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AUTHOR "John Shotter"

TITLE "Wittgenstein and his Philosophy of Beginnings and Beginnings and Beginnings"

SUBJECT "CAT, Volume 5:3"

KEYWORDS "practices, bodily reactions, new possibilities, representational-referential meaning, relationally-responsive meaning, dialogical"

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Wittgenstein and his Philosophy

of Beginnings and Beginnings
and Beginnings*

John Shotter

Abstract: Traditionally, compared with Wittgenstein, philosophers have begun their

investigation too late in the day. They have thought of people as being already self-
conscious, self-contained individuals, acting in a willful and intellectual manner.
Indeed, they have interpreted Wittgenstein’s latter philosophy, and his claim that the
meaning of a word is its use in the language, in this way: as if he were concerned with
language only as a tool, or as move in a language-game, with words said willfully and
intellectually. In this view, words have meaning only if they are systematically connect-
ed with states of affairs and/or states of mind. There is, however, another side to
Wittgenstein: a concern with the beginnings of language-games in spontaneous bodily
reactions, and with such reactions as being the prototypes for new ways of thinking
rather than as the results of ones already in existence. Here, meaning is understood in
terms of one’s direct and immediate responsiveness to one’s surroundings. This paper
explores this side of Wittgenstein’s thought, and relates it to practical methods for
beginning new practices, by noticing the presence within our old practices of such,
usually unnoticed spontaneous bodily reactions.

Key words: practices, bodily reactions, new possibilities, representational-referential

meaning, relationally-responsive meaning, dialogical.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not

able to express) is the background against which whatever I could
express has its meaning. (C&V: 16)

Concepts and Transformation 5:3, 2000. 349–362

© John Benjamins Publishing Company
350 JOHN SHOTTER

The revolutionary nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy has still not been fully
appreciated. We have still not been sufficiently struck by its very practical
nature, by its highlighting of our ordinary, everyday ways of making sense
and of understanding, and by the very different way of seeing our world and
ourselves in our world that it requires of us, as well as the new methods for
understanding he introduces to us. If we had been, as a group of specialists
in talk and its relations to its surrounding circumstances, we would not in all
likelihood be sitting here today in a conference room sitting listening to a lot
of decontextualized, closely reasoned talk. We would, I think, as co-practitio-
ners of one or another kind of social practice, be talking in the context of the
practice with other co-practitioners, drawing each other’s attention to
previously unnoticed aspects of it, thus to elaborate and refine its character.

Beginnings

Indeed, we would be focusing on a number of his remarks, and reminding

ourselves of where we should look if we want to see new possibilities, new
beginnings, for the refining, and changing (!), of our practices, occasions
when we make first-person declarations seemingly ‘out of the blue’:
The origin and the primitive form of the language-game is a reaction; [he
says (C&V 1980: 31)] only from this can more complicated forms develop.
Language — I want to say — is refinement, ‘in the beginning was the
deed’ (quoting Goethe).
The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may
also have been a word. (PI: 218).
But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? [he asks] Presumably
that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on
it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of
thought. (Z: No. 541)
When I say ‘I am in pain’… What I do is not, of course, to identity my
sensation by criteria: but to repeat an expression. But this is not the end of
the language-game: it is the beginning. (PI: Nos. 208, 209)
In all these remarks he is drawing our attention to a possible role in our lives
for our spontaneous bodily responses to events occurring around us or to us.
He is concerned not with the beginning of our current ways of understanding
 BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS 351

things, but with occurrences happening for yet another first time, events
unique to the unique circumstances of their occurrence.

The background: A precursor world

Illustrated here is one aspect of the new way of seeing our world to which
Wittgenstein introduces us. He draws our attention to what goes on in the
background to our lives, that there is a whole unnoticed world there which
is a precursor to the projects and consciousness of individuals, existing prior
to any thoughts, perceptions, actions, evaluations, or words of our own. In
fact, as he sees it, we owe our very being as the kind of individuals we are
to our embedding in a ceaseless stream of spontaneously responsive, living,
bodily activity going on between the others and the othernesses in our
surroundings, intrinsically relating us to them — I shall call it relationally-
responsive activity or joint action. “Words have meaning only in the stream
of life”, he claims (1990: No. 913). Not only do we owe what stable forms
of life we live between us to their continual reproduction in this stream of
spontaneously responsive activity, but also, strangely, whatever possibilities
that there are for their development and change. This background stream of
activity, this “precursor world”, is full of beginnings and beginnings and
beginnings.
In the past, in our studies of ourselves, we have focused on two great
realms of activity: (1) on behavior, on naturally happening events beyond our
agency to control, to be explained in terms of natural causes; and (2) on
action, on events for which we as individuals take responsibility, and explain
in terms of our reasons. Further, without going into the whole Cartesian
history of it, we have treated the world around us, not only as an external
world, but as a dead world of mechanisms, consisting in an assemblage of
externally related objective parts — parts which can exist as the entities they
are whether they are a part of a mechanism or not. This precursor world of
spontaneous, relationally-responsive, living, bodily activity, or joint action,
constitutes a third realm of internally related activities quite distinct from
these other two, a realm in which my activity only has the character it has in
relation to your’s, in relation to your response to it.
It is within this third realm of living, responsive activity, this background,
precursor world, that I think we should see Wittgenstein’s philosophy as
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352 JOHN SHOTTER

