Wittgenstein on Covid-19 before it existed

and other remarks on Wittgenstein

I wondered whether I could make again a special end of the year blog, for example about what philosophers do during the turn of the year. However, it appeared difficult to find such information. I found only what Wittgenstein had written about it in a diary that I have here at home. During the First World War (1914-1918) Wittgenstein volunteered in the Austrian-Hungarian army and then he kept two diaries: a personal diary and a philosophical diary. The first one begins on 9 August 1914 and ends on 19 August 1918. The philosophical diary begins on 22 August 1914 and ends on 10 January 1917. The philosophical diary became the foundation of his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein didn’t write each day in his diaries and moreover several parts of his personal diary have been lost.
When Wittgenstein was in the army, first he had several functions behind the frontline. Later he got – on his request – frontline tasks. He was taken prisoner by the Italian army in 1918. Since the personal diary is not complete, we know only what Wittgenstein did on the last day of 1914 and the first day of 1915 and not on the other New Year’s Eves and Days in this period. He was then somewhere in Poland where he had a quiet job and much time to philosophize. On 30 December he wrote: “Didn’t work. Only take care not to get lost”. Next on 2 January he writes that the day before he suddenly had heard that he would go to Vienna with his commander (where he would then visit his family). In his philosophical diary Wittgenstein wrote nothing for almost two weeks during this time. So although Wittgenstein had apparently much time to philosophize at the end of 1914, for me there is nothing to philosophize about what he did. The only interesting thing to remark here is that when writing “not worked” Wittgenstein didn’t mean that he had nothing to do in his job as a soldier, but that he hadn’t worked on what would later become his Tractatus.
Dissatisfied with this result, I browsed a little bit in Wittgenstein’s philosophical diary. My eye was caught by this sentence: “Empirical reality is limited by the number of objects”, which he wrote down on 26 April 1916. But how do you count the number of objects? For what an object is, is in some sense arbitrary. Is it for this reason that in his Tractatus Wittgenstein changed it to “Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects”? (5.5561). But it doesn’t really solve the problem of countability. Still thinking about this statement, I saw a few lines down another striking statement in the philosophical diary, which Wittgenstein wrote on 6 May 1916: “At the basis of the whole view of the world of the moderns lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.” You find this sentence almost literally in the Tractatus, namely in 6.371. At first sight it seems quite obscure, but a few sentences later, Wittgenstein explains: 

“6.373 The world is independent of my will.
 6.374 Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not again will.” 

How relevant this is in view of the present situation in which the coronavirus rules the world! For what Wittgenstein maintains in these almost religious statements is: What happens in the world is completely independent of what we think of it and what we would like to happen. Whatever we think about natural phenomena and the way they come about, they just happen, despite our will or opinion. And if things happen the way we like, it’s mere chance. Translated to the present pandemic this means: Whatever the origin of the coronavirus is, as a natural phenomenon it follows its own way. Even if it would have a human origin, so even if it would have been made and spread by man on purpose (which I don’t believe), as a natural phenomenon it follows its own way by its own logics. But then we have no other choice, than to adapt ourselves and to follow the logics of nature in order to fight the virus. From that point of view keeping distance, lockdowns and vaccination are reasonable measures for they are based on the natural character of the phenomenon.
However, Wittgenstein didn’t say so. It’s my interpretation. His Tractatus and his later works, published or not published by himself, are abstract works. Nevertheless Wittgenstein wasn’t an ivory-tower thinker. During the First World War he was a soldier by choice; during the Second World War he was a nurse in an English hospital. In this period he also saved the capital of his family from the Nazis, although long before that date he had given away his part.
Be it as it may, my present reflections haven’t helped to answer the main question of this blog: How do famous philosophers meet New Year? Therefore, I want to end with another quote from the Tractatus, namely its last sentence:
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Happy New Year!

Sources
- Baum, Wilhelm, Wittgenstein im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die “Geheimen Tagebücher“ und die Erfahrungen an der Front 1914-1918). Klagenfurt-Wien: Kitab Verlag 2014.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

 to all my readers, wherever you live in the world! 

