What would satisfy us?

Imagine we have a complete science of the world that’s given us an account of the nature of reality, the nature of the mind and our engagement with the world. It seems to me that philosophers would still want to ask questions. There’s a gap that science doesn’t close. There’s something that the philosopher’s after when science is finished. And the question is, what would count as a philosophical explanation?

Wittgenstein was puzzled by and haunted by that question. We know what scientific explanations are. We know that hunger to really understand and put ourselves in the right place to get a grip on what’s going on in cell biology, or the brain, or even the chemical structure of the foods that we eat. But what is a philosophical explanation, and what would satisfy us?

Wittgenstein worries that sometimes philosophers are trying to do a sort of über-science. It’s as though we want not just the physics, but something beyond the metaphysics; we’re looking for the essence or the structure of reality, or language, or mental life. Wittgenstein begins to doubt that such a quest will deliver anything useful, but he thinks we still do seek explanation.

How philosophical explanations differ

Explanations in philosophy are often not the giving of more information or an account of causal mechanism. Sometimes they’re just about seeing things in the right way, having an insight. It’s very interesting that when you look at Wittgenstein’s criticism of Freud – far from being the crude criticism that says Freud was dabbling in talk of unconscious states, and what could those possibly be – Wittgenstein criticises Freud by saying he’s too scientific. Freud gives us a causal explanation when what we really want is a conceptual explanation.

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When someone wakes from a dream, and there’s an image that’s troubling them and haunting them, Freud tries to find an episode in their past which will be the cause of this image or this event happening in a dream. But Wittgenstein says, that’s not what we want. We want to understand: why is this image or event so numinous? Why does it last with us all day? In fact, what we really want to know, as ordinary human beings, is how the dream ends. There’s a desire for an understanding that mere causal explanation won’t give us. This is why Wittgenstein is convinced that there’s a certain kind of explanation that’s very different from scientific explanation.

No explanation needed

Philosophical explanations for Wittgenstein are very different from scientific explanations. Sometimes they’re just about seeing things as they really are instead of looking for some underlying story or cause. But sometimes there’s no need for explanation. In Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein asks, to a man who has lost in love, what will help him – an explanation? To which the answer is obviously no, not an explanation. He must just bear things as they are. He has to take them as he finds them. So sometimes we do away with explanation.

You can think in modern terms of something similar. Just before people have an epileptic seizure, they sometimes feel an imminent sense of revelation and aura, as though there’s going to be a divine revelation made available to them. And they want to have that explained. But we sometimes have to tell them that there’s no revelation. This is just a neuronal storm when the two hemispheres are swapping electrical signals at great speed. So sometimes we have to talk people out of wanting an explanation – there’s nothing there.

A good example of Wittgenstein reminding us not to look for explanations where none is needed, but to look for better descriptions of how things really are, is in the conversation he had with his pupil, Elizabeth Anscombe, who became his literary executor. Anscombe said to Wittgenstein, ‘You can see why people thought that the sun went round the Earth.’ And Wittgenstein says, ‘Really? Why is that?’ Anscombe replies, ‘Well, it looks that way.’ But Wittgenstein says, ‘And how would it look if the Earth went round the sun?’ The answer, of course, is exactly the same. So this is an example of how you describe things in the right way and there’s no longer a problem, and we don’t have to seek special explanations.

Understanding the human mind

We can see the problems that Wittgenstein raises for us, and the new way in which he raises them, when we look at problems that are still persistent in philosophy today, like the problem of consciousness. Often, the problem of consciousness is posed as the question: how can the grey matter inside my skull give rise to these private conscious experiences, these memories, these images, these feelings that are just mine? How do these elusive and ephemeral things arise out of physical stuff?

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But Wittgenstein thinks you’ve already misdescribed what conscious experience or the conscious mind is like. If we thought of the feelings that I’m having when the brain is active as something that was private and personal to me, we wouldn’t be able to make sense of the phrase “he hides his feelings”. If feelings can be hidden, then there’s a way in which they’re not hidden. And Wittgenstein thought that we could see a person’s feelings and emotions in their face. We can see someone’s anger or their hurt. This is a way in which part of the conscious mind is on show, is expressed, in the body and in behaviour.