operating. When he remarks that “our attitude to what is alive and to what
is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (PI: No. 284), I
think we should take him very seriously. It is precisely the move from a
dead, mechanically connected world to a living world of responsive relations,
that is so crucial.

The dialogical

Recently, this third realm of spontaneously responsive activity has come to

the fore in the work of Voloshinov (1986, 1987) and Bakhtin (1981, 1984,
1986), and their emphasis on the dialogical, and dialogically-structured
relations — and I would like to construct an optic, so to speak, based on
their work, through which to see Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the light of the
dialogical. Let me do it simply by listing a number of crucial points about it:
• As soon as a second living human being responds to the activities of
a first, then what the second does cannot be accounted as wholly
their own activity — for the second acts in a way that is partly
‘shaped’ by the first (and the first’s acts were responsive also).
• Thus, what I do now is related to what, overall, we are doing — it is
internally related to it.
• Further, activity of this kind, between us, is not yours or mine but
ours … and this is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins
(‘joint action’ — Shotter 1984, 1993a, b).
• What we produce between us is a very complex mixture of not wholly
reconcilable influences — as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, at work within
it are both ‘centripetal’ tendencies (inward toward order and unity), as
well as ‘centrifugal’ ones (outward toward diversity and difference).
• Influences from vision, touch, hearing, taste, and smell, as well as our
body senses, our own and our responses to those of others, are all
mixed in together — any bodily activities to which others might
respond can become sign material.
• Joint action is in fact a complex mixture of many different kinds of
influences.
• This makes it very difficult for us to characterize its nature: it has
neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, a neither com-
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BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS 353

pletely stable nor an easily changed organization, a neither fully

subjective nor fully objective character.
• Indeed, we could say that it is its very lack of complete specificity,
its lack of any fully-determined human order, and thus its openness
to being specified or determined yet further by those involved in it,
in practice, that is its central defining feature.
Wittgenstein, of course, understood this, and remarked on the partially-this-
partially-that, always unfinished character of our socially created realities thus:
What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and
unfalsified, into words. (PI: 227)
Or:
Mere description is so difficult because one believes that one needs to fill
out the facts in order to understand them. … — Whereas I want to say:
Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you falsify it.) (RPR: I, No. 257).
No wonder that he said that
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and
feel at home there. (C&V: 65).

Awaking to wonder

In saying this, he is suggesting that previous philosophers have come on the

scene far too late and have looked in the wrong direction for the wrong
thing: currently, we have started as self-conscious, intellectual individuals,
trained in an academic tradition, and we look back in its terms to discover
supposedly already existing, but hidden sovereign centers of influence as
giving our activities their organization. Further, we are trained as children in
doing Euclidean geometry, and in developing a sense of what certainty in
formal reasoning — working in terms of ‘seeing’ that two formal patterns,
although located at different places at different times, are identical — feels
like. Hence, later, we find it ‘natural’ to accept Descartes’s (1968) appeal to
a self-given certainty and his resolve “to study no other science than that
which [he] could find within himself or else in the great book of the world”
(p. 35). Whereas, says Wittgenstein,
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354 JOHN SHOTTER

I want to regard man here as an animal… As a creature in a primitive

state. … Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination.
(OC: No. 475)
He wants to consider people’s activities in the background, precursor world,
prior to their individual willful and intellectual acts; and further, rather than
inward and backward, he wants to look outward and forward, toward how
we responsively create and establish between us, in our spontaneous and
non-deliberate acts, ways to ‘go on’, ways to act intellectually and willfully.
In moving to a new starting point, and in reorienting himself toward
influences which determine the structure of our expressions, internally, from
within the event and moment of their expression, he introduces us bit-by-bit
to an aspect of the world between us that, although it is our world, we have
not previously noticed it in this way before.
But in what way? How should we see it, if we are not just to see it as
merely the place within which we can live our lives? Not as something to be
explained, nor to be coped with, nor to be used as material in our projects,
but as something to wonder at, to celebrate, to be startled at or struck by, in
which to find new beginnings and beginnings and beginnings. We must be
ready to “awaken to wonder” (C&V: 5).