Framing

I have always been charmed by the work of the American sociologist Ervin Goffman, especially by his book Frame Analysis. I have devoted already two blogs to this book (see Sources below) and framing is also an important theme in my photography (see for example https://henkbijdeweg.nl/fotos/213265933_Vensters.html ). However, after I had read Nathalie Heinich’s La cadre-analyse d’Erving Goffman [Erving Goffman’s frame analysis], I thought that it would be a good idea to write another blog about it, even if this might mean that I would repeat something that I had written already before. It stresses how important framing is to my mind. In describing Goffman’s ideas I’ll mainly follow chapter I in Heinich’s book.
When you want to understand what Frame Analysis is about, you can best start reading the subtitle of the book, which says that it is An Essay on the Organization of Experience. This experience has two aspects: An experienced part of the activity that takes place (called “strip” by Goffman) and the way this activity is organized (“frame”). A strip is “any arbitrary slice or cut from the stream of ongoing activity” (p. 10), while a frame consists of the basic elements of a social situation that “are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events … and our subjective involvement in them” (10-11) In short, a frame is the way we experience what happens. Events and situations can be framed in different ways, but the point of departure is the basic frame or “primary frame” as Goffman calls it. “Such a [primary] framework is seen … as not depending on or harking back to some prior or ‘original’ interpretation”. (21) To give an example: I hear a bang and I see people running. I wonder what is happening. Is it an explosion? Is it a terrorist attack? Does it come from the exhaust pipe of a car? One of these possibilities forms the basic interpretation or primary frame of what is happening.
However, once we have a primary frame, an activity can be given a new interpretation that modifies the original interpretation. Goffman calls such a modifying frame a “key”: “The set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else. The process of transcription can be called keying.” (43-44) For example: The bang is not a real terrorist bomb attack, but it is a scene in a stage play. Goffman distinguishes five fundamental ways a primary frame can be keyed:
- make-believe
- contests (such as in sport)
-ceremonials
- technical redoings (like exercises, experiments, role playing)
- regroundings (for example in charity work: a princess serves as a salesperson at a salvage sale).
|All these ways of keying an activity have in common that they are “straight”: They appear in the same way to all participants and onlookers. However, besides keying there is also another way to transform a primary frame: fabrications. It is “the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on.” (83) Plots and conspiracies are of this kind and the individuals involved can be divided into “the operatives, fabricators, deceivers” and their co-workers on the one hand and “the dupes, marks, pigeons, suckers, butts, victims, gulls” on the other hand. Fabrications, unlike keyings are subject to a special kind of discrediting, for once discovered what is going on and seen as a deception, they collapse. Fabrications can be divided into benign fabrications and exploitive fabrications. Benign fabrications are such like playful deceit, experimental hoaxing (like psychological experiments: the subject isn’t aware of what is being tested), training hoaxes and a few more. Examples of exploitive fabrications are the plots and conspiracies just mentioned. Another way to subdivide fabrications is to distinguish between other-induced and self-imposed fabrications.
Once Goffman has introduced his concepts, his next step is to apply them. I think that most important in the analysis that follows in his Frame Analysis is the idea that frames can be layered: They can fit one into another like the well-known matryoshka dolls (“Russian dolls). In this way we can get a stratification of frames. An example from theatre is an opera that I have seen long ago in which the singers played that they were performing an opera. It’s a “trick” regularly used in stages plays. An example used by Goffman and taken from “real life” is the case of a company agent who is sent around incognito to see if service standards are being maintained.
Another interesting theme discussed by Goffman is the possibility to break the frame. But should I say more? I think that it’s clear from what I have said that applying the idea of frames is one of the most important ways to understand what is happening around us. It helps us also to find our way in what is happening. By applying frames, we constitute what we see and experience. Often frames are shared among individuals in the sense that they apply more or less the same frames to the same situations or events. If so all participants share an understanding of what is going on and what everyone is doing. If this is the case, frames help to understand ourselves and others. 

