Hans Sluga

This is both a work in the history of philosophy and a work of original thought. The crux of Sluga’s argument is a distinction between “normative political philosophy” and “diagnosis”.

Normative political philosophy, like traditional philosophical theorizing in general, presumes a position external to the reality it theorizes about, with the ability to fully understand (or “survey”, a term adopted from Wittgenstein) that reality. Normative political philosophy carries with it show more the generality, timelessness, and abstraction of traditional philosophical theories.

Rawls’ Theory of Justice is a good example of what Sluga means by “normative political philosophy”. Rawls’ theory is constructed from a hypothetical “original position” in which principles of justice are decided upon in abstraction from historical or personal situations.

Diagnosis by contrast is self-consciously situated. In shedding the claims of traditional theory, it is inherently contextual, historical, and constrained by and to the here and now. Diagnosis acknowledges that there is no external position from which to survey the entirety of political reality. There are only situated perspectives within it, from which we operate with incomplete knowledge and make judgements without certainty.

Sluga traces the development of the diagnostic turn away from traditional theorizing through historical studies, seeing the emergence of diagnosis in the nineteenth century, especially with Nietzsche and Marx, and flourishing in the twentieth century with Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. Despite the apparent turn in those later figures, we still see traditional theorizing, for example, in Rawls (although Sluga notes a later turn toward diagnosis in Rawls’ last writings).

The emergence of diagnosis fits a larger pattern in the history of philosophy. Sluga’s thinking is Wittgensteinian, and his treatment of politics reflects Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical bent. That external position from which traditional philosophers viewed reality turned out, historically, to be chimerical. There is no such position — there are only positions within reality, from perspectives. There is no total picture or “survey”, always a view limited by the perspectives we occupy. Perspective is a condition of knowledge and understanding.

Understandings of the political world are perspectival in the same way. The relations among individual human beings, among groups and organizations, the relations between people and corporations, the environment, technology, . . . make the kind of theory we would like to have, as traditional political thinkers, unattainable. As Sluga argues, this political world comprises a complex system — one in which it becomes impossible to confidently predict that y will happen if we take political action x, or that z will happen if we do not take action x.

In fact, the system is “hyper-complex” in that political actors are themselves part of that complex system, in which their understandings and views of the system become relevant variables in the workings of the system, as do others’ views of their views, and so on.

We are thrown back upon “judgment” — judgment in the sense that Hannah Arendt found in Kant’s third Critique — contextualized, creative, and inherently uncertain.

Diagnosis and political judgment proceed then from this unavoidable situatedness. In the final chapters, Sluga sets out some of the conditions and requirements of diagnosis and judgment in our here and now, emphasizing the roles of technology (both in the economic sense and in its role as enabler of dispersed terrorism), population, and the environment — roles missing in the diagnostic approaches of Schmitt, Arendt, and Foucault.

In this final part of the book Sluga allows himself, as many philosophers don’t, to “go big”. He doesn’t limit himself to technical arguments, critiques, and small conclusions. He raises and addresses big questions about the future of political thought and the dimensions he believes necessary to current political diagnosis.

Sluga’s critique of normative political theorizing may extend beyond professional political philosophy. He distinguishes the “plain” from the “philosophical” in much the same way that other critical treatments of distinctively philosophical contexts have done, with the onus on the “philosophical” to find relevance in the “plain”.

But there may well be a continuity between the philosophical and the plain, one that is more evident in political matters than in other areas studied by philosophers. The distinction between philosophical and plain has always been a troubling one — after all, the philosophical must in some way have been born from the plain. In everyday political discussion, the philosophical seems to make its way into the plain in the form of ideological stances taken in response to practical problems (e.g., income inequality) with the result being not solutions but ideological “answers” that take the characteristic form of normative political philosophy. What may otherwise be valid insights and perspectives (whether egalitarian, libertarian, or otherwise) are presented as definitive and absolute rather than uncertain and perspectival.

There’s a lot to this book. True to its claims regarding perspectivism, it’s not “just” philosophical. show less

This is a long awaited book from Hans Sluga. Sluga has been teaching and studying Wittgenstein's work for decades, inspiring countless students (including me). Sluga is himself an historicist, and the historicism is out front here, both on the scale of Wittgenstein's own development from the Tractatus through to On Certainty, and also on the broader scale, pointing to the influences of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mauthner, and others.

The first three chapters of the book trace the first period show more of Wittgenstein's thought, the Tractatus and Notebooks. Sluga weaves biographical details into his analysis, treating his subject from the beginning as someone haunted by questions rather than by answers. Wittgenstein's recurring retreats from philosophical activity now paint a picture of someone drawing back and rethinking, returning to the same questions with fresh thoughts fed by the limitations he now sees in his previous approaches.

Sluga's treatment of the Tractatus reads as a test, for Wittgenstein, of the very idea of logical atomism. Logical atomism succeeds on its own terms ("Logic takes care of itself. . . "), but it fails as a metaphysics. In other words, in the end, there simply is no bridge between logic, the logical structure of language and thought, and the structure of reality. Logical structure cannot be said to mirror reality, and the primitives of logic cannot be mapped to the primitives of reality. Logic isn't part of reality -- it is "transcendental."

At the same time, the Tractatus sets up, by its exclusion of the "transcendental" from theoretical treatment, the questions of the relation of self to world, self to other, self to language and language to world, the themes that will provoke Wittgenstein's thinking throughout his life.

