comparative & continental philosophy, Vol. 5 No.

1, May, 2013, 6780

Psyches Therapeia: Therapeutic

Dimensions in Heidegger and
Wittgenstein
Robert Eli Sanchez, JR.
The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA

Robert D. Stolorow
The Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, CA

This article explores the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to

illustrate the thesis that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of
investigative and therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of
philosophical concepts is to point toward a path of transformation rather
than to explain. For both, a first step on this path is the recognition of
constraining illusions, whether conventional or metaphysical. For both, such
illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, and for both, philosophical
investigation is a way of emancipating thought and life from illusion by
bringing what is already prereflectively understood into the light of thematic
explicitness. And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are
aspects of the context-embeddedness and finitude of human existence. It is
hoped that comparing the works of these two philosophers will unveil
features of each that are more difficult to discern in the works of either
considered in isolation.

keywords Heidegger, Wittgenstein, therapy, metaphysics, anxiety, scientism,

illusion, metaphilosophy

There is nothing which requires such gentle handling as an illusion.

Sren Kierkegaard

The idea that philosophy as questioning dialogue has a therapeutic aim and impact
goes back at least as far as the Socrates of Platos early dialogues (1997). It is in the
Apology that Socrates spells out most explicitly the therapeutic aim of his
philosophical method, the elenchus, as well as the unity of its investigative and
therapeutic aims. The divine purpose, he claims, of his practice of philosophy, of

W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1757063813Z.0000000006

68 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

his devotion to questioning, examining, and testing the men of Athens, is to

persuade them to care for the best possible state of [their] soul[s] (30b)to
provide psyches therapeia. In this article we seek to show that an analogous
therapeutic aim underlies the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein and, in a
certain sense, unifies them.
We are not the first to recommend comparing Heidegger and Wittgenstein, nor
the first to emphasize the therapeutic dimension of their respective philosophies.1
However, whereas the literature concerning the therapeutic dimension of their
philosophies tends to focus on the later Wittgenstein or the relevance of
Heideggers philosophy for psychoanalytic treatment, we argue that the
transformative aspect of Wittgensteins philosophy is a feature of the development
of his thought, from early to later, and that their philosophies are not just
instrumentally useful for psychotherapy, but potentially therapeutic in themselves.
We do not state here what we consider the most striking parallels between
Wittgenstein and Heidegger, except briefly in the conclusion, since doing so
threatens to undermine the parallel that we find most strikingnamely their
common unwillingness to summarize their thought in the form of philosophical
theses. Instead, we hope to help the reader see what we see, a method of
argumentation we attribute to both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and which
Wittgenstein recommends in his Lectures in 193033:
Reasons, [Wittgenstein] said, in Aesthetics, are of the nature of further descriptions:
e.g. You can make a person see what Brahms was driving at by showing him lots of
different pieces of Brahms, or by comparing him with a contemporary author; and all
that Aesthetics does is to draw your attention to a thing, to place things side by
side if, by giving reasons of this sort, you make another person see what you
see but it still does not appeal to him, that is an end of the discussion And he
said that the same sort of reasons [are] given, not only in Ethics, but also in
philosophy. (Wittgenstein 1993)1

Our plan, then, is to place Heidegger and Wittgenstein side by side to draw the
readers attention to our way of considering them together, and if we are
successful, to draw attention to the idea that the method of comparison, indirect
though it is, is more faithful to the therapeuticas opposed to speculativeaim of
their philosophies.

Heidegger
Like Socrates, Heidegger, in his 1929230 lecture course The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics (1995), emphasizes that philosophy is neither an absolute
science nor a worldview, but our own human activity (Heidegger 1995, 4).
Philosophy is philosophizing It points the direction in which we have to
search (Heidegger 1995, 4). More specifically, Philosophy is a homesickness,
an urge to be at home everywhere, which awakens us to such questions as