What is striking about the dialogical?

So what is striking about the dialogical, about our spontaneous relationally-

responsive activity? Well, one thing that is striking is that, because the
activity between us is not yours or mine but ours, what we jointly do is ‘out
there’ in public space. As Wittgenstein remarks: “Nothing is hidden” (PI:
No. 435). Thus, although I respond to another’s words as their words, to an
extent I must also respond to them as our words, as just as much theirs over
there as yours and mine here. In growing up among a crowd of others
already reacting and responding to each other in their practical, everyday
affairs in characteristic ways, like a professional tennis player condemned to
practice 24 hours a day, I too become practiced in anticipating their respons-
es to my expressions. And what I first do spontaneously in response to their
‘calls’ upon me, I later come to do deliberately, in response to my own
‘commands’ (Vygotsky 1986).
Indeed, although I am always putting to use public property in my
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BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS 355

speaking, to an extent I can put it to use in my own way: “Life’s infinite

variations are essential to our life. And so too even to the habitual character of
life” (C&V: 73). Thus, it is not in our repetition of linguistic forms, our use
of them according to an already established system of rules, that we give our
words their meaning, but in how we make varied use of an already existing,
public set of anticipated responses, to provoke to an extent novel responses
in those we address. We express our meaning, our own unique meaning, in
the use we make of our utterances in the circumstances of their use.
But in varying our use of words, juxtaposing them in our own combina-
tions, pausing, intoning, unfolding our speech in a responsive movement
characteristic in some way of our own unique circumstances, we cannot just
speak in any old way we please. Why not? Because — and here, perhaps,
we come upon an even more striking aspect of joint action or the dialogical
— it seems as if there is a third living agency at work in the space we create
between us in our interactions, beyond the other person immediately before
me, an agency that ‘calls upon’ us with demands of its own, a public
evaluator who ‘calls’ me to use to use our words as we use them. Bakhtin
(1986) calls it the “superaddressee” (p. 126) or “a superperson, a supra-I, the
witness and the judge of the whole human being” (p. 137). Wittgenstein too
remarks in a similar fashion that symbols “appear of their nature to be
unsatisfied”, and he goes on to remark about a proposition, that it “seems set
over against us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. — It seems to
demand that reality be compared with it.” (PG: No. 85, p. 132).

Obeying rules and obeying ‘calls upon us’

Given our rationalistic, Cartesian heritage, we find it easy to assimilate this

aspect of our shared activities — that we cannot just act in relation to the
others around us as we please — to the pre-existence of a set of shared rules,
existing in some hidden, transcendental, platonic world somewhere, to which
we must conform, if we want the others around us to follow us. We feel, like
Saussure (1959) and Chomsky after him, that because an individual speech
act “is willful and intellectual” (p. 14), it can only be properly meaningful
and understood by others if it is properly ordered. And to do this we must
explicitly or tacitly refer to an inner mental representation of a rule system
in structuring it.
356 JOHN SHOTTER

But as Wittgenstein remarks, we hardly ever speak in this self-conscious

way, with an inner, intellectual reference to a system of rules. Mostly, for us,
obeying a rule is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to
obey a rule … otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the
same thing as obeying it. (1953: No. 202)
Indeed, if we did, we would still have to interpret how to apply the general
rule in this particular situation, and where might we find the rules to do that?
In finding ourselves in a situation which seems to require a certain kind of
response from us, stating rules as such doesn’t seem much of a help — what
“I should have said”, says Wittgenstein, in response to such a circumstance,
is that “This is how it strikes me. When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I
obey the rule blindly” (1953: No. 219). A rule as a patterned form is no
help; it lies ‘dead on the page, so to speak. It is a matter of me responding
to a public situation with the kind of publicly anticipated responses into
which I have been trained.
What this shows, [he suggests] is that there is a way of grasping a rule
which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call
‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases (No. 201).
Most of what we do is not done by us deliberately and intellectually, by
reference to an already existing, framework of rules, external to our current
circumstances, but in spontaneous response to ‘calls’ upon us from within
our immediate circumstances.