Sources
- Goffman. Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986 (my edition).
- Heinich, Nathalie, La cadre- analyse d’Erving Goffman. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020; 23-41.
My blogs:
- “Frame analysis”, dated 10 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/frame-analysis_73.html
- “Framing the mind”, dated 13 October, 2016, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2016/10/framing-mind.html

How I prophesied reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic

Actually, I could upload here an old blog that I have written about six years ago: my blog “All things have their season”. It was already the second blog with this title, but I mean the one about apples, dated the 26th October, 2014. For what has happened? Recently, when leafing through my book “Rondom Montaigne” (“About Montaigne”) and rereading old blogs I discovered that both in this blog and in my book – in chapter 9 – I had prophesied how people would react to the present Covid-19 pandemic! Of course, I didn’t forecast this pandemic but what I did forecast were the reactions to a natural disaster, and isn’t it so that the present pandemic is such a disaster? Now I could stop writing and simply paste here the blog just mentioned. Instead, I’ll write a summary of this blog with an explanation and comment. If you want to read the original blog, you can find it here: http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-things-have-their-season-2.html 

“All things have their season”, as Montaigne tells us in the 28th essay in Book II in his Essays. Montaigne sees there a strict connection between a certain stage of life and what you can do; not so much what you can do physically but what is reasonable to do in that stage of life, or what is right to be done. Montaigne gives us the example of Xenocrates who was still studying, when he was already very old. Montaigne comments by quoting Eudemonidas: “When will this man be wise, if he is yet learning?” For learning is something you do, when you are young, for what sense does it have to study when your life soon will come to an end? Although Montaigne admits that you can also study simply for pleasure, even when you are old. But in general it’s so that all things have their season.
Seasons like life rhythms are natural and you must adapt yourself to it, so Montaigne. Maybe this was true in antiquity and also in the days of Montaigne, but the times are changing and gradually the seasons of life disappear; at least to a high extent, for birth and death, being young or old, still exist and will ever exist. But let me explain the disappearance of the seasons with the help of the example of apples.
When I was young, say in the 1960s, all through the year there was a kind of seasonal rhythm of apple varieties that you could buy in a supermarket or in a greengrocer’s shop, especially in autumn, but in fact the rhythm existed the whole year round. In autumn, when the apples were harvested, a certain apple variety was for sale only during a short time and then the next variety came in the shop. In winter they sold apples that could be stored for a longer time. Of course, there was some overlap, but in fact one variety followed after another. There was a rhythm in apple varieties that followed the seasons. Discovery, Alkmene, Benoni and so on, one after another, till the long season of Elstar apples begun. One year later the cycle started anew. All apples had their season. Today, however, this seasonal rhythm in apple varieties has almost disappeared and the whole year round you find the same apple varieties in the supermarket and greengrocer’s shops, independent of the season you are in. That’s pleasant, for so you can always buy the apples that you find tasty.
This example illustrates how we have become less and less dependent on nature. Today, we can make and adapt nature as we like. At least, that’s what we think, but when a calamity happens, and then I mean a real calamity, a natural calamity, like a nuclear disaster or an earthquake, do we know then what to do? Of course, there are bodies, organisations, the government, relief workers, regulations, and so on that will handle the physical side of the calamity but are you mentally prepared? Less and less we are able to deal with unexpected occurrences. We tend to think that what is, will exist eternally. And if then something happens that we didn’t expect, even if it is natural, we blame others for it and aim our frustrations at them. 

That’s more or less what I prophetically wrote six years ago in my blog “ ‘All things have their season’ (2)”. Indeed, prophetically, for it is what we see now: A pandemic has broken out and many people mentally panic, because they no longer know how to deal with an event like this. Government and virologists are blamed for the consequences of the pandemic, they are accused of evil intentions and they are even physically threatened. Others think that a conspiracy is the cause of the pandemic: The coronavirus has been spread on purpose, they say, for what reason ever. Even Bill Gates is mentioned as one of the perpetrators. However, the simplest explanation of the present calamity is reasoned away by (too) many people, since they can no longer mentally grasp it: They cannot understand that the Covid-19 pandemic is a natural phenomenon and that it has a natural origin. Therefore, it is important that seasonal rhythms and other dependencies on nature keep existing, for they show us that we still are a part of nature, anyhow and despite all scientific progress. So they prepare us mentally for calamities. “All things have their season”, as Montaigne taught us. 