1
Although not always explicitly, Stanley Cavell (1984) emphasizes the therapeutic aspects of Wittgensteins later
philosophy. See also James Peterman (1992).
 PSYCHES THERAPEIA 69

what is world, finitude, individuation? (Heidegger 1995, 6), questions by which

we must have first been gripped (Heidegger 1995, 7). In philosophical
questioning, we ourselves, the questioners, are placed into question
(Heidegger 1995, 9). Thus philosophizing is turbulence, the turbulence into
which man is spun, so as in this way alone to comprehend Dasein [the human
being] without delusion (Heidegger 1995, emphasis added). In philosophizing,
man is driven out of [the delusions of] everydayness and driven back into the
ground of things (Heidegger 1995, 21).
The therapeutic-transformational aim of philosophizing to which Heidegger
alludes in the foregoing passages becomes even more explicit in his elucidations of
philosophical concepts as being formally indicative rather than being referential in
the usual sense.2 What philosophy deals with, he claims, only discloses itself at
all within and from out of a transformation of human Dasein (Heidegger 1995,
292). Philosophical concepts, accordingly, formally indicate the direction in which
such transformation is to occur; they point us toward how our understanding
must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings and properly
transform itself into the Da-sein [the there-being] in us They point into Dasein
itself (Heidegger 1995, 296). A philosophical concept only gives an indication, a
pointer to the fact that anyone who seeks to understand is called upon by this
conceptual context to undertake a transformation of themselves into their Dasein
(Heidegger 1995, 297). As is the case for Socrates, for Heidegger in these passages
philosophical questioning and therapeutic change, understanding and transforma-
tion of our existing, are one and the same process. For Socrates, this process entails
the exposure of inconsistencies in our moral beliefs; for Heidegger, it entails a
stripping away of everyday delusions and an unveiling of the concealed ground of
our Being. The investigative method through which Heidegger pursues such
transformation is spelled out in great detail in Being and Time (1962), and it is to
this that we now turn.
Being and Time is an investigation of the question of the meaning of Being
(Heidegger 1962, 19). By the Being (Sein) of beings (Seiendes) Heidegger denotes
their intelligibility or understandability as the beings they are for Dasein. The
being that Heidegger chooses to interrogate as to its Being is the human being
(Dasein), the same being that inquires about its Being. Heidegger explains this
choice by claiming famously: Dasein is distinguished by the fact that, in its
very Being, that Being is an issue for it And this means further that there is some
way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being (Heidegger 1962, 32).
Heidegger designates this human kind of Being, which comports itself under-
standingly toward that Being (Heidegger 1962, 78), by the term existence, and its
not-yet-thematized structures are called its existentiality or existentiales.
Importantly, because an unarticulated understanding of our Being is constitutive
of our kind of Being (existence), we humans can investigate our own kind of Being
by investigating our understanding (and lack of understanding) of that Being.
Accordingly, Heideggers investigative method is phenomenological, in that it is

2
Although not always explicitly, Stanley Cavell (1984) emphasizes the therapeutic aspects of Wittgensteins later
philosophy. See also James Peterman (1992).
70 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

aimed at illuminating the fundamental structures of our understanding of our

Being. Heideggers phenomenological method seeks to bring our unarticulated
understanding of how we are intelligible to ourselves into the light of thematic
explicitness.
This phenomenological act of bringing the structures of our Being into light is no
easy task, however, because, for the most part, our Being lies hidden (Heidegger
1962, 59) from us in our understanding of it. Both in our traditional metaphysical
and in our average everyday understanding of Being, our intelligibility to ourselves
can be covered up so extensively that it becomes forgotten (Heidegger 1962,
59). Most frequently and most dangerously, the covering up of Being may take the
form of disguising its basic structures. Thus, our Being, which is covered up and
disguised in our understanding of it, must be laid bare, unconcealed, by
means of interpretation of that understanding. Through interpretation, phenom-
enology penetrates to our Being, which is hidden within our understanding of it.
Because it relies on interpretation, Heideggers investigative method is a
hermeneutic phenomenologyone aimed at disclosing or unconcealing the basic
structures of our kind of Being, its existentiality, which lie hidden within our
understanding of it.
The two divisions of Being and Time can be grasped as two steps in this process
of unconcealing. Division I is devoted to unveiling the holistic structure of average
everyday existence, covered up by traditional metaphysics, especially Descartes
dualism (1986), which has been transformed by history into Western common
sense. Descartes metaphysics divided the finite world into two distinct basic
substancesres cogitans and res extensa, thinking substances (minds) with no
extension in space and extended substances (bodies and other material things) that
do not think. This metaphysical dualism concretized the possibility of a complete
separation between mind and world, between subject and objecta radical
decontextualization of both mind and world with respect to each another as they
are beheld in their bare thinghood. In his hermeneutic of Dasein, Heidegger (1962)
seeks interpretively to illumine the unity of our Being, split asunder by the
Cartesian bifurcation. Thus, what he calls the destruction of traditional
metaphysics is a clearing away of its concealments and disguises, in order to
unveil the primordial contextual whole that it has been covering up.
The unity of our Being and its context is formally indicated early in Division I, in
Heideggers designation of the human being as Dasein, to-be-there or to-be-
situated. This early appearing contextualization is then fleshed out in his
interpretation of the constitutive structure of our everyday existing as Being-in-
the-world (Heidegger 1962, 78). With the hyphens unifying the expression Being-
in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), Heidegger formally indicates that in his inter-
pretation of Dasein the traditional ontological gap between our Being and our
world is to be definitively closed and that, in their indissoluble unity, our Being and
our world always contextualize one another: The compound expression Being-
in-the-world indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a
unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole (Heidegger
1962, 78). When we understand ourselves unveiledly, we grasp ourselves as a rich
contextual whole, Being-in-the-world, in which our Being is saturated with the
 PSYCHES THERAPEIA 71