The second period of Wittgenstein's thought, in Sluga's treatment, is that of the Blue and Brown Books. Here the limitations of the Tractatus become clear to Wittgenstein, and the diversity of language and fluidity of meaning become apparent. Sluga ties Wittgenstein's realizations during this period to Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense", breaking down the basis of concepts into simile, a likening of what is distinct through similarities rather than a discovery of an underlying essential sameness. This notion of simile flows forward into Wittgenstein's own notion of "family resemblance" that ties instances into concepts, thus abandoning the fixity of essentialism for a potential perspectivism, in which different resemblances can be featured in order to provide a fluid sorting and resorting of conceptual structure.

The third and final period in Sluga's Wittgenstein is the "late Wittgenstein" from the late 1930s on to Wittgenstein's death in 1951. As Sluga concedes, this last period contains some diverse strains of thought. The Philosophical Investigations could arguably be called the "mature" philosophy of Wittgenstein. The Investigations provide what seems to be Wittgenstein's most complete removal from philosophy as theory for the sake of philosophy as therapy. We get the definitive exposure of how our language may mislead us when we take it for more than it is (e.g., when we take its structure for that same "mirror of reality" rejected earlier in the test of logical atomism).

Then On Certainty takes up more explicitly than any other of Wittgenstein's writings questions of how practices of language really do compose or permit a structure of knowledge about the world. G.E. Moore's "Proof of an External World" provides a perfect starting point to examine and dismantle any notion of straight-forward epistemological foundationalism, in which complex knowledge is built on the basis of more primitive knowledge, like a Cartesian game of blocks.

The one slightly odd aspect of the book is Sluga's insertion of questions of social and political philosophy into each of the larger discussions in the book. Wittgenstein was even more silent about such questions than he was about ethics -- at least he did deliver the one "Lecture on Ethics" and the provocative remarks on ethics and "the problem of life" in the closing propositions of the Tractatus. I think the explanation for Sluga's interest is that we are in effect reading the preface to a future work of his own on social and political philosophy, with a grounding in themes from Wittgenstein -- in particular, Wittgenstein's anti-theoretical philosophical stance, what Sluga calls the "unsurveyability of our condition." I'm looking forward to it. show less

After reading On Certainty, I wanted to quickly gather an overview of Wittgenstein without reading all of his works. Why? I like to cheat. On homework, I mean on homework. Like…well…can my high-school diploma be revoked if I tell a story about cheating in high school? Just to play it safe, I’m going to call this a fiction. I’ll change my own name to keep it on the QT. (Don’t tell anyone.) For the remainder of this review, I shall refer to myself as Raymondo.

So, Raymondo was a show more straight-A student. In fact, he was practically a straight-A-plus student. His GPA was 11.6333 out of 12 (12=A , 11=A, 10=A-, etc.) But even so, in his senior year, it was a tight race for Valedictorian. Raymondo’s sometime friend (whom we’ll call Belvedere) had somewhere around an 11.7 GPA. Last semester of “Senior Year,” Raymondo rather suicidally decided to take four advanced placement classes (Physics, Math, English and Chemistry) and all were pretty easy…except Chemistry. Oooh, AP Chemistry was taught by…we’ll call her Mrs. Tangerine. Mrs. Tangerine was just about the meanest, toughest teacher in the school. (Suddenly, this is a Hardy Boys novel). And Raymondo didn’t much like Chemistry.

The situation, my friends, was grim. But then, out of nowhere, a caper that would have been worthy of the Pink Panther himself fell into Raymondo’s lap. It seems that one evening when Raymondo was prepping for the Chemistry final exam with his best friend “Craig” they got a call from this jerk-face-popular-kid we’ll call “Béchamel.” Béchamel, turns out, might know how to acquire a key to the High School. Yes, for Béchamel’s uncle happened to be a janitor at said High School, and he had a master. (To be honest—or dishonest, as the case may be--“Craig” and Raymondo probably would have done just fine on the exam. Béchamel is the one who would’ve crapped out. But given the opportunity to pull a fast one and get an edge on Belvedere, Raymondo had no desire to resist.)

Quickly, “Craig” and Raymondo formulated a plan.* They knew that Mrs. Tangerine always kept the exams in her left hand top drawer because they had always seen her removing each exam from that drawer. (A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of the easily duped.) And they also knew that she made the exact number of copies as there were students in the class. So an exam could not go missing without her notice, either. And we’re talking about a 20 page complex-organic-molecule-type exam that you couldn’t just scribble down.

To the point: “Craig” (who later in life apparently did learn enough chemistry because he became a nuclear engineer) and Raymondo (who later in life took a lot of drugs, so he apparently also learned enough chemistry) drove to the school in the dark of night. 2am-on-a-school-night dark. “Craig” pulled all the way in behind the school and hid the car as best as he could. He would be designated as the getaway driver, keeping the car running. Raymondo took the key and sure enough, was able to enter the school. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness and--with judicious use of a flashlight--made his way to Mrs. Tangerine’s classroom. Lo and behold, the key also worked on that room. Heart in mouth, he checked the drawer and there was a very neat short stack of exams. At this point he heard a sound. Freaking out, he crouched down, fearing the worst. Eventually, he peeped out into the hallway. No sign of anyone. He quickly exited the building with the exam. He jumped in the car and “Craig” drove them to a 24-hour Kinko’s. They carefully removed the staple by bending it open and then pulling it delicately through the holes. They copied each page and replaced the staple so that the exam appeared good as new.

They drove back to the school. Raymondo returned to the classroom, replaced the exam and CRASSSHHHH!--on his way out knocked over a desk. He set it back upright and ran like fucking hell. Made it to the car, and they were gone. Free with no retribution whatsoever and a perfect copy of the exam.

In the end, Raymondo was Salutatorian instead of Valedictorian anyway so the moral of this story is that doing stupid things in High School is a lot more interesting than getting a good grade on an exam. And that’s what I thought of The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein.

*Formulated…get it? show less