I am delighted to see this issue of Existential Comics
doesn’t assume, as so often by others, that Wittgenstein’s quip about the lion suggests
that we would not be able to interpret the lion’s speech.
This line complements the last line in the Tractatus as the quotations all the
participants on that fine 1980-90s radio 4 show Stop the Week knew. (And it really was an excellent programme, an excellent use of 30 minutes of the radio. I recall –
dimly albeit – a good 15 minute discussion of the worth of fish knives, the
vague recollection of which sometimes makes me wonder now whether I ought to
buy some. My partner’s family deployed them with due solemnity for fish fingers
and I think that they were right so to do.) But typically the assumption is
made that it is a kind of exception to a broadly Davidsonian view. The lion
really is speaking, is in the space of reasons, but is somehow inaccessible to
interpretation.
It seems, from the context, that Wittgenstein’s comment is
more subtle and helps to flag some of the range of meaning that attaches to ‘understand’.
It is worth noting what comes before the famous line. We can fail to
understand, not because we cannot grasp their meanings, (whether or not for
Mulhallian reasons one wants to rejects the word ‘interpretation’ for this), but
because we cannot find our feet with them.
We also say of some people that they are transparent to
us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can
be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange
country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a
mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And
not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find
our feet with them.
“I cannot know what is going on in him” is above all a picture.
It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons
for the conviction. They are riot readily accessible.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him. [Wittgenstein
1953: 223]
Well I hope that this is what the comic strip is flagging
rather than the fact that the lion is actually Frege.
((I have no doubts, given the immediately preceding comment by Wittgenstein. There is a nice, heavy Travisian atmosphere to the scene.))
((I have no doubts, given the immediately preceding comment by Wittgenstein. There is a nice, heavy Travisian atmosphere to the scene.))