Invisible ‘presences’

But how can this be? How can it seem that there is a third agency making
demands on us like this, when we are in interaction with our surroundings?
Because, as we saw above, the outcome of a second person’s spontaneous
responses to the expressions of a first can be attributed to neither of them;
what is produced is public property, it is theirs, or to put it another way, it
belongs to their world. Further, because it has been ‘shaped’ by their respon-
sive reactions, both to each other and to their surroundings, it shows intelli-
gence in its calls, in its requirements; it offers them ‘invitations’, so to
speak, as to their next possible steps. Indeed, it seems to show — to display
 BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS 357

or manifest in the unfolding contour of our expressions in response to it —

the presence of an invisible ‘field of force’, as it were. It is as if in moving
about in the dialogically-structured ‘spaces’ we create between us (in our
spontaneous, relationally-responsive activities) a shaped and vectored sense
of a dynamic landscape possible places to go next. Just as in driving down
a multi-lane interstate highway, we sense those cars here as near, and those
there as far away, this one as requiring us to move away as it is moving too
close, and we possess a synoptic sense of how at any one moment we are
placed, so we can come to such a synoptic grasp of how ‘to go on’ in a skillful
way in many other spheres of our lives. Similarly, after enough experience
in tramping the streets of our own home town, we can bring a synoptic sense
of its interconnected streets to mind, if someone stops us to ask directions.
Although invisible, its ‘presence’ is shown in the directions we give.
I emphasize the notion of ‘a presence’ here because, as we move away
from the idea that we can locate what we feel to be important about lan-
guage in a single (hidden) center of organization, in “one comprehensive
essence” (Z: No. 444), in a theory or in a set of rules, we must rethink the
whole nature of our intellectual inquiries into humanly organized wholes.
Rather than thinking that it is the discovery of a hidden system of rules,
say, that is needed to join the infinite possibilities of language into a finite
whole, another tack entirely is needed. We can come to a recognition of the
workings of our language as a whole, “not by giving new information”, he
notes, “but by arranging what we have always known” (PI: No. 109) — and
as we do this, we come to realize that there is no one single source of the
meaning of our words, but that “language is variously rooted; it has roots,
not a single root” (Z: No. 656). Indeed, as we move around ‘inside’ such an
arrangement of facts, as we move from fact to fact, a sense of a characteris-
tic something ‘there’ begins to make itself felt. We can create a way of
looking such that, as we look over each part of what is publicly ‘there’
before us, we can begin to see each part as owing its character and its
existence to its relations to all the other parts in constituting a unified whole.
We can look from one to the next with an anticipatory sense of their
connectedness, a sense of their grammar. Thus once this occurs, our actions
can become informed, not by an inner hidden center of influence, but by the
unseen presence of such a whole. It is of this kind of “clear view of the use
of our words”, that Wittgenstein speaks. He seeks “just that understanding
which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (PI: No. 122) — a whole ramifying,
358 JOHN SHOTTER

unending, unfinished system of links, connections, and relations, all known

from within our living involvement with them.

Poetry and drama

How might we do this? How might we achieve such a view, such an

understanding? Indeed, what does Wittgenstein do in his writings? It is here
that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is clearly a philosophy of beginnings, for he
wants to move us on to doing something quite new, but not just once for a
very first time, but again and again for a first time — if, that is, we want to
live more than just a life of mindless routines. Hence his claim that “…
philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition” (C&V:
24) — this involves acts of poeisis, of making, of creating, of bringing
something new into existence, rather than merely discovering already
existing things. For every instance of us being able to ‘go on’ in our
practical lives, is an act of this kind. And what poetic uses of language can
do, is by juxtaposing words in unusual combinations, cause us to pause, to
cease our current project for a moment, to put reality on ‘freeze-frame’, so
to speak, to look over the circumstances before us in a new light. At the
heart of his style of writing is the realization that the linear, static, ‘geo-
metrical’ structure of rational argumentation is quite inadequate to display,
to show, the dia-logical grammar of the primeval, chaotic world he has come
to inhabit. He needs a way to express, and to show in his expression, the
configurations of a mobile, open reality in which contradictory events are co-
implicated in a steady, ongoing, conversation between all concerned.
Central to his methods, then, is a concern with striking, moving, or
arresting moments, with first times, with beginnings — where, as we have
noted, the beginning of something new, a new language game, is in a
reaction. To refine or elaborate our forms of life, we must be struck by
something that has not struck us before. Where, being struck is, as he
remarks, a complex phenomenon. “Is being struck looking plus thinking?” he
asks. “No”, he replies, “many of our concepts cross here” (PI: 211).
With the Cartesian idea of a self-given certainty, in which we take it
that “a kind of seeing on our part… lies at the bottom of the language-game”
(OC: 204), we have sought general, foundational principles of a metaphysical
kind. But what Wittgenstein suggests to us, with his descent into the
 BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS 359

