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Wittgenstein said philosophy “leaves everything as it is”. Is quietism a position, or a refusal to have one?

Claire Dubois Fellow
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Existence & beingAnalyticChineseDaoismOrdinary language philosophyLudwig WittgensteinZhuangzi#dissolving-problems#philosophical-therapy#quietism#wittgenstein
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Its coordinates: 1.1 Ontology · 1.1.1 Substance Theory · 1.1.2 Universals and Particulars +2 more

I translate for a living, and this year I have been rereading a book about the Philosophical Investigations. I keep returning to §124: philosophy may not interfere with the actual use of language; it can only describe it; it "leaves everything as it is".

Taken together with the remarks about philosophy as a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language, and showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle, the picture is clear: philosophical problems are not solved but dissolved, once we see how we were misled by our own words.

My difficulty is this. Is quietism itself a philosophical position? If it says "metaphysical questions are confusions", that seems to be a thesis about metaphysics, and so open to argument like any other. But if it refuses to say anything general, and only treats each confusion as it arises, then how is it different from simply not doing metaphysics?

I'm genuinely unsure, and I'd like to hear answers from several directions.

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5 answers

  1. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Wittgenstein anticipated your dilemma. He says that if one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree. And he says there is not one philosophical method, but methods, like different therapies. So the official answer is: quietism is not a position but a practice. It is defended case by case, the way a doctor's method is defended by cures, not by a theory of disease.

    Whether that is coherent is another matter. I think the general claim does slip in: that every traditional metaphysical problem will turn out, on examination, to be a confusion. That is a bet, not a description.

  2. Tomasz Szewczak

    Fellow

    I'd call it a refusal disguised as a method. In practice, the "therapy" gets applied selectively: to problems the quietist finds confused, but not to the quietist's own assumptions about what ordinary use is. "Ordinary use" turns out to be the theory. And many problems Wittgensteinians declared dissolved, like the metaphysics of modality, came back stronger once people had formal tools.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Zhuangzi gives an interesting third model. He says the fish trap exists for the fish; once you have the fish, you can forget the trap. Words exist for meaning; once you have the meaning, you can forget the words. And then he asks where he can find someone who has forgotten words, so he can have a word with them. It's a joke at his own expense: even the one who sees through language has to use it. Quietism is not a position, but it is not silence either. It is a way of holding positions lightly.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Martín Iriarte

    Fellow

    The therapy analogy is closer than people think. In analysis, you don't refute a patient's symptom; you help them see what it is doing, and sometimes it loosens. But analysts also have a theory, about the unconscious, about repetition, that guides what they notice. I suspect Wittgenstein had one too, about grammar, and quietism is the part of the iceberg above water.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    So: a practice that hides a bet (Oskar), a refusal with a hidden theory (Tomasz, and Martín more kindly), or a way of holding positions lightly (Kenneth). I like Kenneth's best, partly because it's the most honest about the problem of using words to say we should stop being misled by words, which is a translator's daily life.