Wittgenstein, Hertz, and Hermeneutics

Abstract

“How does Wittgenstein stand with respect to hermeneutics?” is a question that has often been posed by interested but puzzled hermeneuticists. They feel instinctively a certain sympathy for his idea of “seeing the world rightly” in the Tractatus as well as with his views about, say, what it is to understand persons in the Philosophical Investigations. Yet, there remains something strange, even foreign to the hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey to Gadamer in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings.1 Like the hermeneuticists, Wittgenstein insists, for example, that description must replace explanation in philosophy but what he understood by description has precious little to do with either the historically-oriented contextualism of Dilthey or the phenomenology of the early Heidegger. Wittgenstein describes in the form of thought experiments, examples, aphorisms, analogies, metaphors and questions — the most interesting single fact about the Investigations is that it contains 784 questions of which only 110 are answered of which in turn 70 are answered falsely on purpose.2 This is a very curious way to do hermeneutics indeed. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein, despite his insistence that philosophy was a kind of analysis (PI, I, 91), always distanced himself from the tradition of Logical Positivism by emphasizing that it was fundamentally about meaning rather than truth. Indeed, the later Wittgenstein’s lack of concern for issues relating to truth in philosophy has been perceived by many, not least Bertrand Russell, as scandalous. His ways of “reminding” us of the multiple modes of interweaving words and gestures into meanings are, nevertheless, highly reminiscent of hermeneutic techniques. Yet, Wittgenstein’s rejection of Positivism was never for a moment connected with a temptation to develop an anti-positivistic philosophy like those of Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. The question is why? The answer is to be found in his scientific background — the last place that either a Positivist or a hermeneuticist would look.