primeval chaos of the world that is a precursor to the world of our self-
conscious and intellectual projects, is that “it is our acting, that lies at the
bottom of the language-game” (OC: No. 204). In other words, the real
foundations of our inquiries can only be found in unique, fleeting, only once-
occurrent, dialogically-structured moments, in specific concrete circumstanc-
es, when in responsive contact with others around us. It is this which has not
struck us before.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of
their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something —
because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his
enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck
him. — And this means; we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most
striking and most powerful. (1953: No. 129)
But if he is in his writings to strike us in ways in which we not been struck
before, besides being poetic, Wittgenstein must also be dramatic. More than
merely touching on a ‘something’ and then moving on, as we do in our daily
routines, he must make the invisible currents, the dynamic structures in the
streaming of our lives, visible to us in some way. He must, as in an artistic
presentation or performance, dramatize them in some way. For what is done
in a dramatization, is to foreground and make sensibly graspable the shape
and character of a ‘presence’ a ‘something’ which, nonetheless, still remains
invisible — its presence as a unitary whole is portrayed, displayed, or shown
in one’s performance (just as Marcel Marceau ‘shows’ the existence of an
invisible wall in his hand movements as he struggles to find an opening in
it). If one is primordial enough (in one’s stance) and original enough (in
one’s words), then one can express the fleeting presence of new possibilities
merely glimpsed at in such a way that others cannot only glimpse them too,
but dwell on them long enough to make them items of public discussion and
attention. To do that, we have to describe them in memorable ways, in ways
that enables all of us to notice them too.

Concluding comments: The practicality of Wittgenstein’s philosophy

With this task in mind, let me end here with two relevant remarks. The first
is to do with our inital orientation to our tasks in philosophy:
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… the difficulty — I might say — is not that of finding the solution but
rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were
only a preliminary to it. … This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly
expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a
description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell
upon it, and do not try to get beyond it. (Z: No. 314).
Being able to stop the background flow, to look over what is before us, and
to see in it relational possibilities not seen before, is what is at stake here.
But the task is not to do this in general, for all time, but in this and that
particular circumstance: to see where one is now, and to see it afresh, with
wonder: “…the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at
now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me”
(C&V: 7).
This relates directly to my own practical interest in Wittgenstein’s
methods. Arlene Katz and I (Katz and Shotter 1997, 1997; Shotter and Katz
1997; Shotter and Gustavsen 1999) have been engaged in outlining how a
group of practitioners — such as doctors, workers, managers, stakeholders in
regional development, etc. — can, while in fact still engaged in their
practices, draw each other’s attention to new facets of each other’s activities,
which, once noted in public space, can become a shareable resource by all.
Indeed, once noticed, being ‘struck by’ such facets can by ‘carried over’, so
to speak, from one to another context of the practice. And, just as Wittgen-
stein (1969) remarks, “not only rules, but also examples are needed for
establishing a practice. Our practice leaves loop-holes, and the practice has
to speak for itself” (OC: 139), so we find that talk of ‘striking events’ helps
in establishing a new practice. The new practice ‘tells’ us of its own basic
nature in how such examples strike us: they establish a basic way of seeing,
a form of perception, for use in making sense of all the other “objects” we
encounter in the sphere of the practice.
This kind of small scale development in our practices was suggested by
Wittgenstein thus:
Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy
wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite)
longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips This inversion of our
conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp
the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be
sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it
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BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS 361

may well be done, if one means a cross-strip. — But in that case we never
get to the end of our work! — Of course not, for it has no end. (We want
to replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of
linguistic facts.) (Z: No. 447)
Here we are back, as philosophers, to being co-practitioners with a group of
others, and to a set of methods that may be of help to them in elaborating,
refining, and sustaining their practice from where they already are, at any
one moment, within it. Again, as always, the task is to move from what is
done spontaneously, and unthinkingly, to what might be done willfully and
intellectually. It is the removal of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of beginnings
and beginnings from the academy and its re-situating out in the everyday
world, that is the truly revolutionary move I am advocating here.

About the author

John Shotter is professor at the Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire,

New Hampshire, USA.

Note
* Paper given at the American University, Washington DC, March 26th 2000, at a
Wittgenstein Conference in honor of Rom Harré.

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