Parsing Wittgenstein using Heidegger

These are some thoughts on Wittgenstein and (pre-Kehre) Heidegger, on their approaches and how they might articulate a scenario's outcomes

Their approaches to language largely overlap, or at least their projects are broadly similar. Heidegger originally wanted to define the copula, the “is”, in Being and Time, where Wittgenstein wanted to find the general form of the proposition in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein later rejected that approach for the quietist one of Philosophical Investigations. However, Heidegger’s (B&T) approach overlaps with the later Wittgenstein too in that he chooses to analyze the copula, the “is”, by analyzing the entity (Dasein) which employs the copula in it’s everyday language and, going one step further, how Dasein might think about the copula, and think about itself thinking about thinking about the copula, etc. where Wittgenstein’s states that “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."

    They differ in that where Wittgenstein explicitly avoids attempts at formulating overall structure to the world of language, Heidegger finds many structures fundamental to Dasein. In particular, Dasein’s unavoidable prospect of death, and Dasein’s being embedded within a world - how it interacts with objects.

With objects in the world, Heidegger always prioritizes how those objects are experienced in everdayness - IE, in the immediate social, cultural, historical context of those objects. This is to him more primordial, for Dasein, than these objects as material entities; as in weighing this many kg, being made up of this many atoms, etc. (Heidegger originally studied Physics and Math while Wittgenstein originally studied Engineering - another parallel). Wittgenstein doesn’t prioritize or even articulate any “realm” be it social, historical, aesthetic, material, etc. outside of describing paradigms and neighborhoods of language. Because of this, I think Heidegger will require an extra step to describe the following situation's outcomes intuitively:

Let us say two ancient countries are at war - X and Y. This war is particularly brutal, citizens and civilians are considered fair targets. A man and his son are citizens of country X, and are farming in the countryside. The son is using a spade to dig while the father plants behind him. Suddenly, a soldier from country Y appears from the bushes, and runs at them. The father and son both notice, and the father yells “Quick! Pass me that spade!”

The situation could go one of four ways, but for the purpose of this discussion they will be grouped together in two’s since the ultimate outcome is irrelevant.

A/B: The son tosses the spade to his father, who then either bashes the soldier over the head with it or is still overpowered by the soldier.  C/D: The son is puzzled, and thinks “What’s he going to do with the shovel? Why would he want to dig a hole in a time like this?” as the soldier tackles his father and either overpowers him or is himself overpowered. 

My immediate reaction to this situation is that A&B are intuitively the most sensible, while C&D show a clear miscommunication or even a lack of awareness on part of the son.

In my view, Heidegger’s prioritizing of the historical and social realm for objects in the world allows for the outcomes of C&D to be more easily read as a possibility. The social and historical context of the shovel are that it is a tool that exists for digging. Many examples Heidegger provides in Being and Time, such as with a Hammer only existing in the context of nails, or a lectern only existing in the context of lecture hall (while a “savage” might use it to “hide from arrows”) - Heidegger doesn’t really allow for the contextual change as fluidly as Wittgenstein does.

A response to this would be “well, the social and historical context of the spade have shifted drastically in wartime, in outcomes C/D the boy is at fault for not understanding this shift. He considered the object independent of his current social circumstances - that of a farmer in a country at war. He thought of the object as present at hand - as detached from the current circumstances.” This is true, but still Wittgenstein on this point requires no clarification. The shovel was simply a large heavy object at hand by which the father wanted to defend himself - if anything is clarified at all.

An even more Heideggerian point would be "the son had no understanding of the immanence of death, of the imminent danger or even of anxiety in its fallen form - as fear." Also true, but this is also implied in Wittgenstein's approach, without even needing to be articulated. It is obvious that we are dealing with finite creatures with determinate lifespans, that is already implied in "imagine a form of life."

       Addendum: Caleb (@litmiddle) and Scott (@cafeviolenza) pointed out something I did not make clear. I do not think that Heidegger's framework makes it likely that the second scenario will occur, I simply think Heidegger's framework requires additional explication because of a fundamental difference between his approach and Wittgenstein's: Heidegger makes general ontological commitments, such as prioritizing the socio-historical realm of everydayness, where Wittgenstein makes none. This discussion shows a possible drawback of those commitments, however these commitments do enable Heidegger to discuss and even standardize phenomena that Wittgenstein wouldn't be able to articulate (temporality, being-towards-death, etc) - but that would be a discussion for "Parsing Heidegger Using Wittgenstein" and not "Parsing Wittgenstein using Heidegger."