Language Games Can Set Us Free

“We live out our lives amid a world of language, in which we use words to do things.”

“We are as if bewitched by the practices of saying that constitute our ways of going on in the world.”

“If we want to change how things are, then we need to change the way we use words. But can language-games set us free?”

“It was the maverick philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who coined the term ‘language-game’. He contended that words acquire meaning by their use, and wanted to see how their use was tied up with the social practices of which they are a part.”

“So he used ‘language-game’ to draw attention not only to language itself, but to the actions into which it is woven.”

“Wittgenstein wanted to expose how ‘words are deeds’, that we do something every time we use a word. Moreover, what we do, we do in a world with others.”

“Wittgenstein was intent on bringing out how ‘the “speaking” of language is part of an activity, or form of life’.”

“Wittgenstein’s attempts to see met with the charge that he was stopping us from seeing anything else, from perceiving new possibilities: his linguistic obsessions were a distraction from real politics.”

“The chief accuser was Herbert Marcuse, who in his blockbuster One-Dimensional Man (1964) declared that Wittgenstein’s work was reductive and limiting.”

“It could not be liberatory, for the close focus on how we use words misses what’s really going on.”

“Marcuse claims that Wittgenstein is reductive, seeing only language, and poorly at that.”

“Wittgenstein strives to bring language-games to light: Marcuse says this is stupid. Well, is it? Yes and no.”

“In Culture and Value (1977), Wittgenstein admits: ‘How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes.’ All too often, he says, we miss the obvious. That which is close is the most difficult to see for what it is.”

“When we use words, we partake of everyday understandings and carryings-on. Wittgenstein looks to these everyday usages, and remarks upon them.”

“Wittgenstein is calling attention to the ways in which, by our everyday language-games, we entrap ourselves. So he looks closely at what he is doing and saying.”

“He sees work in philosophy as therapeutic, in the sense of ‘a work on oneself’.”

“And there is an intense self-scrutiny in Philosophical Investigations. It is quite remarkable, questioning the ways we use language to do mundane things such as telling the time, doing sums, or hoping that someone will come.”

“One remark that Marcuse ridicules is Wittgenstein’s example, ‘My broom is in the corner…’ Marcuse is super-snarky about this, and denounces ‘the almost masochistic reduction of speech to the humble and common’. But, amid the bluster, Marcuse misses the point.”

“This all-too-human stupidity is deep-seated.”

“So, if we are to change, we must first face up to an imperative to ‘be stupid’, and to know ourselves to be. Marcuse could have welcomed this, for he gets that it is in everyday practices that we are unwittingly subjected: ‘magic, witchcraft, and ecstatic surrender are practised in the daily routine of the home, the shop, and the office’. In short, the lady doth protest too much.”

“Does Marcuse’s second objection fare any better? This is the claim that Wittgenstein is confining, ensnaring us only further within language. Marcuse says that Wittgenstein’s take on language is one-dimensional.”

“But this is not borne out by a reading of Wittgenstein’s book, where we find a view of language as irreducibly multi-dimensional.”

“Wittgenstein painstakingly shows how the basis for what we use as language is provided by shifting patterns of communal activity.”

“Language is contingent and provisional, so language-games can’t but be open to change, in numerous ways.”

“So language usage admits contestation and change, in virtue of what it is. Marcuse, on the other hand, denies this, and even says that societal processes close the universe of discourse. We don’t get from him anything like Wittgenstein’s suggestion that there is in language usage itself something recalcitrant to fixity.”

“Wittgenstein’s position is rather more radical than Marcuse cares to notice. He says ‘something new (spontaneous, “specific”) is always a language-game’.”

“What of this prospect? Notably, on Wittgenstein’s account, we don’t play language-games solo. They arise through communal uses of language.”

“Marcuse’s objections are unfounded. He fails to show that Wittgenstein’s astonishing scrutiny of language-games is either pointlessly stupid or enslaving. In fact, his efforts only heighten regard for Wittgenstein’s relevance in the darkness of these times.”

“Using language is an integral part of the human condition. We live within language, yet our way of life is something we find hard to see.”

“Wittgenstein is not peddling ready answers to this predicament. Indeed as long as there is language it will bewitch us, we will face the temptation to misunderstand. And there is no vantage point outside it. There is no escape from language-games then, but we can forge a kind of freedom from within them. We might first need to ‘be stupid’ if we are to see this.”