The Language of Philosophy: Freud and Wittgenstein

In this chapter 2, Morris deals with differences of the two thinkers: Freud and Wittgenstein.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, made what is
perhaps the most remarkable breakthrough in the history of science: he was the scientific
discoverer of the unconscious, and he devised a method for bringing its contents, the thoughts
and wishes buried in it, into conscious view.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was the great philosopher of the 20th century who worked primarily
in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.

Wittgenstein and Freud’s view on use of language, “When Wittgenstein first learned
about psychoanalysis and read Freud he was filled with admiration and respect. He remarked
about Freud, Wittgenstein rejects psychoanalysis as a harmful mythology. From Wittgensteinian-
Freudian days to date many critics and writers have studied this controversy between these two
great thinkers and the facts behind that. From the viewpoints of both thinkers they cannot be
considered as philosophically satisfied.

Everyone agrees that Wittgensteinian criticisms on Freud are semiotic rather than
epistemological. Freud as well as Wittgenstein in their philosophy maintains a concept of
language misusing and that misuse derives from the language structure that can be called the
“dual system” of language.

In Freudian psychoanalysis this dual system consists of two forms of language; conscious
use of language and unconscious use of language. While the conscious use of language is a
logical and socially recognized form of language, the unconscious use of language is an illogical
and a personally expressed form or in other words a second dimension of language. For Freud,
surprisingly not the illogical form but the logical form was the illusionary and misleading
dimension of language.

The dual system in Wittgensteinian’s philosophy consists of the ordinary use of language
and the logical form of language. Though Freud says that the logical form is illusionary and
misleading from Wittgensteinian’s point of view, such characteristics belongs to the ordinary use
of language. The words in ordinary language are unprecised, confused and vague. He always
considered as his philosophical goal to fight against illogical and illusionary forms of language.

During Blue and Brown Books period Wittgenstein’s war against illogical use of
language takes a psychoanalytic form. He used illogical form of language as an illusion; a mental
illness.

As in Psychoanalysis to get cured, attitudes, behaviors and values should be changed. The
sickness of philosophical problems can get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of
life. As Wittgenstein commented: There can only be conscious thoughts and no unconscious
ones.

Wittgenstein shifted his position from psycholinguistics standard to a pragmatic standard.

Freudian concept of unconscious language is also a pragmatic analysis. Freud has raised a
number of arguments to defend his concept of unconscious language. One of the main arguments
was unconscious thoughts could not be studied by conventional scientific methods. He says,
“The logical laws of thoughts do not apply to the Id and this is true about all of the laws of
contradiction. Contrary impulses exist side by side without cancelling each out or diminishing
each other; at the most the coverage to form a comprise.”

It is very well seen from Freud’s argument is a paradox. By this paradox Freud explains the
dialectical basis of human mental life and knowledge related to that. Then, the unconscious can
be understood as a lack or absence of the quality of consciousness, knowledge.

Freud’s focus on the activity of the unconscious in human psychical life expanded the meaning
of the term from the description of a state of being to an actual mechanism within the human
psyche or mind. Freud was the first to take up serious disputation with the prevalent
understanding that “what is mental is conscious.” He believed that consciousness made up only
part of mental processes. Freud considered that : There are in the mind processes and purposes of
which one knows nothing at all for a long time, and even never known anything, those very
processes serving as the body, or stuff, of unconscious mental life, or simply, the unconscious.

According to Lazerowitz’s view metaphysical is an intellectual illusion serving unconsciousness

needs. It differs from, say, a religious belief or a dream in the peculiar mechanism employed, a
mechanism calculated to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of the intellectual. A metaphysical
statement is a deliberate, though unconsciousness proposal for linguistic innovation, being
unconsciousness, It does not take the overt form of a proposal but is concealed as an apparent
statement of fact. Like a dream, its represents wishes in a form of realities. This particular kind
of self-deception succeeds through the aesthetic appeal of linguistic jugglery that make would it
were so turn into so it is.