My review will appear in Practical Philosophy.
Nicholas Royle
How to Read Shakespeare
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN-1-86207-730-4 (pb), pp. xii + 130
Of the books I have seen so far from Granta’s How to Read series, the Shakespeare volume is the most directly engaged in teaching its audience how to read texts. Nicholas Royle is not interested in working out what Shakespeare thought about any particular issue; rather, he seeks to help us recognize some of the ways that Shakespeare uses and manipulates words in order to create various effects. Although the author has written extensively on literary theory (including, among other works, a book on Derrida) the present book is blessedly uninterested in that topic. Instead of talking about talking about how to read Shakespeare, Royle never strays far from the actual words and passages from Shakespeare which are under discussion. Neither does he offer any abstract arguments for the validity of the interpretive strategies that he uses. Instead, we are tacitly invited to pragmatically judge his methods by their fruits; those who find Royle’s readings enlightening will no doubt follow in his footsteps. I personally found most of what he says agreeable, although he may occasionally read too much into certain details of the texts (if one is allowed to suggest that Shakespeare may be over-interpreted!). Some readers may also be annoyed when Royle indulges in a bit of his own faux-Shakespearian word play.
Each chapter of the book works like a microscope, zooming in and out on its subject at different degrees of magnification. At one level, a chapter is devoted to a particular play; at another level, it contains a close reading of a particular passage from that play; and finally, each chapter examines the role of a particular word as it appears in the passage, in the play, and throughout the Shakespearian oeuvre. Chapter seven, for example, discusses Antony and Cleopatra. More particularly, it analyzes a bit of dialogue that takes place between Antony and his loyal follower, Eros, which is found in act four, scene fourteen of that play. There Antony describes how, when looking at a cloud, we might see in it a “blue promontory with trees upon’t that nod unto the world.” Royle zooms in on the word “nod,” explicating its use in the passage against the background of its use in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Other chapters treat passages from The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth.
There is certainly much to be gained from this short book and it does inspire one to read or reread the works it discusses. Clearly this is what Royle hopes for, and he ends his book with a few useful pages of “Suggestions for Further Reading,” which describe editions of the plays, critical works, philological works, biographies, and websites that can all be of help and interest to budding Shakespearian scholars.
I do have two inter-connected quibbles with this book, both of which probably reflect my own preference for philosophy over literary criticism. Royle appears at times to be guilty, simultaneously, of both over-interpretation and under-interpretation of the texts he discusses. On the one hand, he finds great significance in the way Shakespeare uses particular words in different contexts. On the other hand, he rarely comes up with much in the way of clear conclusions about exactly what Shakespeare is trying to achieve or express by using words as he does. Lacking definite theses, the discussion sometimes descends (or ascends, according to taste) into a free-wheeling interpretive improvisation.
Royle writes in his introduction that, “My principle aim is to register and explore the strangeness [Royle’s emphasis] of Shakespeare’s writing… - its capacity to surprise and alter our sense of the world” (pg. 3). The book does reveal all manner of word-play and strangeness in Shakespearian texts, but there is a danger here: any natural human use of language can be shown to be quite strange and ambiguous when placed under a sufficiently powerful exegetical microscope.
Does Shakespeare merely want to play verbal tricks on us, or is he actually trying to say something? Royle offers some direction regarding certain themes that we should be looking out for. He points, for instance, to the tendency of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae to reflexively allude to the fact that they are merely actors in a play. However, while readers of his book will come away with new appreciation of Shakespeare’s language, they will not have gained any real understanding of his importance for western culture. Royle has convinced me; Shakespeare’s language is stranger than I had thought. However, it was not strangeness of language that inspired T. S. Eliot to write, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third.” To understand Shakespeare’s greatness, we must look beyond this book.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College,
Akko, Israel
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Harry G. Frankfurt: The Reasons of Love
My review will appear in Practical Philosophy.
Harry G. Frankfurt
The Reasons of Love
Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2004
ISBN0691126241 (pb), pp. 135.
This slim and elegantly written volume should be of obvious interest to anyone interested in the application of philosophy to sorting out the problems of life. After all, the first of its three chapters is actually titled, ’The Question: “How Should We Live?”’ More precisely, the book discusses how people should organise their desires, interests, and loves in the light of Frankfurt’s celebrated two-tiered model of human volition. The model could be crudely described as: human beings are motivated by immediate, first-order desires to have and do things in the world, as well as by reflexive second-order desires to possess specific first-order desires. Frankfurt’s main message is that in order to be healthy, effective, and happy human beings, it is necessary for there to be things and/or people whom we love in a wholehearted way. Surprisingly, self-love ends up having an essential role to play in the achievement of this volitional wholeness.
Frankfurt begins by distinguishing caring about something from merely desiring or preferring something, and even from ‘taking something to be intrinsically valuable’ (p. 12). Mobilising his model of volition, Frankfurt explains that we care about something when we both desire it and also have an enduring second level desire to continue desiring it. Such caring infuses our world with meaning, but the ultimate objects of our care are not themselves determined by further rational considerations or ulterior motives: ‘Formulating a criterion of importance presupposes possession of the very criterion that is to be formulated. The circularity is both inescapable and fatal’ (p. 26).
The next chapter investigates a concept very close to that of caring, i.e., ‘love’. The love Frankfurt is talking about can arise from an appreciation of the beloved’s special virtues or as the result of a natural psychological tendency, as in parental love. However, those are just contingent facts about the psychological impetus of love. We do not directly control our love or select its objects; rather our love for those objects is itself that which ultimately grounds and shapes our dispositions and conduct. The object of love is loved not merely for its valuable characteristics (if it does have any) or as a means for attaining some other thing of importance; it is cherished for its own sake and cannot be substituted. When we love a person, we identify with him or her. If we do not love at all we risk profound and debilitating boredom. When we do love we can overcome the ’inhibitions and hesitancies of self-doubt’ (p. 65) and become free to pursue an active life devoted to the objects of our love.
The final chapter develops Frankfurt’s most surprising thesis, that is, that self love is the conceptually purist and most important form of love. It is pure because it so clearly fits the criteria of love (i.e. we care about ourselves for our own sake, we identify with ourselves, etc.). It is important because Frankfurt does not understand self-love to be an expression of crass egocentrism. When I love someone else, I identify with them and care about them and thus love what they love. Similarly, self-love demands love of that which the self loves. What is this further object which the self loves? Through a somewhat suspicious dialectical move, Frankfurt tries to show that it cannot simply be the self all over again; it must be an external object. He claims that it is my self-love which drives me to ‘get a life’ (to borrow a colloquial expression) and this requires, according to Frankfurt, that I learn to love things and people besides myself. The remainder of the chapter treats the pathologies of will which occur when we cannot manage to identify with ourselves (an essential element of self-love), that is, when we fail to successfully reconcile conflicts between our loves for different objects. It is only when we can love objects outside ourselves wholeheartedly that we can genuinely love ourselves; it is our self-love which motivates us to seek wholehearted love of objects outside ourselves.
