Zeit und Geschichte Time and History - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein ...

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Conservativism or Progressivism - Is It a Yes/No Question? Wittgenstein’s and Rorty’s Pragmatic Account of Historical Progress - István Danka
writings had previously fixed the structure of reality
(including our present and the future); historical existence
is, since Plato, only an illusion. One of the main reasons
why we supposed for ages that history has an end of it
was that some of our beliefs are proven to be illusory, and
since we had a strong rationalist belief (unproven not to be
illusory) that reality is reasonable, we needed to think that
passing time is a process which has an end in which we
can reach the eternal structure of ‘real’ reality.
That static framework which teleologically determines
contingencies had therefore been self-explained by
RTK which was precisely the central target of
Wittgenstein’s pragmatic arguments. The idea of
progression is, as it is known, a belief strongly accused by
rationalist suppositions of the Enlightenment (Bloor 2004).
Most importantly, a rationalist wants to feel herself in
safety just alone (i.e., without God and/or society). Since
she knows that the frame of her knowledge does not
exactly fit into the structure of the world, she hopes that in
the future the former will converge to the latter. From this
hope, moreover, she misimplies that the only possible way
of thinking about reality is a view that our knowledge in fact
converges to reality. It is not the problem with progressivist
accounts that they were false; the problem is that they are
claimed to be the only possible explanations by
rationalists. If we give up, however, RTK, we don’t need,
and have no more reasons for, the supposition that history
should have any direction fixed once and for all.
Rorty is of course aware of a possible description of
his view as a Neoromantic attack against scientism of the
Enlightenment, with an unreasonable nostalgy toward
progressivism of it. He sees but his hope for a better future
as a central thesis of his pragmatism (esp. Rorty 1994).
This hope, after leaving behind realization of RTK as a
purpose, is directed to a social goal in terms of solidarity
(as opposed to an epistemic goal in terms of knowledge).
If the above-mentioned are right, Wittgenstein’s
main reason against seeing history as a progress was its
exclusive strategy, strongly affected by RTK. If it is allowed
that there is more than just one way of describing the world
which can be (almost) equally applicable for some purposes,
it is evident that we lose not only the
reasonableness of RTK, but also the reasonableness of
the supposition that history has a certain goal fixed once
and for all.
Seeing the distinctive features of a conservative
reading of Wittgenstein, Rorty’s progressivism is,
surprisingly, in an accordance with it point by point. A
conservative Wittgensteinian thinks that concrete is prior to
abstract, history to reason, practice to theory, norms or
customs to rules, and life to thought (Bloor 2004, 113). I
hope it is clearly unwanted to argue that these are exactly
the features which are attributed by Rorty to good
Deweyan comrades. If this is so, maybe the abovementioned
are features which does not necessarily commit
us either to conservativism or to progressivism, since they
are just some marks of rejection of a fixed goal of history,
i.e., rejection of the view that the world has come into
existence just for the purpose that we could have got a
complete account of it via RTK.
As I mentioned, Wittgenstein did not directly argue
for or against the idea of progression but regarded it as a
hypothesis which can be either followed or abandoned
without proofs (i.e., blindly). Hypotheses of progression
(e.g. Evolution Theories) are parts of our natural history
(Schulte 2004, 183-7) and natural history is a practical
explanatory strategy which should be followed (or
abandoned) without any proofs - since proofs are
distinctively theoretical explanatory strategies (Garver
2004, 141). Natural history is rather like a Genrebild than a
story of series of events with temporal extension - but also
without an explicit rejection of it. This also means that
explaining the relations among particular events does not
have a unique historical or temporal structure. What can
be seen from the past can only be seen as it appears now
for us; what appears to be thus and so from this aspect,
can also be seen from another aspect otherwise. Hence,
the only way to reflect history of past time and of future as
well, is to understand how it is involved in the present.
Reading Wittgenstein in such a way, it is more
obvious why he did not work out any complete history of
philosophy - since it can only be found in the practice of
the present language games. In this case, the only
significant difference between conservativism and
progressivism is, nevertheless, just the emphasis: a
conservativist says that knowledge is practically-socially
inherited rather than written and proven once and for all,
whereas a progressivist says that knowledge practicallysocially
will be created rather than written and proven once
and for all. From a perspective of a complex account of
where our knowledge comes from, it seems that there is
no contradiction: for coming into existence, an inherited
piece of knowledge has to be created socially (since it is
not fixed once and for all) and for being kept up, a created
piece of knowledge has to be inherited socially (for the
very same reason).
A conservative account of the present in terms of
the past seems therefore not to contradict a progressivist
account of the present in the terms of the future. On the
contrary, they do have a similar explanatory structure in
which our present stage must be seen as a contingent
episode in the flow of time. On the other hand, a historical
account in terms of the present, either a progressivist one
of the past, or a conservative one of the future, is
essentially mistaken since it is accused with the bad
presupposition of RTK that what is written now can be
seen as eternally true. It is but evidently a supposition of
RTK that the best way to understand how the world is, is to
apply overgeneralized theories to issues for which they are
unapplicable. A pragmatic, i.e., practice-oriented instrumentalist
presupposition can dissolve the yes/no question
if we apply explanatory strategies to the appriopriate
explanatory targets and we will remain conservatives with
respect to the socially inherited knowledge of the past, and
will become progressivists with respect to a hope that
social problems which actually exist can be once solved by
our social knowledge which is inherited and is going to be
hopefully improved, or, on the grounds of inherited
knowledge, is going to be hopefully extended, in the future.