. (PPF, § 327)

In her otherwise influential English translation of what became known as Philosophical Investigations (hereinafter PI), Parts I and II, Elizabeth Anscombe renders the claim as follows:

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. (PI, 223e)

On the face of it, the remark seems absurd, and commentators have obligingly voiced numerous complaints against it. These frequently revolve around the thought that Wittgenstein did not know the first thing about animals:

Wittgenstein once claimed, ‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’ He seemed to assume that because the lion's consciousness is so different from ours, even if there were a spoken lion language, it would be too alien for us to understand. However, lions and many other animals do indeed communicate in their own ways, and if we make an effort to understand their communications, we can learn much about what they are saying. If Wittgenstein had gotten off his couch and actually watched animals, he might agree.