While by any account The Reasons of Love is well worth reading, I would like to mention three aspects of the book which might draw criticism. First of all, Frankfurt repeatedly downplays the importance of moral values in our lives. He is concerned with the wholeheartedness of our care, love, and action and is not very interested in whether the things we care about and the deeds we perform are morally commendable. Secondly, he is very wary of romantic love and would much rather talk about parental love for children. Thirdly, the ‘suspicious dialectical move’ mentioned above is suspicious. The god of Aristotle got along fine just thinking about his own thinking (at least in book 12 of the Metaphysics). Why can’t self-love be satisfied by loving the object of the self’s own self-love? In other words: why wouldn’t someone be able to infuse his life with meaning by becoming the sole member of a mutual admiration society?
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College,
Akko, Israel,
bdlerner@gmail.com
Harry G. Frankfurt
The Reasons of Love
Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2004
ISBN0691126241 (pb), pp. 135.
This slim and elegantly written volume should be of obvious interest to anyone interested in the application of philosophy to sorting out the problems of life. After all, the first of its three chapters is actually titled, ’The Question: “How Should We Live?”’ More precisely, the book discusses how people should organise their desires, interests, and loves in the light of Frankfurt’s celebrated two-tiered model of human volition. The model could be crudely described as: human beings are motivated by immediate, first-order desires to have and do things in the world, as well as by reflexive second-order desires to possess specific first-order desires. Frankfurt’s main message is that in order to be healthy, effective, and happy human beings, it is necessary for there to be things and/or people whom we love in a wholehearted way. Surprisingly, self-love ends up having an essential role to play in the achievement of this volitional wholeness.
Frankfurt begins by distinguishing caring about something from merely desiring or preferring something, and even from ‘taking something to be intrinsically valuable’ (p. 12). Mobilising his model of volition, Frankfurt explains that we care about something when we both desire it and also have an enduring second level desire to continue desiring it. Such caring infuses our world with meaning, but the ultimate objects of our care are not themselves determined by further rational considerations or ulterior motives: ‘Formulating a criterion of importance presupposes possession of the very criterion that is to be formulated. The circularity is both inescapable and fatal’ (p. 26).
The next chapter investigates a concept very close to that of caring, i.e., ‘love’. The love Frankfurt is talking about can arise from an appreciation of the beloved’s special virtues or as the result of a natural psychological tendency, as in parental love. However, those are just contingent facts about the psychological impetus of love. We do not directly control our love or select its objects; rather our love for those objects is itself that which ultimately grounds and shapes our dispositions and conduct. The object of love is loved not merely for its valuable characteristics (if it does have any) or as a means for attaining some other thing of importance; it is cherished for its own sake and cannot be substituted. When we love a person, we identify with him or her. If we do not love at all we risk profound and debilitating boredom. When we do love we can overcome the ’inhibitions and hesitancies of self-doubt’ (p. 65) and become free to pursue an active life devoted to the objects of our love.
The final chapter develops Frankfurt’s most surprising thesis, that is, that self love is the conceptually purist and most important form of love. It is pure because it so clearly fits the criteria of love (i.e. we care about ourselves for our own sake, we identify with ourselves, etc.). It is important because Frankfurt does not understand self-love to be an expression of crass egocentrism. When I love someone else, I identify with them and care about them and thus love what they love. Similarly, self-love demands love of that which the self loves. What is this further object which the self loves? Through a somewhat suspicious dialectical move, Frankfurt tries to show that it cannot simply be the self all over again; it must be an external object. He claims that it is my self-love which drives me to ‘get a life’ (to borrow a colloquial expression) and this requires, according to Frankfurt, that I learn to love things and people besides myself. The remainder of the chapter treats the pathologies of will which occur when we cannot manage to identify with ourselves (an essential element of self-love), that is, when we fail to successfully reconcile conflicts between our loves for different objects. It is only when we can love objects outside ourselves wholeheartedly that we can genuinely love ourselves; it is our self-love which motivates us to seek wholehearted love of objects outside ourselves.
While by any account The Reasons of Love is well worth reading, I would like to mention three aspects of the book which might draw criticism. First of all, Frankfurt repeatedly downplays the importance of moral values in our lives. He is concerned with the wholeheartedness of our care, love, and action and is not very interested in whether the things we care about and the deeds we perform are morally commendable. Secondly, he is very wary of romantic love and would much rather talk about parental love for children. Thirdly, the ‘suspicious dialectical move’ mentioned above is suspicious. The god of Aristotle got along fine just thinking about his own thinking (at least in book 12 of the Metaphysics). Why can’t self-love be satisfied by loving the object of the self’s own self-love? In other words: why wouldn’t someone be able to infuse his life with meaning by becoming the sole member of a mutual admiration society?
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College,
Akko, Israel,
bdlerner@gmail.com
Mark Wrathall: How to Read Heidegger
My review will appear in Practical Philosophy.
Mark Wrathall
How to Read Heidegger
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN-13: 987-1-86207-766-9 (pb), pp. viii + 135.
This book offers introductory accounts of several central themes from Being and Time and from Heidegger’s later writings. As is the custom in the How to Read series, each chapter begins with a selection from a primary source (in this case, an English translation of a primary source). Given the notorious obscurity of Heideggerian texts, Mark Wrathal can hardly be blamed for not really equipping his readers with the tools and background implied by the series’ title. At best his readers will be able to discern some kind of a connection between the quoted passages and Wrathall’s explanations.
The book opens with a programmatic introduction that treats the question of how Heidegger should be approached by today’s reader. Wrathall is tired of the analytic/continental split in contemporary philosophy. Following the lead of writers such as Hubert Dreyfus, he wants to present Heidegger as a philosopher who can speak to the analytic tradition and who can serve as a corrective to its overly scientistic tendencies.