world in which we dwell, and the world we inhabit is drenched in human

meanings and significance. In our average everyday understanding of ourselves as
Being-in-the-world, however, a constitutive feature of our existence still remains
hidden, and in Division II Heidegger devotes himself to a second step in his
interpretive unconcealing of our existential structure.
Heideggers distinction between two basic modes of existenceauthentic
(owned) existing and inauthentic (unowned or disowned) existingprovides the
organizing structure of Being and Time. Division I is devoted primarily to an
elucidation of the inauthentic mode of Being-in-the-world, which, according to
Heidegger, dominates our average everyday understanding of our existence. Such
average everyday understanding, claims Heidegger, is characterized by what he
calls fallingthe unreflective adoption of the public interpretedness of the they
(das Man). The they is Heideggers term for the impersonal normative system
that governs what one understands and what one does in ones everyday
activity as a member of a society and an occupant of social roles. The they is a
normative authority external to ones own selfhood. Falling into identification
with the conventional interpretedness of the they is thus an inauthentic mode of
understanding existence, whereby Dasein, for the most part, is not itself.
In Division I, falling into the they is regarded as an essential existentiale
(Heidegger 1962, 168), an essential ontological structure of Dasein (Heidegger
1962, 224) that pertains to our inescapable embeddedness in a context of social
customs, practices, and normativity with which we identify. It is in this sense that
we are always already falling. In Division II, by contrast, falling is characterized
as a motivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight into the inauthentic illusions of the
they, in order to evade the anxiety inherent in authentic existing.
For Heidegger, authentic existing is grounded in nonevasively owned Being-
toward-death (Heidegger 1962, 279). One who exists authentically apprehends
death, not as a distant event that has not yet occurred or that happens to others (as
the idle talk governed by the they would have it), but as a distinctive
possibility (Heidegger 1962, 305) that is constitutive of his or her very existence
in its futurity and finitude, as his or her ownmost (Heidegger 1962, 307) and
uttermost (Heidegger 1962, 308) possibility, as a possibility that is both
certain and indefinite as to its when (Heidegger 1962, 310) and that
therefore always impends as a constant threat. Authentic existing is disclosed in
the mood of anxiety, in which conventional interpretedness loses its defensive
purpose and thus its significance, and one feels uncanny (unheimlich)that is,
no longer safely at home in an everyday world that now fails to evade Being-
toward-death.3
In Heideggers view, it is authentic Being-toward-death as our ownmost,
unsharable possibility (death is in every case mine [Heidegger 1962, 284]),
along with a readiness for the anxiety that discloses it, that radically individualizes
and singularizes us. Torn from the sheltering illusions of the they and