Bodily movement, bodily action, isn’t a surface or a cover behind which conscious experiences generated by the brain are going on in private. It’s when we see the mind not as a container, but as a set of activities, a set of things we do, that we see people’s conscious minds expressed all the time. So how can we know that someone else is conscious? How can we know that there’s a mind, and they’re not just a zombie or a robot? Wittgenstein would have thought that the problem of other minds was ridiculous. How do we know other people’s minds? Look at them, look at what they do and what they say. You see their mind at work in how they act and how they speak. Nothing is hidden from you.

Rethinking consciousness through modern neuroscience

There are things that Wittgenstein got wrong, and where modern neuroscience has given us reasons to revise some of his philosophical thinking. Wittgenstein says that a man could not be in pain and wonder whose pain it was. Pain seems to announce itself to the owner as “my pain”.

However, in the case of people who’ve suffered brain lesions or neural damage, left parietal damage, they can sometimes have a hand or an arm which they no longer recognise as their own. The patient will say to the doctor, ‘That’s not my arm.’ The doctor may ask, ‘Whose arm is it?’ And the patient might reply, ‘It’s your arm’, or ‘It’s my husband’s arm.’

Now, with some of those patients, if you then prick the skin with a pin, there is a pain. You can ask the patient, ‘Is there pain?’ They’ll say, ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it your pain?’ ‘No.’ ‘Whose pain is it?’ The patient may say they don’t know or that it’s the pain of whoever’s arm this is. So, the very idea that it seemed conceptually impossible for someone to wonder whose pain it was when they felt pain is now made possible, not by a special philosophical example, but by a real-life case of the strange pathologies that we find in modern neuroscience and neurology.

A fragile sense of self

What we’re finding out from neuroscience is that when everything’s functioning well, we imagine we have a unified consciousness. I feel my body, I see things around me, I’m conscious of my feelings and my thoughts and my mental states, and they all seem to take place in one sphere. They’re commingling and they’re part of the unified self.

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However, when some of the subsystems that orchestrate that unity break down, when certain connections are cut, you can have cases of people who no longer think that their limbs belong to them, or people who think they’re moving a limb when in fact the body’s not moving. Or you can have people who think the thoughts that are going through their head are not their thoughts; they’re being inserted into their minds by some outside force.

We realise that all of the parts that make our conscious lives available to us are just that – they’re parts, they’re subsystems – and usually they’re so beautifully orchestrated that they’re all in tune. It seems to be one single, unified, conscious mind. But when things go wrong, with brain trauma or with lesions, you can then induce states in patients where we see the fragmentation of the self, and self-knowledge is not possible. In fact, there’s a fragility to self-knowledge. There’s a breakdown in the notion of self.

Why aren’t we more fragmented?

What we’re able to see now, with the help of modern neuroscience and some of these tragic patient cases, is that the sense of self is actually just that. It’s a sense of self, and it depends on many systems: awareness of our body, awareness of our limbs, our senses providing the right information. But when any of that is damaged or broken, we can end up fragmented, and we can have different levels of consciousness, or parts of consciousness that are not speaking to other parts.

Then, the question is why isn’t it like that most of the time? In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks looks at these curious reports of patients, thinking how bizarre, how strange. Instead, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we are not more like that, given that we know there are all these subsystems that make it possible for us to have a continued conscious sense of self.

Applying Wittgenstein’s thinking today

Wittgenstein has told us to question everything and to try to see things as they are, rather than some tidied up and philosophically advantageous version of them. So we have to take his moral and his recommendations at his own word and apply it to some of his own thinking.

We’ve learned things from the surprises that neuroscience provides us with as to how the brain works, and how the systems that provide us with information about our self are organised, enabling us to look at new cases. Wittgenstein would have taken it as the right thing to do: to remind ourselves not to take anything for granted, but to try to see how things really are. That includes both the cases where these systems are working perfectly, where we have conscious minds that are unified and putting us in touch with ourselves and the world around us, but also the cases where things break down and that doesn’t happen. Then we see that things are more complicated than even Wittgenstein thought.

Discover more about

the nature of explanation and human consciousness

Wright, C., Smith, B. C., & Macdonald, C. (Eds.). (2000). Knowing Our Own Minds. Oxford University Press.

Smith, B. C. (2018). Consciousness: What Is It Like?. In G. D. Caruso (Ed.), Ted Honderich on Consciousness, Determinism, and Humanity (pp. 89–110). Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, B. C. (2014). What Does Metacognition Do For Us?. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(3), 727–735.

Wittgenstein and the nature of philosophical explanation