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PHILOSOPHICAL SELF-DENIAL
Wittgenstein and the Fear of Public Language

Rei Terada

“Throughout his life Wittgenstein was convinced that he could not make him-
self understood”— so a friend recalls.1 Wittgenstein’s confidence in the stability
and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expec-
tation that he would himself be unintelligible. Commentators who relate Witt-
genstein’s psychology or biography to his philosophy often do so by setting them
in opposition: by writing his polemic against private language, it is suggested,
Wittgenstein fought off a personal susceptibility to myths of romantic solitude.
But the assumption of antagonism may not be apt: hard-core belief in the pub-
lic nature of language and a terror of isolation may well go together. The more
public language is, the more awful failures of communication must be. When one
can no longer imagine that an utterance retains a meaning independent of its
reception, an ineffective utterance matters more. Without an ideal standard, we
need only to be generally, not completely, competent; but at the same time, we
need only to be generally incompetent to become linguistic pariahs. And for the
very reason that one’s intelligibility is never perfect or finally destroyed, each
exchange counts. Wittgenstein’s life and work alike show that these incremen-

1. M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with contagious. He published a collection of essays entitled
Wittgenstein,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, The Danger of Words and discontinued his memoirs of
ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 93. Drury was Wittgenstein because, according to Rhees, he thought
one of many students who found Wittgenstein’s anxiety “what he had written would do more harm than good” (ix).

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tal shifts in the account book of one’s intelligibility are large enough to perceive

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with the naked eye.
While it is sometimes assumed that Wittgenstein’s general legacy is a view

Pe a c e a nd M i nd : Pa r t 3
of language and social learning that is comfortable, agreeable to imperfections,
Wittgenstein’s writing and life themselves show that some amount of anxiety is
built into any public language model. Language games, like other games, are ago-
nistic; they produce wins and losses as well as draws and exchanges. While this
feature does not discredit Wittgenstein’s otherwise persuasive model of commu-
nication, it does disturb our impression that the little conflicts of everyday com-
munication are not worth worrying about. They are a recurring focus of Wittgen-

•
stein’s own thought: he is a vivid anthropologist of normal enmity. And although

Terada
he insists that the pain of normal conflict is itself normal, he makes it clear how
personally consequential such pain can be. For Wittgenstein, commitment to pub-
lic language entailed living in an economy in which, he believed, he was one of
those who would have most to pay. The secondary literature avoids dealing with
this issue by solving the problems posed by Wittgenstein’s works, then imagin-
ing the world described by its solutions. I would therefore like to make the exper-
iment of refraining, at times, from the explication of difficult passages in order
to bring forward the phenomenology of social exchanges in Wittgenstein’s life and
texts. His phobia of misunderstanding is worth considering, not so that we can
come up with a different idea of language that would avoid it, but so that we can
understand what normal enmity is really like. It is both discomfiting and illumi-
nating to observe the deeply unconventional and exceptional Wittgenstein justi-
fying conventionalism and defending rules against exceptions. Wittgenstein’s
intellectual consistency and his tendency toward self-denial conspire to sacrifice
Wittgenstein’s own normality, in his view, to that of his philosophy.

Although Wittgenstein talked a lot, and could be witty and eloquent, he fre-
quently labored to explain himself. Norman Malcolm, an invaluable source
regarding the phenomenology of Wittgenstein’s presence, describes his first
glimpse of this verbal travail:

At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening
was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer a
remark. He had extreme difficulty in expressing himself and his words
were unintelligible to me. I whispered to my neighbor, “Who is that?”:
he replied, “Wittgenstein.” I was astonished, because, for one reason, I
had expected the famous author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to
be an elderly man, whereas this man looked young—perhaps thirty-five.
(His actual age was forty-nine.) I observed the respectful attention that
everybody in the room paid to him. After this unsuccessful beginning he
did not speak for a time but was obviously struggling with his thoughts.