3
One of us (Stolorow 2007, 2011) has shown that Heideggers characterization of existential anxiety bears a
remarkable resemblance to the phenomenology of traumatized states and that emotional trauma plunges one into a
form of Being-toward-death.
72 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

understanding ourselves right under the eyes of Death (Heidegger 1962, 434),
we become able resolutely to seize ownership of and responsibility for our own
existence.
To summarize, in Being and Time the therapeutic process of Heideggers
philosophizing proceeds in two phases. In Division I, he clears away the isolating
illusions of traditional metaphysics and lays bare our everyday existing as a
contextual whole, a Being-in-the-world, governed by the matrix of conventional
interpretedness in which we are always already embedded. In Division II, he
unconceals the Being-toward-death that is covered up by this veil of conventional
interpretedness and that is constitutive of authentic or owned existing. In
understanding and helping us to understand the anxiety that discloses Being-
toward-death, he helps us to live in that anxiety and thereby open a path toward a
more authentic way of existing.

Wittgenstein
Like Socrates and Heidegger, Wittgenstein thought of philosophy primarily as a
human activity, not an absolute science. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he
says, Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity and Philosophy does
not result in philosophical propositions, but rather in the clarification of
propositions (Wittgenstein 2001b, 4.112, emphasis added). The aim of
philosophy, he suggests, is not reflected in the form of conclusions or results; it
is expressed in philosophical clarity. If philosophy is successful, we do not learn
something new about ourselves or the world, but come to see the world aright
(6.54). And in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reiterates that the
aim of philosophy is complete clarity, adding that the philosophical problems
should completely disappear (Wittgenstein 2001a, 1133, emphasis in the
original).
For Wittgenstein, the term clarity is not equivalent to transparency, as
though the main difficulty of philosophy were a matter of saying what one means
in clearer terms. Rather, Wittgenstein sought the clarity of resolution, the kind of
clearing away that we attributed to Heidegger above. The solution to the
problems of philosophy, then, is structurally similar to the solution to the problems
of life: it is seen in the vanishing of the problem. And, again, this is not solely a
matter of becoming a better writer, so to speak: as Wittgenstein says, Is not this
the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of
life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that
sense? (TLP 6.521; emphasis added)
What these remarks illustrate, in part, is that for Wittgenstein the solution to the
problems of philosophy and life are both liberating. Philosophy has the potential
to relieve the constraining, and sometimes paralyzing, sense that something is
missing, unfamiliar, or just not right. In his own case, Wittgenstein thought
philosophy could alleviateget rid ofwhat he called his Sorge, as he
explained in a letter to his teacher and confidant Bertrand Russell:
Whenever I have time I now read Jamess Varieties of Religious Experience. This
book does me a lot of good. I dont mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not
 PSYCHES THERAPEIA 73

sure that it does not improve me a little in the way in which I would like to improve
very much: namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which
Goethe used the word in the Second Part of Faust). (Quoted in McGuinness 1988, 129)

What exactly Wittgenstein meant by Sorge, we can only speculate.4 Whats

important here is that Wittgenstein thought that William Jamess Varieties of
Religious Experience could assist him in his effort to remove something
constraining and that the result was a matter of improving spiritually.
One obstacle to interpreting Wittgensteins philosophy as therapeutic or
transformative is that Wittgenstein says almost nothing about the problems of
life or therapy, and he certainly doesnt specify what he means by these terms.5
Nor is he typically thought of as a moral philosopher.6 However, though the
problems of moral philosophy and its therapeutic aims are not the subject of
Wittgensteins philosophy, they nevertheless inform how Wittgenstein philoso-
phizes. So we believe that this obstacle might be overcome if we zoom out enough
to discern from the development of his thought that, as with Socrates and
Heidegger, understanding what Wittgenstein believed is tantamount to under-
standing his struggle for existential clarity. In what follows, we discuss three
stages of Wittgensteins philosophical development in order to draw attention to
the therapeutic point of his philosophy.
The first stage of the development of Wittgensteins thought, as we characterize
it here, is represented in the Tractatus, whose fundamental idea is that the logical
constants are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic
of facts (TLP 4.0312). Logical propositions such as p v :p are not meaningful,
as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell had believed. They are tautologies which
say nothing about the world (TLP 6.11). That is, although p might represent
some fact about the world (e.g., that it is raining), :p the opposite fact, the
proposition p v :p does not represent anything. It is merely a possible but
meaningless combination of signs permitted by the logical structure of language
what Wittgenstein calls an extreme case (TLP 4.466).
By calling this his fundamental idea, Wittgenstein suggests that the fundamental
aim of the Tractatus is to resolve the semantic issues that plagued Freges and
Russells effort to reduce mathematics to logic (the project known as logicism).
Wittgensteins solution, however, was not the type of solution either Frege or
Russell had hoped for. Wittgenstein did not study the foundations of mathematics
or logic in order to present a theory which solved Russells paradox, for example.
Rather, he offered a critique of language (TLP 4.0031) to show that if the logic
of language is clarified fully, well see that the aim of logicism is fundamentally
misguided and that its problems simply disappear. Consider Wittgensteins word
choice. About Russells own theoretical solution to the paradox, the theory of