The first six chapters are devoted to themes from Being and Time. Chapter one begins with a quick introduction to Heidegger’s phenomenological method and moves swiftly on to Heidegger’s vision of human beings as Dasein (entities for whom being is itself an issue) who can live in Eigentlichkeit, the authenticity achieved by Dasein when “it has become its own” (pg. 14). Although Eigentlichkeit does involve a kind of individual autonomy, Wrathall is careful to point out how Heidegger’s recognition of the limits placed upon our choices by the world contrasts with Sartre’s more radical view of a completely unencumbered human freedom. This leads naturally into chapter two, which describes Heidegger’s replacement of the Cartesian self/world dichotomy with the idea that Dasein is always already existing in a world. Heidegger insists that we do not relate to the world primarily as a collection of objects for our dispassionate observation, but rather we encounter the world as “that wherein all of our actions make sense” (pg. 28), a world containing (among other things) the immediately intelligible tools and materials with which we execute our projects. Unfortunately, Wrathall does not make it sufficiently clear to the reader that Heidegger is far from being a lone voice of anti-Cartesian dissent among twentieth century philosophers. Chapter three discusses how our moods and emotional attitudes inform our experience of the world, while chapter four concludes the discussion of Dasein’s world with an account of “understanding” and “interpretation.” In this context, these terms refer to our modes of grasping and making sense of the world, which are themselves integral to the practical business of existing in that world (as against purely intellectual theorizing about the world).
Chapters five and six complete Wrathall’s treatment of Being and Time with a return to issues of authenticity. First we are told about Heidegger’s das Man, the omnipresent “one” of “that’s what one does,” which represents the unquestioned societal norms that threaten the authenticity of the individual. Next comes an explanation of Heidegger’s dark insistence that one’s attitude towards one’s own mortality is essential for the achievement of authenticity.
The book’s remaining four chapters treat some of Heidegger’s most celebrated later essays. A chapter on “The Origin of the Work of Art” unpacks the claim that art reveals the truth about its subjects. The discussion of On the Way to Language deals with the way ordinary language serves as the orienting underpinning for the way we live our lives. Discussions of “The Question Concerning Technology” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” offer opportunities to explore Heidegger’s critique of modern technological existence.
All-in-all Wrathall has given us a quite readable and useful introduction to Heidegger’s thought. If only the Master himself had written so clearly! My only real qualm concerning this book is its nearly complete lack of critical perspective. While some pages are devoted to describing and denouncing Heidegger’s attachment to Nazism, Wrathall basically treats it as something of a tragic aberration, a terrible misapplication of a critique of modernity which is in itself basically sound.
Heidegger is the kind of philosopher who offers pronouncements rather than arguments. This makes it difficult to know even how to begin criticizing his work. By the time people manage to eke out meaning from his forbidding prose, they often have little energy left to consider whether what he says is actually true. As a result, expositors of Heidegger – especially those writing introductory expositions – bear a special responsibility to their readers to mention some of the main criticisms that have been directed against his work.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College
Akko, Israel
Mark Wrathall
How to Read Heidegger
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN-13: 987-1-86207-766-9 (pb), pp. viii + 135.
This book offers introductory accounts of several central themes from Being and Time and from Heidegger’s later writings. As is the custom in the How to Read series, each chapter begins with a selection from a primary source (in this case, an English translation of a primary source). Given the notorious obscurity of Heideggerian texts, Mark Wrathal can hardly be blamed for not really equipping his readers with the tools and background implied by the series’ title. At best his readers will be able to discern some kind of a connection between the quoted passages and Wrathall’s explanations.
The book opens with a programmatic introduction that treats the question of how Heidegger should be approached by today’s reader. Wrathall is tired of the analytic/continental split in contemporary philosophy. Following the lead of writers such as Hubert Dreyfus, he wants to present Heidegger as a philosopher who can speak to the analytic tradition and who can serve as a corrective to its overly scientistic tendencies.
The first six chapters are devoted to themes from Being and Time. Chapter one begins with a quick introduction to Heidegger’s phenomenological method and moves swiftly on to Heidegger’s vision of human beings as Dasein (entities for whom being is itself an issue) who can live in Eigentlichkeit, the authenticity achieved by Dasein when “it has become its own” (pg. 14). Although Eigentlichkeit does involve a kind of individual autonomy, Wrathall is careful to point out how Heidegger’s recognition of the limits placed upon our choices by the world contrasts with Sartre’s more radical view of a completely unencumbered human freedom. This leads naturally into chapter two, which describes Heidegger’s replacement of the Cartesian self/world dichotomy with the idea that Dasein is always already existing in a world. Heidegger insists that we do not relate to the world primarily as a collection of objects for our dispassionate observation, but rather we encounter the world as “that wherein all of our actions make sense” (pg. 28), a world containing (among other things) the immediately intelligible tools and materials with which we execute our projects. Unfortunately, Wrathall does not make it sufficiently clear to the reader that Heidegger is far from being a lone voice of anti-Cartesian dissent among twentieth century philosophers. Chapter three discusses how our moods and emotional attitudes inform our experience of the world, while chapter four concludes the discussion of Dasein’s world with an account of “understanding” and “interpretation.” In this context, these terms refer to our modes of grasping and making sense of the world, which are themselves integral to the practical business of existing in that world (as against purely intellectual theorizing about the world).
Chapters five and six complete Wrathall’s treatment of Being and Time with a return to issues of authenticity. First we are told about Heidegger’s das Man, the omnipresent “one” of “that’s what one does,” which represents the unquestioned societal norms that threaten the authenticity of the individual. Next comes an explanation of Heidegger’s dark insistence that one’s attitude towards one’s own mortality is essential for the achievement of authenticity.
The book’s remaining four chapters treat some of Heidegger’s most celebrated later essays. A chapter on “The Origin of the Work of Art” unpacks the claim that art reveals the truth about its subjects. The discussion of On the Way to Language deals with the way ordinary language serves as the orienting underpinning for the way we live our lives. Discussions of “The Question Concerning Technology” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” offer opportunities to explore Heidegger’s critique of modern technological existence.
All-in-all Wrathall has given us a quite readable and useful introduction to Heidegger’s thought. If only the Master himself had written so clearly! My only real qualm concerning this book is its nearly complete lack of critical perspective. While some pages are devoted to describing and denouncing Heidegger’s attachment to Nazism, Wrathall basically treats it as something of a tragic aberration, a terrible misapplication of a critique of modernity which is in itself basically sound.
