‘Cat on the Mat’ and other Troubles

Many of my friends know that sometime half way through my masters degree I found a renewed interest in history and theory. This has prompted a lot of new reading and re-thinking. Much of this reading involves areas of thought I have never had much exposure to while some of it is re-covering old ground. Today I read a short introductory work on Wittgenstein, a somewhat problematic figure in the field of analytical philosophy, where I spent many of my undergraduate days.

The work has left me a bit frustrated, to say the least. In addition to many other reactions I won’t share here, it made me realize the incredible lack of context which marked my undergraduate training in philosophy…

In my undergraduate classes on metaphysics, logic, ethics, epistemology, etc. I was, if anything, impressed by the organized problem-centered approach of our education. With the exception of our history of philosophy courses, our training consisted of confronting the classic “problems” of philosophy in a relatively systematic fashion. The problem was presented, we were prompted for our own thoughts, they were refuted or developed, other “classic” solutions were presented, and usually, the “current” range of positions was presented, often in the form of assignments of recent publications related to the problems.

While I have since come to have many serious questions about the entire enterprise represented by one of my undergraduate majors, I haven’t entirely abandoned it either. In fact, I’m in a period of absolute theoretical confusion. This aside, however, on a strictly pedagogical note, I feel a sense of betrayal after having read this short work on Wittgenstein.

In it I find much that is familiar. I see how important Wittgenstein (and Russell, who is also frequently discussed in the work) was in the development of some things, such as the invention of truth tables and the development of logical notation. I also see a presentation of problems and issues in the work which match identically the presentation of some of the problems in my undergraduate classes.

What shocked and angered me was that, by extracting these elements and including them in our classes as part of the “standard” presentation of logic, we lose the important other parts of this story, in Wittgenstein’s case, his own reversal and rejection of much that I have absorbed as almost sacred methodology. While I was aware of this famous reversal, (I became curious enough about him after seeing the darkened countenance of a professor following the mention of his name that I looked him up in a encyclopedia of philosophy) , I think I assumed at the time that his later work was sufficiently “dealt with” by some later philosopher that there was no need to distract us with such nonsense.

Regardless of whether this was actually the case, this revealed to me the completely illusory nature of that sense of a free and open playing field I had throughout my undergraduate years. The problems, indeed, the range of responses to those problems, were carefully selected by my instructors, and perhaps, more broadly speaking, by the world of analytic philosophers.

I first discovered the existence of what was called “continental philosophy” when one day I wandered into my favorite professor’s office and asked what good analytical material there was out there on Kierkegaard. Since he was Danish, I was confident he was one famous non-English philosopher I could read in the original language, and one who I knew to have had some influence on Japanese thinkers. I was met with the response that, “Well, he is a continental philosopher, and, to be honest, I don’t really know much about them.” Later in the conversation, the professor said that, generally speaking, continental philosophy wasn’t felt to actually be philosophy, primarily, I was told, because they did not present their thoughts in the form of organized arguments with premises and conclusions. While many of them were brilliant and took up interesting questions, they resembled literary works and were not of great interest to “us”. Most people in the USA, I was assured, didn’t worry too much about them, except for a rather unusual fellow by the name of Rorty.

Since then, I have learnt more about the post-Kantian split, and the world of thought on the “other side”, as my love for binary divisions compels me to call it. What frustrated me today, however, wasn’t the fact that I was offered almost no access to this world throughout my entire undergraduate major in philosophy, but the fact that, as best as I can remember, we did not take seriously, and in many cases, did not take up at all, the developments, doubts, and rejections within the very range of issues I believed we were given fairly comprehensive overviews of.

Of course, I have little more than myself to blame for my naivety and failure to pursue those instinctive, “there is something missing here” feelings that I think all of us felt along the way.