4
The reference to Faust suggests that Wittgenstein was referring to the kind of worry that is particular and a response
to anxiety generated by an awareness of human finitude (i.e. the kind of metaphysical brooding or ruminating that
attempts to evade existential anxiety connected to transience, decay, vulnerability, limitedness, uncertainty, etc.).
5
He mentions the problems of life and therapy in passing (TLP 6.522) and (PI 1133), respectively, but only in passing.
6
A new wave of commentators have begun to challenge this view, arguing that there is, in fact, a significant moral
dimension of Wittgensteins thought. For an overview of this line of interpretation, which is now called The New
Wittgenstein, see (Crary and Read 2000, especially the "Introduction").
74 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

types, Wittgenstein says, The theory of classes is completely superfluous in

mathematics (TLP 6.031; emphasis added).7 And about the paradox itself, he
says, as with a wave of the hand, That disposes of Russells paradox (TLP 3.333;
emphasis added).
In saying that logical propositions dont represent anything in the world, that
they are senseless [sinnlos], and that the attempts to validate logicism or justify
the laws of inference are superfluous, Wittgenstein rejects out of hand the view
that logic is a science of maximally general truths, a fundamental tenet of Frege
and Russells universalist conception of logic.8 On Wittgensteins view, the
universality of logic can be accounted for by showing that it is necessary for the
possibility of language and thought. That is, what a critique of language shows is
that logic does not add anything to (our understanding of) language, thought, or
the world, but characterizes what they must share in common if representation is
possible at all. So, what the Tractatus aims to show is that the problems of logic
and, more generally, the view that meta- or mathematical logic promises to teach
us something new about language, thought, and the worldarise from a
misunderstanding of the nature of logic, not from a missing puzzle piece. Put
another way, by clarifying the nature of logic and language, Wittgenstein thought
that he had caused Freges and Russells problems simply to disappear.
Although Wittgenstein abandons the claim that logic is a science, he continues
to speak of it in the Tractatus as maximally general. Logic does not tell us anything
substantive about the world, but it is essential to the possibility of representing
anything, or as Wittgenstein says, it is the essence of the world:
A particular mode of signifying may be unimportant but it is always important that it
is a possible mode of signifying. And that is generally so in philosophy: again and again
the individual case turns out to be unimportant, but the possibility of each individual
case discloses something about the essence of the world. (TLP 3.3421; emphasis in the
original)

And it is precisely the lingering craving for generality, the view that the particular
case is unimportant, which provides the target of Wittgensteins criticism in the
second stage of his development, as it is represented in The Blue and Brown Books
(1958).
If the first stage of development in Wittgensteins thought can be characterized
as a rejection of logicism, specifically a rejection of the view that logic is a science,
the second stage can be characterized as a rejection of scientism. In The Blue Book,
Wittgenstein says, for example:
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly
tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real
source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say
here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything.
Philosophy really is purely descriptive. (Wittgenstein 1958, 18)

7
Similarly, Wittgenstein says, Laws of inference, which Russell and Frege thought justified ordinary inferences,
have no sense and would be superfluous (TLP 5.132). Emphasis has been added in all three remarks.
8
For a helpful introduction to the universalist conception of logic, see Goldfarb (2010).
 PSYCHES THERAPEIA 75