Heidegger is the kind of philosopher who offers pronouncements rather than arguments. This makes it difficult to know even how to begin criticizing his work. By the time people manage to eke out meaning from his forbidding prose, they often have little energy left to consider whether what he says is actually true. As a result, expositors of Heidegger – especially those writing introductory expositions – bear a special responsibility to their readers to mention some of the main criticisms that have been directed against his work.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College
Akko, Israel
Penelope Deutscher: How to Read Derrida
My review will appear in Practical Philosophy.
Penelope Deutscher
How to Read Derrida
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN: 1-86207-768-1 (pb), pp. xii + 132.
Although it has been years since he occupied the pinnacle of academic fashion, it is doubtless that many aspiring intellectuals across the world would be thrilled to be taught How to Read Derrida by a short book of 132 pages, including a chronology, bibliography, and index. Unfortunately, while Penelope Deutscher does begin each of her chapters with a short passage from Derrida’s writings, she does not really offer much in the way of practical help to those who would like to trudge through, say, Of Grammatology on their own. Instead, she has written a reasonably lucid exposition of several of Derrida’s main themes. In a way, this may only serve to further exasperate those who attempt to read the original texts; if Deutscher can explain his ideas in a fairly straight-forward fashion, why did the Master himself have to torture us with his idiosyncrasies and neologisms?
Deutscher divides Derrida’s ideas into roughly two periods. The earlier of these spans the 1960s and 1970s, during which he produced the classic documents of deconstructionism. It was then that Derrida set out to expose the tensions inherent in any attempt to divide things up into a hierarchical dichotomy. For instance, while the Western tradition, as epitomized by Plato, favors “living” speech over “dead” writing, Derrida tries to demonstrate that speech itself may be characterized as possessing those very qualities that lead us to devalue writing. Any discourse that tries to uphold such dichotomies will have to resort to various rhetorical ploys in order to hide the inherent instability of its categories. The deconstructionist reader brings those ploys to light, exposing the conceptual weaknesses they were meant to conceal and undermining our confidence in the very dichotomies they were meant to protect. Here Deutscher does offer one essential hint for those who would dare read Derrida on their own: much confusion is generated by his tendency to expand the meaning of a term to include everything under the sun that shares certain qualities attributed (usually pejoratively) to the term’s usual referent. For instance: he may refer to speech as “writing” in order to say that speech itself possesses those very qualities that were thought to differentiate writing from it.
When the dichotomies involved refer to social hierarchies and to the delineation of membership on one’s own social group, the deconstructionist reading takes on political significance, forcing us to reconsider the status of people excluded from our own group, the famous “Other” of recent French philosophy. In this connection, Deutscher specifically discusses Derrida’s ideas on national identity and gender.
Next Deutscher discusses the “Afterword” of Derrida’s Limited Inc., which serves as a kind of bridge between the early and later periods of his writing. There Derrida develops a typical theme; that communication must inherently involve miscommunication. But how can communal life succeed if miscommunication is inevitable? His point is that we should never assure ourselves that perfect political solutions can be achieved through perfect communications. Sometimes incomprehension can even be valuable, especially if it signals the presence of wisdom beyond our comprehension. In any case, we must be prepared to endlessly “renegotiate” the way we understand both ourselves and others.
Derrida’s later writings further develop the theme of perfection vs. imperfection. Acts of mourning and hospitality, giving and forgiving, and the institution of jurisprudence are all considered as examples of the imperfectability of human life. Now, however, impossible moral and political ideals take on a new role in Derrida’s thinking. Rather than merely deconstruct such “pure” notions, he calls upon us to employ them heuristically for imagining new possibilities of human conduct. Instead of subjecting idealizing rhetoric to a deconstructive reading, Derrida wants to deconstruct the pragmatic language of those who cite the impossibility of ideal solutions in order to avoid radical progress. For example, if a French politician claims that it would be simply impossible to permit entrance to everyone who wants to live in France, Derrida will investigate the rhetoric required to shore up the notion of impossibility involved, thus making room for the discussion of a more radically hospitable policy. Finally, in a somewhat mystical mood, Derrida suggests that in some unthinkable way, acts of True Gift-Giving or True Forgiveness may actually be possible in this world. We can accomplish such moral feats without even knowing it - or perhaps only without knowing it! Unfortunately, Deutscher’s powers of exegesis fall somewhat short of giving us an entirely comprehensible account of this final mystery – but if she had it would not have remained a mystery.
In conclusion: this is a good short introduction to Derrida, but much more would be required to teach us “how to read” him. It seems that Deutscher is well aware of this herself. A more comprehensive guide would include suggestions regarding the order in which Derrida’s works should be read, warnings about the dangers of reading him in translation, and more information about the secondary literature. It might be said in Deutscher’s defense that she has made a more fundamental contribution to the popularization of Derrida’s idea; her book leaves the reader feeling that it will be worth while to make the effort to read his works.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College
Akko, Israel
Penelope Deutscher
How to Read Derrida
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN: 1-86207-768-1 (pb), pp. xii + 132.
Although it has been years since he occupied the pinnacle of academic fashion, it is doubtless that many aspiring intellectuals across the world would be thrilled to be taught How to Read Derrida by a short book of 132 pages, including a chronology, bibliography, and index. Unfortunately, while Penelope Deutscher does begin each of her chapters with a short passage from Derrida’s writings, she does not really offer much in the way of practical help to those who would like to trudge through, say, Of Grammatology on their own. Instead, she has written a reasonably lucid exposition of several of Derrida’s main themes. In a way, this may only serve to further exasperate those who attempt to read the original texts; if Deutscher can explain his ideas in a fairly straight-forward fashion, why did the Master himself have to torture us with his idiosyncrasies and neologisms?
Deutscher divides Derrida’s ideas into roughly two periods. The earlier of these spans the 1960s and 1970s, during which he produced the classic documents of deconstructionism. It was then that Derrida set out to expose the tensions inherent in any attempt to divide things up into a hierarchical dichotomy. For instance, while the Western tradition, as epitomized by Plato, favors “living” speech over “dead” writing, Derrida tries to demonstrate that speech itself may be characterized as possessing those very qualities that lead us to devalue writing. Any discourse that tries to uphold such dichotomies will have to resort to various rhetorical ploys in order to hide the inherent instability of its categories. The deconstructionist reader brings those ploys to light, exposing the conceptual weaknesses they were meant to conceal and undermining our confidence in the very dichotomies they were meant to protect. Here Deutscher does offer one essential hint for those who would dare read Derrida on their own: much confusion is generated by his tendency to expand the meaning of a term to include everything under the sun that shares certain qualities attributed (usually pejoratively) to the term’s usual referent. For instance: he may refer to speech as “writing” in order to say that speech itself possesses those very qualities that were thought to differentiate writing from it.