Sources
- Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, Book II, chapter XXVIII, “All things have their season”, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm#2HCH0049
- Weg, Henk bij de, “ ‘All things have their season’ (2)”, on http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2014/10/all-things-have-their-season-2.html
- Weg, Henk bij de, Rondom Montaigne. The Hague: Uitgeverij U2pi, 2019.

Who I am

In my blogs, I have often written about the problem of personal identity. Most times I have written about it from the perspective of analytical philosophy. In this branch of philosophy the main question then is what makes a person an entity of its own. This leads to questions like “What makes me the same person as the person I was five, ten, twenty, fifty … years ago?”; “What happens with me when I am teletransported to another planet?”; “What happens to a person when her brain is swapped with the brain of another person?” This problem of identity is especially a continuity problem: The problem which makes me as I am now continuous with the person who I was in the past, and what separates me from other persons. However, there are different perspectives to discuss the question of a person’s identity, and I think that the continuity problem is the last one most people – non-philosophers – will think of when we bring up the problem of personal identity. When we ask questions about a person’s identity, I think that most people want to know who they are in relation to others. I think that most people are not interested in continuity problems and the like but want to know what characterizes a person and what makes him or her different from other persons as an individual. Therefore, it is not surprising that Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, discusses the question from just this perspective. Because I find her view on personal identity quite interesting and important, I want to give it some attention in this blog.
Before doing so, I want to present first an important aspect of the social theory of George Herbert Mead, namely his famous distinction between Self, I and Me. The “Self”, which Mead also calls the “generalized other”, comprises, briefly, the attitudes of the group or community a person belongs to toward him or her and toward one another in what they do. The “I” is the response of the person to the attitudes of the others leading to a self-image, and the “Me” consists of the attitudes of others toward the person as seen by him or herself. We can also say that the “I” is the person for himself as a subject and the “Me” is the self for this person as an object.
What does this mean for Heinrich’s view on a person’s identity? In most identity discussions a distinction is made between the person him or herself on the one hand and society (“the others”) on the other hand. In this way we can distinguish a “personal identity”, i.e. the way a person sees him or herself (the subjective view on identity) and a “social identity”, which is the way society or others see you (the objective view on identity). For instance, for you your painting is not more than daubing on a canvass, but for others you are a real artist. Some views on a person’s identity take one of these two conceptions as the “real” identity a person has (unidimensional views), other views stress the relationship between the personal identity and the social identity (bidimensional views).
What is lacking in such conceptions, so Heinich, is Mead’s idea that the relationship person-society has three aspects. It involves not only an I versus an Other (Self) but also a Me, so an I as seen by the other according to the I. It was Erving Goffman, she says, who has applied Mead’s idea to the conception of identity: Goffman replaces the bidimensional view on identity in which “personal identity” opposes “social identity” – referring to the I and the Self respectively – by a tridimensional view by adding a third category: the “identity for yourself”. While the social identity still refers to the Self, now the personal identity refers to the Me and the new category of identity for yourself refers to the I. In short:
- social identity: the way others see you (1)
- identity for yourself: the way you see yourself (2)
- personal identity: the way you think that others see you (3).
In this view on a person’s identity all three aspects put forward by Mead are important. Such a tridimensional view has big advantages on the ordinary unidimensional and bidimensional views, so Heinich. By adding (3) and by taking account of all three aspects together, one can see how the social identity reflects itself in the perception one has of oneself. Moreover, for the person him or herself there is a gap between the objective social view of who s/he is and his/her subjective self-image and now this gap is filled by the third category of personal identity. Besides, if one attaches the labels “designation”, “autoperception” and “presentation” to the types of identity just given (in the order mentioned), than we have strong instruments to analyse how people present themselves in society and how they try to manipulate others by their presentation, and to see how a person’s autoperception develops influenced by the designation of the identity by others and the other way round.

Sources
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972; esp. ch. 5.
- Heinich, Nathalie, Ce que n’est pas l’identité. Paris: Gallimard, 2018; esp ch. 5.
- Mead, George Herbert, Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974 (1934).