That is, by focusing on the logic of our language in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had
reduced language to the possibility of representation, and he thought that the
clarification of propositions demonstrated that logic explains the possibility of
representation. And it was this need to reduce and explain the possibility of
representation or language that Wittgenstein sought to alleviate.9
It is wrong to say, however, that the older Wittgenstein rejected his earlier
view of language. In The Blue Book he says, Whenever we make up ideal
languages it is not in order to replace our ordinary language by them; but just to
remove some trouble caused in someones mind by thinking that he has got hold of
the exact use of a common word (Wittgenstein 1958, 28), a statement which is
reminiscent of his earlier view that all the propositions of our everyday language,
just as they stand, are in perfect logical order (TLP 5.5563). So, if there is a
criticism of his earlier view of language implicit in the claim that philosophy has no
business trying to reduce or explain, it is not that the Tractatus had made up an
ideal language, but that Wittgenstein did not clarify (or fully understand) the
purpose of making up ideal languages and perhaps that he had suggested that there
is only one ideal language.
Notice how Wittgenstein describes the purpose of constructing ideal languages
in The Blue Book. It is not to teach us something about language or the world, but
to remove some trouble caused in someones mind. And he adds, speaking of his
preoccupation with the philosophy of mind, I have been trying in all this to
remove the temptation to think that there must be what is called a mental process
of thinking independent of the process of expressing a thought (Wittgenstein
1958, 41). What is striking here is that Wittgenstein characterizes a certain view in
the philosophy of mind as a kind of temptation. Consider also: Now we are
tempted to imagine this calculus as a permanent background of every sentence
(Wittgenstein 1958, 42); What causes most trouble in philosophy is that we are
tempted to describe the use of important odd-job words (Wittgenstein 1958,
44); There is a temptation for me to say that only my own experience is real
(Wittgenstein 1958, 46); One can defend common sense against the attacks of
philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to
attack common sense (Wittgenstein 1958, 58259). In describing the puzzles,
problems, and methods of philosophy as temptations, Wittgenstein is suggesting
not only that they are obstructive but also that the solutions to the problems of
philosophy test what we are willing to doand, importantly, willing not to do
not what we do or dont know.
One important difference between the early and middle Wittgenstein, then, is his
growing insistence that [t]he thing to do in such cases is always to look how the
words in question are actually used in our language (Wittgenstein 1958, 56;
emphasis in the original). That is, as Wittgensteins thought developed, he
turned his attention away from language (singular) or ideal languages and
toward the use of particular words, which accrue significance in what he dubbed

9
We do not want to suggest that Wittgensteins aim in the Tractatus wasnt to alleviate the need to reduce and explain
the possibility of representation. Rather, we are merely claiming that Wittgenstein was more explicit about this aim in
The Blue Book.
76 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

language-games or systems of signs to which a sign or word belongs

(Wittgenstein 1958, 5). So, if Wittgenstein had thought that the temptations of
logic and metaphysics arose from a misunderstanding of the logic of our language,
he came to believe that they arose in particular from failing to recognize the
multiplicity of systems in which words are used and gain significance. In ordinary
language we speak of colors (one system), measurements (another system), pain
behavior, expectations, commands, wishes, and so on. And we do so as part of
ordinary activities: coloring, building, looking for sympathy, discouraging, learning.
In Wittgensteins new vocabulary, the temptation of metaphysics is the desire to
subsume language-games under a single game or system and thus to not look at
how words are actually used. However, as there is nothing metaphysical
underlying the correct use of a word, there is nothing metaphysical to keep us
from inventing a new game which we can call metaphysics. In other words, by
asking us to look at how language is actually used, and by describing the problems
of philosophy as temptations, Wittgenstein does not rule out the possibility of
metaphysics. (And, since metaphysicians as a matter of fact use language as they
do, he cant or shouldnt.) What he does say, however, is that certain uses of
language are capable of creating a muddle that is felt as a problem
(Wittgenstein 1958, 6), suggesting that the problem is artificial and our own.
So, one way we generate philosophical problems is by failing to recognize the
multiplicity of language-games and instead insisting on a single all-encompassing
game. For instance, we problematize familiar words or concepts, such red or
freedom, by rendering them unfamiliar or uncanny, as we do when we try to
determine their meaning outside the games in which they accrue significance. We
speak of political freedom, or of free-falling bodies, or of finally being free, or even
of having free will, but we do so in rich contexts that are grounded in familiar and
important activities. But when we speak of freedom per se and try to determine
what all our uses of freedom have in common, we either ignore the particular
activities and contexts that give the word or concept meaning in the first place, in
which case the word or concept ceases to do any work at all and our language
begins to spin idly,10 or we put ourselves in the impossible position of trying to
summarize the infinitude of actual and possible activities and contexts. In either
case, the metaphysician invents a game that, so to speak, is impossible to win, and
unless the new activity (metaphysics) generates new significance on its own, a use
particular to that game, and unless that new significance and activity are
important, they will remain mere temptations.
In the Philosophical Investigations, which represents the third stage in the
development of his thought, Wittgenstein deepens his campaign against scientism
by responding to a potential objection to his early use of language-games:
For someone might object against me: You take the easy way out! You talk about all
sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game,