When the dichotomies involved refer to social hierarchies and to the delineation of membership on one’s own social group, the deconstructionist reading takes on political significance, forcing us to reconsider the status of people excluded from our own group, the famous “Other” of recent French philosophy. In this connection, Deutscher specifically discusses Derrida’s ideas on national identity and gender.
Next Deutscher discusses the “Afterword” of Derrida’s Limited Inc., which serves as a kind of bridge between the early and later periods of his writing. There Derrida develops a typical theme; that communication must inherently involve miscommunication. But how can communal life succeed if miscommunication is inevitable? His point is that we should never assure ourselves that perfect political solutions can be achieved through perfect communications. Sometimes incomprehension can even be valuable, especially if it signals the presence of wisdom beyond our comprehension. In any case, we must be prepared to endlessly “renegotiate” the way we understand both ourselves and others.
Derrida’s later writings further develop the theme of perfection vs. imperfection. Acts of mourning and hospitality, giving and forgiving, and the institution of jurisprudence are all considered as examples of the imperfectability of human life. Now, however, impossible moral and political ideals take on a new role in Derrida’s thinking. Rather than merely deconstruct such “pure” notions, he calls upon us to employ them heuristically for imagining new possibilities of human conduct. Instead of subjecting idealizing rhetoric to a deconstructive reading, Derrida wants to deconstruct the pragmatic language of those who cite the impossibility of ideal solutions in order to avoid radical progress. For example, if a French politician claims that it would be simply impossible to permit entrance to everyone who wants to live in France, Derrida will investigate the rhetoric required to shore up the notion of impossibility involved, thus making room for the discussion of a more radically hospitable policy. Finally, in a somewhat mystical mood, Derrida suggests that in some unthinkable way, acts of True Gift-Giving or True Forgiveness may actually be possible in this world. We can accomplish such moral feats without even knowing it - or perhaps only without knowing it! Unfortunately, Deutscher’s powers of exegesis fall somewhat short of giving us an entirely comprehensible account of this final mystery – but if she had it would not have remained a mystery.
In conclusion: this is a good short introduction to Derrida, but much more would be required to teach us “how to read” him. It seems that Deutscher is well aware of this herself. A more comprehensive guide would include suggestions regarding the order in which Derrida’s works should be read, warnings about the dangers of reading him in translation, and more information about the secondary literature. It might be said in Deutscher’s defense that she has made a more fundamental contribution to the popularization of Derrida’s idea; her book leaves the reader feeling that it will be worth while to make the effort to read his works.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College
Akko, Israel
Michael S. Gazzaniga: The Ethical Brain
My review will appear in Practical Philosophy.
Michael S. Gazzaniga
The Ethical Brain
Washington, DC: Dana Press, 2005, pp. xix + 201
ISBN: 1932594019 (hb), US$25
Michael S. Gazzaniga, a world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist, was invited to join the physicians, philosophers, and others who sit on the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. That experience inspired him to write this book. Gazzaniga wishes to convince us that the new brain science will help solve the ancient perplexities of the philosophers. Unwittingly, he also demonstrates that, even in our hi-tech, bio-tech world, it is worthwhile for writers to acquaint themselves with the relevant philosophical literature before publishing pronouncements on ethical matters.
The book deals with a number of problems in ethics, including the moral status of embryos and euthanasia; brain enhancement via eugenics, training, and drugs; free will and moral responsibility; and the search for a universal ethics. Although his writing is sometimes disappointing when judged by the high standards set by the great science popularizers of our day such as Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, Gazzaniga reviews the neuroscientific background of each of these topics with a reasonable degree of success.
As I have indicated, Gazzaniga’s application of his scientific knowledge to the questions at hand is not always entirely convincing. He tells us that since a fourteen day old embryo lacks a brain, it should not be granted human status. Unfortunately, so little argumentation is offered for this thesis that one can only wonder whether, if he had specialized in nephrology, Gazzaniga would recognize the humanity of embryos only after they had developed kidneys.
The chapter on the “Aging Brain” offers some useful information regarding the process of mental deterioration that comes with aging. However, when Gazzaniga tries to score a point against philosophers who write about dementia and euthanasia but have “never walked the neurology wards” (pg. 30), he ends up attacking a straw-man; the example he cites involves a relatively highly functional Alzheimer patient whose condition he conflates with “end-state” dementia.
The chapters on brain enhancement contain some very interesting scientific material. Once again, Gazzaniga’s philosophical insights are rather limited. He suggests that we stop worrying since people are generally good at adapting to new technologies. He seems to be unconcerned about the issue of how such new technologies may serve to radically widen the social and cultural gap between the rich (who will be able to avail themselves of artificial brain enhancement) and the poor (who most likely will not).
I found Gazzaniga’s discussion of “Free Will, Personal Responsibility, and the Law” to be the strongest section of his book. That is not to say that it is philosophically informed. How can someone write about this topic today without, so it seems, even being aware of the work of Harry Frankfurt? Fortunately, Gazzaniga devotes most of the discussion to explanations of recent research on the limitations of human memory and the latest developments in lie-detection technology. He makes a strong case that, given what is now known about human memory, the legal system should rethink its traditional reliance on eye-witness testimony. Anyone who deals with the analysis of personal narratives — including philosophical practitioners — would be well advised to take his message to heart.
The final section of the book, “The Nature of Moral Beliefs and the Concept of Universal Ethics”, is philosophically the weakest. Gazzaniga appears here as a naïve son of the Enlightenment: science will complete the unfinished business left by religion and philosophy and finally offer humanity a universal basis for ethics. The idea is that all human brains are genetically “hard-wired” for certain universal moral tendencies, and although these values are diffracted and distorted by the lenses of different cultural environments, they remain discoverable by the scientific method. In fact, they have already been partially uncovered by a study of ethical decision-making done via a website questionnaire. Unfortunately, Gazzaniga never asks himself why ethical predispositions, apparently formed by an evolutionary process that took place against the backdrop of prehistoric life in the African grasslands, would remain particularly functional in the twenty-first century. It is not immediately obvious that Stone Age ethics can handle issues such as artificial brain enhancement and the use of neural scanners for lie-detection. It is also a bit embarrassing that someone so celebrated for his experimental work does not realize that surveys run on the Internet tell us very little about “universal human nature.” Even if the respondents come from far-flung lands and subscribe to various different religions, they all belong to the global elite of people who have Internet access, are fluent readers of English, and are sufficiently computer literate to stumble upon and participate in an online survey.
