life’.47 According to Robinson’s account, metatheory is concerned with questions of justification and explanation (traditional epistemological concerns) whereas Wittgenstein’s opposing conception of theory understood theorizing as ‘an ongoing description of the components and topography of reality from various positions within’.48 Robinson calls this immanent theorizing49 and he places special emphasis on perception and on mobility (particularly walking). For example, he says that ‘for theorists following Wittgenstein’s path to immanent theorizing, what is valued above all else is mobility’50 and he claims that ‘there is a palpable therapeutic effect in seeing that theorizing is cast more accurately as a primitive activity involving seeing and walking’.51 Immanent theorizing, according to Robinson, involves being mobile and seeing things (reality, practices) close up and describing them52 whereas epic theory (metatheory) involves distancing oneself from things and trying to achieve a ‘God’s eye view’ of them. Robinson says that ‘the further we stand from people, the less we care what happens to them’ and that ‘Wittgenstein expresses this distance as at the heart of “the darkness of our time”’.53 He claims that Wittgenstein abandons ‘the pretense of a God’s eye perspective’54 and that ‘both Wittgenstein and, more famously, Beckett, work from a street-level where no God’s-eye point of view is possible, though we may find ourselves waiting for it’.55
Robinson claims that Wittgenstein’s ‘therapeutic turn’ ‘promises an erosion of the boundary separating philosophy from other activities’56 and ‘therapy was conceived as a matter of returning philosophers to the pre-linguistic primordial and then guiding them through mazes of contingent, opaque but permeable and overlapping language-games to give a sense of language’s capaciousness and insurpassability […] akin to the speech therapies a patient rendered aphasic as a result of a stroke might undergo’.57 The outcome of Wittgensteinian therapy, according to Robinson, is that the patient remembers ‘what it is to be human’.58
While I agree with Robinson that Wittgenstein would likely have recognized problems with epic or transcendental political theory (this will be discussed in my chapter on justice) I have several disagreements with Robinson’s interpretation of Wittgenstein and with Robinson’s suggestions about the direction political theory should take. In the first place I think that Robinson misunderstands Wittgenstein’s remarks on theory. Looking carefully at Wittgenstein’s remarks on theory and philosophy it becomes clear that Wittgenstein was not just criticizing metatheory and nor was he proposing or suggesting a new way of theorizing himself. In §109 of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein says that ‘we may not advance any kind of theory’. There is no mention of ‘metatheory’ or ‘epic theory’ at all anywhere in the Philosophical Investigations. However, that does not yet demonstrate that Robinson is mistaken. It could be that what Wittgenstein was objecting to when he objected to theory was what Robinson calls ‘metatheory’. That, I think, is Robinson’s position. So, in order to see if he is right we should look at what Wittgenstein has to say.
In §109 of the Investigations, when Wittgenstein is discussing the nature of philosophy and rejecting the idea that it is theoretical, it seems that (contra Robinson) he does not have in mind political theories which present themselves as offering a ‘view from nowhere’ (the ‘metatheory’ that Robinson opposes). What Wittgenstein does in §109 is to contrast philosophy with empirical theories which involve formulating hypotheses, putting them to the test, making observations, and gathering empirical evidence. He says that ‘there must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations’ and that philosophical problems ‘are, of course, not empirical problems’. Robinson is right that Wittgenstein’s conception of what he is doing involves description (and not explanation) but he is mistaken about what Wittgenstein says he is describing. Wittgenstein does not suggest that we should walk and see things and describe them from close-up. As we have just seen, the activity he is engages in is not empirical at all. Wittgenstein is not suggesting that we should describe the things that we see. Philosophy’s task is not to describe empirical reality but to describe the uses of words, to describe grammar. Philosophical problems, Wittgenstein says, ‘are solved through an insight into the workings of our language’.59 Whereas Robinson presents the Wittgensteinian position as being one where the philosopher-theorist is engaged in ‘an ongoing description of the components and topography of reality from various positions within’,60 Wittgenstein himself distinguishes ‘the thing’ from ‘the mode of representation’.61 His concern is not with looking at objects and describing their qualities (e.g. the ball in front of me is red and squidgy). Wittgensteinian description is description of the mode of representation rather than of things. The descriptions are of ‘the workings of our language’,62 of norms of representation, rather than empirical descriptions of reality. I take this difference over the nature of the descriptions involved in Wittgenstein’s philosophy to be a significant difference between Robinson’s account and my own. Philosophy involves arranging grammatical rules, in order to achieve perspicuity about philosophical problems, not the kind of empirical descriptions we might find in science.
That is not to say that Wittgenstein did not also find metatheory, as Robinson describes it, objectionable. It is just to say that he did not mean to replace it with any kind of theory. Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks in On Certainty and elsewhere suggest that he not only objected to the idea that we could have a God’s-eye view but he also objected to the idea that philosophy was in any way theoretical.
But perhaps something like Robinson’s position could still be rescued. Wittgenstein’s remarks do suggest that certain ways of going about doing political theory are misguided and perhaps we could say that Wittgenstein’s remarks do open up a space for a new way of theorizing political life, as Robinson suggests – as long as we do not suggest that this is the activity that Wittgenstein was engaged in when doing philosophy. In coming to understand political situations we do undoubtedly engage in activities that do not just involve describing grammar. We do gather evidence, we do make observations, and we do present and evaluate opinions. Those are activities unlike what Wittgenstein was doing when he was doing philosophy but they are important activities in understanding our political situation (they also involve more than just walking, seeing things from close-up, and describing them – Robinson’s ‘immanent theorizing’).
Given what I have said about Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy above I think it is clear that I also disagree with Robinson’s portrayal of Wittgenstein’s ‘therapeutic turn’. Robinson’s account of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy was supposed to erode boundaries between philosophizing and other activities. However, Wittgenstein was clear throughout his career that philosophy was a different sort of activity to disciplines which seek knowledge of the world around us. In particular he always clearly distinguished philosophy from science. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he remarks that ‘philosophy is not one of the natural sciences’