10
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that it is perfectly possible to look for order(s) in language as a
way of reforming language for a particular purpose and in order to prevent misunderstandings in practice. But
these are not the cases we have to do with [in philosophy]. The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like
an engine idling, not when it is doing work (PI 1132).
 PSYCHES THERAPEIA 77

and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them
into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the
investigation that once gave you yourself the greatest headache, the part about the
general form of propositions and of language. (PI 165; emphasis in the original)

Although the author of The Blue Book believed that he was in the process of
alleviating mental cramps (Wittgenstein 1958, 1, 59) caused by a certain view of
language, Wittgenstein came to see that speaking of language-games as systems
of signs still suggested the possibility of an all-encompassing system, order, or
essence of language, one which tempts us to reduce and explain.
In response to this objection, Wittgenstein introduced the notion of family
resemblances to capture the idea that what language-games have in common
cannot be captured in the form of necessary and sufficient conditions, just as we
wouldnt (because we cant) say what it is that makes us confident that everyone in
the photograph is a member of the same family. To be sure, everyone in the
photograph may actually exhibit some discernable resemblance to someone else in
the picture: three share a smile or have the same distinctive nose or perhaps all the
men are unusually tall. But there is no set of features that all and only members of
the family share; and none of the features which a subset of the family do share
determines criteria for belonging to a family. Similarly, on Wittgensteins later
view, it is a mistake to look for essential characteristics that apply to all language-
games, some one thing that connects the language of political life to that of
building; the language of coloring to that of comforting; the language of doubting
to that of war; and so on.
So, if the aim in The Blue Book was to reject scientism in philosophy, the aim of
the Investigations was, in part, to reject all forms of essentialism. That is,
Wittgenstein had come to believe that it is not only the craving for generality or the
method of science that leads a philosopher into darkness, but also, and more
perniciously, the feeling that we had to penetrate phenomena (PI 190). Again,
whats problematic about the metaphysicians temptation is not that one cant
imagine an ideal language or a system of signs, but that one feels the need to
determine or penetrate the essence of things. It is the feeling that ordinary language
and participating in a multiplicity of related activities is somehow inadequate to
the task of understanding or knowing, or the feeling that something is hidden
beneath everyday understanding.
The most influential essentialist was Plato. And perhaps the most famous
expression of his essentialism occurs in the Euthyphro, a dialogue in which
Euthyphro offers to teach Socrates many things of which the majority has no
knowledge (Euthyphro 6b). Eager to learn as always, Socrates encourages
Euthyphro to define piety but makes it clear that he is not looking for examples:
Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions
but the form itself that makes all pious actions pious, for you agreed that all impious
actions are impious and all pious actions pious through one form, or dont you
remember? (Euthyphro 6d)

The trouble with examples, as the passage suggests, is not that we dont have
enough of them, but that they are the wrong kind of thing. Even if we had every
78 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

