Wittgenstein: Is Understanding Possible?

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Asiatic Lions (Panthera leo persica), male, Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Borivali, Mumbai: photo by supersujit, 2008

I.286. But isn't it absurd to say of a body that it has pain?-------And why does one feel an absurdity in that? In what sense is it true that my hand does not feel pain, but I in my hand?

What sort of issue is: Is it the body that feels pain?---How is it to be decided? What makes it possible to say that it is not the body?---Well, something like this: If someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face.

Lion (Panthera leo), West Midlands Safari Park: photo by Robek, 2006

I. 300. It is -- we should like to say -- not merely the picture of the behaviour that plays a part in the language-game with the words "he is in pain", but also the picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but also that of the pain.---It is a misunderstanding to say "The picture of pain enters into the language-game with the word 'pain'." The image of pain is not a picture and this image is not replaceable in the language-game by anything that we should call a picture.---The image of pain certainly enters into the language-game in a sense; only not as a picture.

I.301. An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.

Lion (Panthera leo), Ngorongoro Crater: photo by Rob Qld, 2007

I.303. "I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I am."---Yes, one can make the decision to say "I believe he is in pain" instead of "he is in pain". But that is all.------What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one.

Just try -- in a real case -- to doubt someone else's fear or pain.

Lioness (Panthera leo): photo by Mila Zinkova, 2006

I.350. "But if I suppose that someone has a pain, then I am simply supposing that he has just the same as I have so often had."...

I.351. Yet we go on wanting to say: "Pain is pain -- whether he has it, or I have it; and however I come to know whether he has a pain or not."---I might agree.---And when you ask me "Don't you know, then, what I mean when I say that the stove is in pain?---I can reply: These words lead me to have all sorts of images; but their usefulness goes no further.

Lion (Panthera leo), Tanzania: photo by John Storr, 1997

II.xi. ...What is internal is hidden from us."---The future is hidden from us. But does the astronomer think like this when he calculates an eclipse of the sun?

If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.

We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language, we do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.

"I cannot know what goes on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. They are not readily accessible.

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Lion (Panthera leo), Olomouc Zoo: photo by SonNy cZ, 2007

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations, c. 1945-1949