Wittgenstein and Freud

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud have a lot in common. Both were Viennese gurus, who inspired groups of disciples to preach their world-changing revelations to a sceptical world. Both were forthright in putting forward their views, but believed they were offering therapy for which the recipient would ultimately be grateful. Both reached the high point of their fame in the mid-twentieth century, but have since had their achievements questioned. Both left Vienna, and spent the last years of their lives in England.

But the two men had very different life stories. Freud was born 33 years before Wittgenstein, but lived longer than him with their lives overlapping for 50 years. Freud was born in a small provincial town, while Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Freud was the son of a struggling wool merchant and faced significant financial difficulties at the start of his career. Wittgenstein was the son of one of the wealthiest men in Austria, grew up in a palace and had no financial worries. Indeed, at the age of thirty he gave away all of his inherited wealth. Freud married, had six children and had a wide circle of friends. Wittgenstein lived a solitary life, never marrying and only having a handful of close friends.

Their different life stories reflect very different personalities. Freud was a conquistador, committed to turning a hierarchical, anti-semitic world upside down. Wittgenstein was a wanderer, searching for order in an unstable world. Freud enjoyed good food, alcohol and cigars, while Wittgenstein had little interest in bodily comforts. Although Wittgenstein claimed to be a follower of Freud, their intellectual differences are more obvious than their similarities. Freud saw himself first and foremost as a scientist, whereas Wittgenstein believed scientific thinking was overvalued in modern culture. Freud attacked religion, seeing it as a prop for the weak, whereas the young Wittgenstein embraced a Tolstoyan form of Christianity and was always respectful of religion. Both had a deep interest in language, but Freud took little pleasure in music, whereas music was central to Wittgenstein’s life.

Freud and Wittgenstein had complex relationships to rationalism. Freud was in some ways more of a rationalist than Wittgenstein. He believed in science, saw religion as irrational and disliked music because he didn’t like being moved by something without knowing what was affecting him. But his notion of the Unconscious was a devastating attack on the idea that we are essentially rational beings. Similarly, as a scientist, Freud believed in progress, but, like Wittgenstein, he certainly didn’t believe that the trajectory of history was always upward. In fact, both men had sombre, even tragic views of the human condition, although both seem to have ended their lives reasonably at peace with the world and with themselves.

So, what should we make of these two very different intellectual figures? Some, perhaps, many, would deny that they were geniuses – just forceful personalities who were highly fashionable but have now been recognised as overrated. Personally, I think both have a huge amount to offer.  I think Wittgenstein was absolutely right to claim that traditional philosophy is an unhelpful mixture of conceptual confusion and substantive claims and to argue that, as philosophers, we would do better to focus on getting a clear view of our concepts. This won’t tell us how we should understand the world or how we should lead our lives (things philosophers have traditionally tried to do), but it will enable us to see more clearly the substantive issues on which we as individuals can take a position. 

I also think that Freud deserves to be recognised for opening up a new way of thinking about ourselves that can help us better understand why we do what they do. I don’t see Freud as a scientist who discovered a new entity (the Unconscious), but I think it is misguided to claim that the only truths are scientific truths or that all genuine explanations must be causal in nature. Freud’s development of the concept of the unconscious provided a new vocabulary for thinking about the complexities of the human soul. It would be tempting to say that he created a new language game. A better way of putting it would be to say that he highlighted certain aspects of our existing language games (in particular, the fact that we do not always treat an individual’s sincere expressions of their inner world as correct) and showed how models of the mind (based on these aspects of our language games) can be used to explore (and better understand) the complexities of human behaviour and the limits to our self-knowledge. In my view, Freud’s achievement was huge – even if, like Christopher Columbus, his own description of his achievement was incorrect.

Bringing Wittgenstein and Freud together in this way is controversial, given that many see both as outdated and having little to offer. It would take at least a book to try to justify the position sketched out above, but I think this could be done. In this blog, I have been testing out some ideas and looking at psychoanalytic claims from a Wittgensteinian perspective. There is a lot of thinking and a lot of work to be done, so all feedback (supportive or critical) is very welcome.