Berel Dov Lerner
Michael S. Gazzaniga
The Ethical Brain
Washington, DC: Dana Press, 2005, pp. xix + 201
ISBN: 1932594019 (hb), US$25
Michael S. Gazzaniga, a world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist, was invited to join the physicians, philosophers, and others who sit on the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. That experience inspired him to write this book. Gazzaniga wishes to convince us that the new brain science will help solve the ancient perplexities of the philosophers. Unwittingly, he also demonstrates that, even in our hi-tech, bio-tech world, it is worthwhile for writers to acquaint themselves with the relevant philosophical literature before publishing pronouncements on ethical matters.
The book deals with a number of problems in ethics, including the moral status of embryos and euthanasia; brain enhancement via eugenics, training, and drugs; free will and moral responsibility; and the search for a universal ethics. Although his writing is sometimes disappointing when judged by the high standards set by the great science popularizers of our day such as Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, Gazzaniga reviews the neuroscientific background of each of these topics with a reasonable degree of success.
As I have indicated, Gazzaniga’s application of his scientific knowledge to the questions at hand is not always entirely convincing. He tells us that since a fourteen day old embryo lacks a brain, it should not be granted human status. Unfortunately, so little argumentation is offered for this thesis that one can only wonder whether, if he had specialized in nephrology, Gazzaniga would recognize the humanity of embryos only after they had developed kidneys.
The chapter on the “Aging Brain” offers some useful information regarding the process of mental deterioration that comes with aging. However, when Gazzaniga tries to score a point against philosophers who write about dementia and euthanasia but have “never walked the neurology wards” (pg. 30), he ends up attacking a straw-man; the example he cites involves a relatively highly functional Alzheimer patient whose condition he conflates with “end-state” dementia.
The chapters on brain enhancement contain some very interesting scientific material. Once again, Gazzaniga’s philosophical insights are rather limited. He suggests that we stop worrying since people are generally good at adapting to new technologies. He seems to be unconcerned about the issue of how such new technologies may serve to radically widen the social and cultural gap between the rich (who will be able to avail themselves of artificial brain enhancement) and the poor (who most likely will not).
I found Gazzaniga’s discussion of “Free Will, Personal Responsibility, and the Law” to be the strongest section of his book. That is not to say that it is philosophically informed. How can someone write about this topic today without, so it seems, even being aware of the work of Harry Frankfurt? Fortunately, Gazzaniga devotes most of the discussion to explanations of recent research on the limitations of human memory and the latest developments in lie-detection technology. He makes a strong case that, given what is now known about human memory, the legal system should rethink its traditional reliance on eye-witness testimony. Anyone who deals with the analysis of personal narratives — including philosophical practitioners — would be well advised to take his message to heart.
The final section of the book, “The Nature of Moral Beliefs and the Concept of Universal Ethics”, is philosophically the weakest. Gazzaniga appears here as a naïve son of the Enlightenment: science will complete the unfinished business left by religion and philosophy and finally offer humanity a universal basis for ethics. The idea is that all human brains are genetically “hard-wired” for certain universal moral tendencies, and although these values are diffracted and distorted by the lenses of different cultural environments, they remain discoverable by the scientific method. In fact, they have already been partially uncovered by a study of ethical decision-making done via a website questionnaire. Unfortunately, Gazzaniga never asks himself why ethical predispositions, apparently formed by an evolutionary process that took place against the backdrop of prehistoric life in the African grasslands, would remain particularly functional in the twenty-first century. It is not immediately obvious that Stone Age ethics can handle issues such as artificial brain enhancement and the use of neural scanners for lie-detection. It is also a bit embarrassing that someone so celebrated for his experimental work does not realize that surveys run on the Internet tell us very little about “universal human nature.” Even if the respondents come from far-flung lands and subscribe to various different religions, they all belong to the global elite of people who have Internet access, are fluent readers of English, and are sufficiently computer literate to stumble upon and participate in an online survey.
Berel Dov Lerner
C. Mantzavinos: Naturalistic Hermeneutics
My review will be published in Practical Philosophy.
C. Mantzavinos
Naturalistic Hermeneutics
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. xv + 180
ISBN: 0521848121 (hb), £40, US$65
This book takes on one of the most popular theses of the modern philosophy of the social sciences, i.e., the claim that the human sciences must adopt a methodology fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences. More particularly, the human sciences should aim to interpret the meanings connected with human thought, speech, and action, while the natural sciences should devise causal explanations of phenomena in the physical world. Those causal explanations are themselves based upon empirically testable natural laws or invariances. Mantzavinos argues that there is nothing peculiar to the human sciences – or even to the interpretation of meanings – that should keep them from applying methodologies that are essentially similar to those of the natural sciences.
German philosophical hermeneutics is perhaps the most prestigious tradition demanding the methodological autonomy of the human sciences. In the first three chapters of his book, Mantzavinos offers a dismissive critique of the tradition’s three most celebrated representatives: Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He seems to find these writers so repellent that he barely makes an effort to present a charitable and comprehensible reading of their work. As described by Mantzavinos, their doctrines appear either preposterous or trivial. The assumption of his opponents’ alleged incomprehensibility makes Mantzavinos’s own arguments against them difficult to follow. It would have been much more instructive if he had chosen to discuss works that criticize the use of law-based explanations in the human sciences by authors whose philosophical style he might find more generally attractive, such as Peter Winch, John Searle, and Charles Taylor.
In the second part of the book Mantzavinos marshals philosophical arguments and literature, as well as relevant material from the scientific literature, to present and defend his own ‘naturalistic’ position. Some readers will no doubt feel that he makes his job a bit too easy for himself. ‘Naturalistic’ methodology shades off into ‘hypothetico-deductive’ methodology, and anyone who is willing to test claims against some kind of reality (including the content of a particular text, instances of some person’s behaviour, etc.) may be said to employ the hypothetico-deductive method. Mantzavinos dismisses the fact that empathic understanding may play a special role in the human sciences as being of little philosophical consequence. After all, empathy does its work in the context of discovery, i.e., in the anarchic process of hypothesis construction that is everywhere ruled by luck and intuition. Good positivists such as Mantzavinos are perfectly willing to limit their methodological doctrines to the more orderly realm of the context of validation. The bright side of this is that Mantzavinos avoids falling into a trap of doctrinaire naturalism. For instance, he is perfectly willing to admit that, ‘Since the creative element is omnipresent in human praxis, it should be more difficult for us to discover regularities in human action than regularities in nature’ (pg. 112).
