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1.M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in
 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections,
ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 93. Drury wasone of many students who found Wittgenstein’s anxiety contagious. He published a collection of essays entitled
The Danger of Words 
and discontinued his memoirs of  Wittgenstein because, according to Rhees, he thought“what he had written would do more harm than good” (ix).
PHILOSOPHICAL SELF-DENIAL
Wittgenstein and the Fear of Public Language
Rei Terada
“Throughout his life Wittgenstein was convinced that he could not make him-self understood”—so a friend recalls.
1
 Wittgenstein’s confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expec-tation that he would himself be unintelligible. Commentators who relate Witt-genstein’s psychology or biography to his philosophy often do so by setting themin opposition: by writing his polemic against private language, it is suggested, Wittgenstein fought off a personal susceptibility to myths of romantic solitude.But the assumption of antagonism may not be apt: hard-core belief in the pub-lic nature of language and a terror of isolation may well go together. The morepublic language is, the more awful failures of communication must be. When onecan no longer imagine that an utterance retains a meaning independent of itsreception, an ineffective utterance matters more. Without an ideal standard, weneed only to be generally, not completely, competent; but at the same time, weneed only to be generally 
in
competent to become linguistic pariahs. And for the very reason that one’s intelligibility is never perfect or finally destroyed, eachexchange counts. Wittgenstein’s life and work alike show that these incremen-
Common Knowledge
8:3Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
464
 
tal shifts in the account book of one’s intelligibility are large enough to perceive with the naked eye. While it is sometimes assumed that Wittgenstein’s general legacy is a viewof language and social learning that is comfortable, agreeable to imperfections, Wittgenstein’s writing and life themselves show that some amount of anxiety isbuilt into any public language model. Language games, like other games, are ago-nistic; they produce wins and losses as well as draws and exchanges. While thisfeature does not discredit Wittgenstein’s otherwise persuasive model of commu-nication, it does disturb our impression that the little conflicts of everyday com-munication are not worth worrying about. They are a recurring focus of Wittgen-stein’s own thought: he is a vivid anthropologist of normal enmity. And althoughhe insists that the pain of normal conflict is itself normal, he makes it clear howpersonally consequential such pain can be. For Wittgenstein, commitment to pub-lic language entailed living in an economy in which, he believed, he was one of those who would have most to pay. The secondary literature avoids dealing withthis issue by solving the problems posed by Wittgenstein’s works, then imagin-ing the world described by its solutions. I would therefore like to make the exper-iment of refraining, at times, from the explication of difficult passages in orderto bring forward the phenomenology of social exchanges in Wittgenstein’s life andtexts. His phobia of misunderstanding is worth considering, not so that we cancome up with a different idea of language that would avoid it, but so that we canunderstand what normal enmity is really like. It is both discomfiting and illumi-nating to observe the deeply unconventional and exceptional Wittgenstein justi-fying conventionalism and defending rules against exceptions. Wittgenstein’sintellectual consistency and his tendency toward self-denial conspire to sacrifice Wittgenstein’s own normality, in his view, to that of his philosophy. Although Wittgenstein talked a lot, and could be witty and eloquent, he fre-quently labored to explain himself. Norman Malcolm, an invaluable sourceregarding the phenomenology of Wittgenstein’s presence, describes his firstglimpse of this verbal travail:
 At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer aremark. He had extreme difficulty in expressing himself and his words were unintelligible to me. I whispered to my neighbor, “Who is that?”:he replied, “Wittgenstein.” I was astonished, because, for one reason, Ihad expected the famous author of the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
tobe an elderly man, whereas this man looked
 young 
—perhaps thirty-five.(His actual age was forty-nine.)I observed the respectful attention thateverybody in the room paid to him. After this unsuccessful beginning hedid not speak for a time but was obviously struggling with his thoughts.
   T  e  r  a   d  a
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        4        6       5
 
His look was concentrated, he made striking gestures with his hands asif he were discoursing. All the others maintained an intent and expec-tant silence. I witnessed this phenomenon countless times thereafter andcame to regard it as entirely natural.
2
 The scene has a strange quality, as if observed from outside a language, since weunderstand what is happening but not what is being said. Philosophically adeptas he is, Malcolm cannot decipher Wittgenstein’s meaning yet observes that theperformance gains everyone’s “respectful attention.” Malcolm thus finds him-self groping for an unknown standard of communicative success. The ratiobetween Wittgenstein’s inarticulateness and his deferential reception by otherspeaks when Wittgenstein actually falls mute. Although he only gestures “as if he were discoursing,” the audience still listens intently: they too act “as if he werediscoursing.” Malcolm must have felt like a man who does not yet know therules—“like a madman alone among people who were all normal” (as Wittgen-stein describes this kind of experience) “or a normal person alone among mad-men.”
3
 After “countless” such experiences and by way of a process that Malcolmdoes not explain—perhaps a process we can only undergo ourselves, by read-ing Wittgenstein and Malcolm—he becomes one of the natives who regardssuch scenes as “natural.” Before this naturalization, it is not clear who is mad, Wittgenstein or Malcolm: the speaker who appears to communicate withoutspeech or the listener who does not know the rules for what constitutes com-munication. Wittgenstein’s weirdly functional dysfunction thus points to a tenserelation between sense and perceived force—force less articulate than rhetoricalfinesse and more like social status, aggression, or “force of personality.” In thisinstance, sense seems to rely on the acceptance of force, but effective force is notidentifiable in advance either.
 Persuasion
is one of Wittgenstein’s favorite termsfor this kind of force. A madman, perhaps, is one who sees force where others seesignification, or who sees himself as signifying where others see a show of force. Wittgenstein’s nervousness about the fragility of making sense thus appearedin his tendency to detect coercion in unremarkable transactions. Such coercionis one concern of 
On Certainty,
as we will see. In Wittgenstein’s life, this con-cern (as O. K. Bouwsma says) inflected his inability to “bear idle talk and unin-telligibility gladly.”
4
“Idle talk and unintelligibility”—it may not be evident what
   C   O   M   M   O   N    K   N   O   W   L   E   D   G   E
        4        6        6
2.Norman Malcolm,
 Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 23.3.Ludwig Wittgenstein,
On Certainty
, trans. Denis Pauland G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe andGeorge Henrik Von Wright (New York: Harper and Row,1972), §420.4.O. K. Bouwsma,
Wittgenstein Conversations, 1949–1951
,ed. J. L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit (Indianapolis, IN:Hackett, 1986), 3; see also Malcolm,
 Ludwig Wittgenstein
,30–31, 50, 53; Fania Pascal, “Wittgenstein: A Personal Memoir,” and Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations,” inRhees,
 Ludwig Wittgenstein
, 42–43 and 114, respectively.His acquaintances often recall occasions when talk wastense or halting (Malcolm,
 Ludwig Wittgenstein
, 29, 40; John King, “Recollections of Wittgenstein,” in Rhees,
 Ludwig Wittgenstein
, 85).
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