A fair bit of the later chapters is devoted to criticizing a methodological assumption that underlies much contemporary work in the social and behavioural sciences, i.e., the notion that humans should be viewed as being essentially rational creatures. Mantzavinos claims that such assumptions cannot give rise to genuine explanations of behaviour, but rather only to ‘rational reconstructions’. Similarly, while he admits that principles of charity (i.e., the assumption that an author or speaker usually makes sense) have proven useful to the work of interpretation, contra philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Mantzavinos believes that they are not crucial. However, it seems that he does not properly appreciate that without some kind of charitable assumption of rationality, it would be simply impossible to identify what someone is doing as being a particular action. (Unless we discount the possibility that someone could be so crazy that he might believe that any action might produce any result, how can we ever identify his behaviour as an instance of some purposeful act? We see him insert coins into a parking meter but for all we know, he might be trying to conduct a symphony orchestra.)
In a particularly weak moment, Mantzavinos addresses a classic criticism of naturalism in the social sciences: since human behaviour is radically informed by ever-changing historical circumstances, it is not consistently describable by the kind of unvarying concepts that allow for the formulation of law-like generalizations that can underlie causal explanations of the kind produced in the physical sciences. He tries to defuse the criticism with a facile demonstration of its own alleged self-contradiction: ‘What can the thesis of the radical historicity of standpoints mean other than that man and his actions possess a constant property, precisely this historicity?’ (Pg. 94). An invariant absence of invariance hardly bodes well for the construction of law-like generalizations!
While recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have done much to weaken the position of those who oppose any role for naturalism in the study of human thought and behaviour, the battle is yet to be completely decided. This book may help re-ignite the debate. Though brief – perhaps too brief – it is not an easy read and it assumes a fair acquaintance with the field. Perhaps it would be most profitably read by philosophers – and philosophical counsellors – who still support the categorical separation of the human sciences from the natural sciences.
Berel Dov Lerner
C. Mantzavinos
Naturalistic Hermeneutics
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. xv + 180
ISBN: 0521848121 (hb), £40, US$65
This book takes on one of the most popular theses of the modern philosophy of the social sciences, i.e., the claim that the human sciences must adopt a methodology fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences. More particularly, the human sciences should aim to interpret the meanings connected with human thought, speech, and action, while the natural sciences should devise causal explanations of phenomena in the physical world. Those causal explanations are themselves based upon empirically testable natural laws or invariances. Mantzavinos argues that there is nothing peculiar to the human sciences – or even to the interpretation of meanings – that should keep them from applying methodologies that are essentially similar to those of the natural sciences.
German philosophical hermeneutics is perhaps the most prestigious tradition demanding the methodological autonomy of the human sciences. In the first three chapters of his book, Mantzavinos offers a dismissive critique of the tradition’s three most celebrated representatives: Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He seems to find these writers so repellent that he barely makes an effort to present a charitable and comprehensible reading of their work. As described by Mantzavinos, their doctrines appear either preposterous or trivial. The assumption of his opponents’ alleged incomprehensibility makes Mantzavinos’s own arguments against them difficult to follow. It would have been much more instructive if he had chosen to discuss works that criticize the use of law-based explanations in the human sciences by authors whose philosophical style he might find more generally attractive, such as Peter Winch, John Searle, and Charles Taylor.
In the second part of the book Mantzavinos marshals philosophical arguments and literature, as well as relevant material from the scientific literature, to present and defend his own ‘naturalistic’ position. Some readers will no doubt feel that he makes his job a bit too easy for himself. ‘Naturalistic’ methodology shades off into ‘hypothetico-deductive’ methodology, and anyone who is willing to test claims against some kind of reality (including the content of a particular text, instances of some person’s behaviour, etc.) may be said to employ the hypothetico-deductive method. Mantzavinos dismisses the fact that empathic understanding may play a special role in the human sciences as being of little philosophical consequence. After all, empathy does its work in the context of discovery, i.e., in the anarchic process of hypothesis construction that is everywhere ruled by luck and intuition. Good positivists such as Mantzavinos are perfectly willing to limit their methodological doctrines to the more orderly realm of the context of validation. The bright side of this is that Mantzavinos avoids falling into a trap of doctrinaire naturalism. For instance, he is perfectly willing to admit that, ‘Since the creative element is omnipresent in human praxis, it should be more difficult for us to discover regularities in human action than regularities in nature’ (pg. 112).
A fair bit of the later chapters is devoted to criticizing a methodological assumption that underlies much contemporary work in the social and behavioural sciences, i.e., the notion that humans should be viewed as being essentially rational creatures. Mantzavinos claims that such assumptions cannot give rise to genuine explanations of behaviour, but rather only to ‘rational reconstructions’. Similarly, while he admits that principles of charity (i.e., the assumption that an author or speaker usually makes sense) have proven useful to the work of interpretation, contra philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Mantzavinos believes that they are not crucial. However, it seems that he does not properly appreciate that without some kind of charitable assumption of rationality, it would be simply impossible to identify what someone is doing as being a particular action. (Unless we discount the possibility that someone could be so crazy that he might believe that any action might produce any result, how can we ever identify his behaviour as an instance of some purposeful act? We see him insert coins into a parking meter but for all we know, he might be trying to conduct a symphony orchestra.)
In a particularly weak moment, Mantzavinos addresses a classic criticism of naturalism in the social sciences: since human behaviour is radically informed by ever-changing historical circumstances, it is not consistently describable by the kind of unvarying concepts that allow for the formulation of law-like generalizations that can underlie causal explanations of the kind produced in the physical sciences. He tries to defuse the criticism with a facile demonstration of its own alleged self-contradiction: ‘What can the thesis of the radical historicity of standpoints mean other than that man and his actions possess a constant property, precisely this historicity?’ (Pg. 94). An invariant absence of invariance hardly bodes well for the construction of law-like generalizations!
While recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have done much to weaken the position of those who oppose any role for naturalism in the study of human thought and behaviour, the battle is yet to be completely decided. This book may help re-ignite the debate. Though brief – perhaps too brief – it is not an easy read and it assumes a fair acquaintance with the field. Perhaps it would be most profitably read by philosophers – and philosophical counsellors – who still support the categorical separation of the human sciences from the natural sciences.
Berel Dov Lerner
Ray Monk: How to Read Wittgenstein, Practical Philosophy
My review originally appeared in Practical Philosophy, Volume 8, No 1, Summer 2006, p. 59.
Ray Monk
How to Read Wittgenstein
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN: 1-86207-724-X (pb), pp. viii + 114.
Oceans of ink have been spilled in the course of the past half century in debates about ‘How to read Wittgenstein’. Having authored the much-celebrated biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), Ray Monk was almost uniquely qualified to write this new addition to Simon Critchey’s How to Read series. He manages, in very limited compass of this slender volume, to offer the reader a guiding thread by which to follow the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. He also troubles himself to occasionally acquaint us with some major alternatives to his own reading.
Books of the How to Read series are comprised of original texts and interpretive comments. Interestingly, Monk chooses to begin with a rather obscure piece; Wittgenstein’s first published work, a short review of the long-forgotten P. Coffey’s long-forgotten The Science of Logic. Monk deftly expounds upon the review to describe Wittgenstein’s state of mind as an undergraduate at Cambridge and enthusiastic convert to the “new logic” of Frege and Russell. This first chapter also helps set the intellectual backdrop for Wittgenstein’s own original contributions to philosophy.
The next four chapters are concerned with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. While explaining the basics of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, Monk is especially exercised by the famously self-destructive paradox at the heart of the Tractatus, i.e., that it apparently declares itself to be meaningless. He mentions Cora Diamond and James Conant’s radical view that Wittgenstein genuinely devised the Tractatus as an example of the kind of out-and-out nonsense we must learn to avoid. Monk’s own mind, however, tends towards the more common view that Wittgenstein thought his book somehow points the reader towards a true vision of the relationship between language and the world.
Chapter six uses the paper, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” to clearly delineate the first signs of Wittgenstein’s growing unhappiness with the system he had worked out in the Tractatus. It offers a short and masterful explanation of Wittgenstein’s technical doubts regarding the nature of the contradiction between statements which attribute different colours to the same ‘place’ at the same time, and how such doubts could eventually help bring Wittgenstein’s early philosophy crashing down in ruins. It is perhaps the best short presentation available of this crucial crisis in Wittgenstein’s intellectual development.
The next three chapters of the book outline Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The passages are mostly drawn from the Philosophical Investigations, but other late works are also quoted. Monk wants us to read Wittgenstein as a therapeutic philosopher whose illuminating examples and challenging questions will free us of the maladies of systematic philosophy and help us discover new connections between different aspects of our experience. He is unhappy with those who have founded their doctrinaire relativism upon Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games,’ and with those who purport to find a knock-down-drag-out argument against ‘private languages’ in the Philosophical Investigations.
The final two chapters should be of particular interest to those involved in philosophical counselling. They describe Wittgenstein’s disdain for modern culture and his insistence that science is inadequate for the understanding of people, art, and all things spiritual. More generally, the therapeutic conception of philosophy which informs all of Wittgenstein’s later work can obviously play an important role in the practice of philosophical counselling. However, I would add a personal caveat to this. To the extent that Monk is right and the later Wittgenstein genuinely disavowed any systematic doctrine, all is well and good. However, if one is trying to convince an audience to accept a particular philosophical view, it might be more honest to set it out in a straight-forward manner than to cajole one’s interlocutors into agreement through what might become a dangerously manipulative ‘therapy’.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee Academic College
Akko, Israel
Ray Monk
How to Read Wittgenstein
London: Granta Books, 2005
ISBN: 1-86207-724-X (pb), pp. viii + 114.
Oceans of ink have been spilled in the course of the past half century in debates about ‘How to read Wittgenstein’. Having authored the much-celebrated biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990), Ray Monk was almost uniquely qualified to write this new addition to Simon Critchey’s How to Read series. He manages, in very limited compass of this slender volume, to offer the reader a guiding thread by which to follow the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. He also troubles himself to occasionally acquaint us with some major alternatives to his own reading.
Books of the How to Read series are comprised of original texts and interpretive comments. Interestingly, Monk chooses to begin with a rather obscure piece; Wittgenstein’s first published work, a short review of the long-forgotten P. Coffey’s long-forgotten The Science of Logic. Monk deftly expounds upon the review to describe Wittgenstein’s state of mind as an undergraduate at Cambridge and enthusiastic convert to the “new logic” of Frege and Russell. This first chapter also helps set the intellectual backdrop for Wittgenstein’s own original contributions to philosophy.
The next four chapters are concerned with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. While explaining the basics of Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, Monk is especially exercised by the famously self-destructive paradox at the heart of the Tractatus, i.e., that it apparently declares itself to be meaningless. He mentions Cora Diamond and James Conant’s radical view that Wittgenstein genuinely devised the Tractatus as an example of the kind of out-and-out nonsense we must learn to avoid. Monk’s own mind, however, tends towards the more common view that Wittgenstein thought his book somehow points the reader towards a true vision of the relationship between language and the world.
Chapter six uses the paper, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” to clearly delineate the first signs of Wittgenstein’s growing unhappiness with the system he had worked out in the Tractatus. It offers a short and masterful explanation of Wittgenstein’s technical doubts regarding the nature of the contradiction between statements which attribute different colours to the same ‘place’ at the same time, and how such doubts could eventually help bring Wittgenstein’s early philosophy crashing down in ruins. It is perhaps the best short presentation available of this crucial crisis in Wittgenstein’s intellectual development.
The next three chapters of the book outline Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The passages are mostly drawn from the Philosophical Investigations, but other late works are also quoted. Monk wants us to read Wittgenstein as a therapeutic philosopher whose illuminating examples and challenging questions will free us of the maladies of systematic philosophy and help us discover new connections between different aspects of our experience. He is unhappy with those who have founded their doctrinaire relativism upon Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘language games,’ and with those who purport to find a knock-down-drag-out argument against ‘private languages’ in the Philosophical Investigations.
The final two chapters should be of particular interest to those involved in philosophical counselling. They describe Wittgenstein’s disdain for modern culture and his insistence that science is inadequate for the understanding of people, art, and all things spiritual. More generally, the therapeutic conception of philosophy which informs all of Wittgenstein’s later work can obviously play an important role in the practice of philosophical counselling. However, I would add a personal caveat to this. To the extent that Monk is right and the later Wittgenstein genuinely disavowed any systematic doctrine, all is well and good. However, if one is trying to convince an audience to accept a particular philosophical view, it might be more honest to set it out in a straight-forward manner than to cajole one’s interlocutors into agreement through what might become a dangerously manipulative ‘therapy’.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee Academic College
Akko, Israel
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