example of piety before us, we still wouldnt know what piety is because we
wouldnt know how to decide whether a new person or action was pious or not.
Examples, in other words, are not explanatory; they do not tell us what makes
all and only pious things pious.
For Plato, the essence of pietythat which applies to all and only pious things
and which explains what makes something piousis other-worldly. But it need
not be, for we can also attribute essentialism to Aristotle, who located the essence
or form of a thing in the physical world. Essentialism, then, is simply a name for
the meta-philosophical position that attempts to explain meaning, the possibility
of knowledge, the nature of causality, the shape of things, etc., in terms of an
underlying (and hidden) metaphysical account of essences. It considers philoso-
phical puzzles the consequence of incomplete understanding, as though their
solutions required knowing something morenamely, the essence of thingsand
it considers the job of philosophy as a kind of excavating.
To say that Wittgenstein was an anti-essentialist, for us, is to say that the aim of
his later philosophy was to revive the method of examples, to show that there is
nothing hidden, and that the solution to our philosophical problems consists in
realizing that nothing needs digging up. But Wittgenstein was not insensitive to the
power of the temptation to uncover something mysterious and hidden. He says
that the problems of philosophy have the character of depth, that they are deep
disquietudes (PI 1111), which compel us to search for something beneath or
beyond actual language-use. The challenge of philosophy as therapy, then, is not
simply to dismiss ones attraction to metaphysics, but to expose it as a temptation,
to diagnose the origin of ones deep disquietudes. We have to, in Sren
Kierkegaards language, take ones illusion as good money, lest we set the
philosophers will in opposition and deepen his insistence that the source of his
disquietude is a genuine intellectual problem.11
Like Heidegger, Wittgenstein thought of philosophy both as a departure from
ordinary language and existence, and as the effort to find ones way home. The
temptation to philosophize, in other words, indicates a kind of homesickness. We
dont need explanatory accounts that unify or summarize language or life; we need
methods for marking wrong turnings that cause us to feel that we do need such
accounts. Wittgenstein says:
[Language] is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we
watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance
where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turning, etc.
etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong
turnings so as to help people past the danger points. (Wittgenstein 1980, 18e, emphasis
added)
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.
(PI 1127)

11
In The Point of View of My Work As An Author (1962), Kierkegaard claims that to try to attack an illusory point of
view directly is counterproductive: A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion. . . . There is nothing that
requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set
his will in opposition, all is lost.
 PSYCHES THERAPEIA 79

A philosophical problem has the form: I dont know my way about. (PI 1123)
In short, as with Heideggers use of formal indicators, Wittgensteins use of
signposts and reminders suggests that philosophy is a matter of re-orientating
ourselves with the familiarnot explaining, reducing, or excavating something
hidden.
To students of Wittgenstein, our brief overviewindeed, any brief summary
of Wittgensteins corpus will no doubt appear highly selective and inadequate.
However, our aim was not to introduce the reader to Wittgensteins thought or to
compete with lengthier interpretations of his corpus. We aimed to describe the
development of his philosophy as a series of stages which clarifies and deepens his
objection to logicism, scientism, and essentialism in philosophy. We have
somewhat artificially divided Wittgensteins thought into stages in order to
compare it to our reading of Being and Time as also working in stages. Our hope is
that by hazarding an overview of Wittgensteins thought, however incomplete or
unoriginal it may be, we have brought into focus the recurrence and centrality of
terms like obstacles and obstructions, temptations and disquietudes,
confusions and muddles in Wittgensteins effort to describe the problems of
philosophy. What they, along with even a cursory glance at Wittgensteins
biography, suggest is that Wittgensteins theoretical meanderings were anchored in
a desire, perhaps a need, to cope with the existential difficulty of getting rid of
what Wittgenstein called his Sorgewhich is, suggestively, Heideggers word for
care or concern. Ultimately we hope to have drawn the readers attention to
one direction that future discussion of Wittgenstein and Heidegger may take.

Conclusion
We have turned to the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein to illustrate our
claim that philosophy is a human activity exhibiting a unity of investigative and
therapeutic aims. For both philosophers, the purpose of philosophical concepts, as
formal indicators (Heidegger) or as signposts or reminders (Wittgenstein), is to
point us toward the path of transformation rather than to explain. For both, a first
step on this path is the recognition of illusions spawned by conventional
interpretedness (Heidegger) or scientistic evasiveness (Wittgenstein). For both,
such illusions are sedimented in linguistic practices, in the idle talk of das Man
(Heidegger) or the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language
(Wittgenstein, PI 1109). For both, philosophical investigation is a way of bringing
what we already prereflectively understand into the light of thematic explicitness.
And what both philosophers bring into thematic explicitness are aspects of our
context-embeddedness and of our finitude. Heidegger helps us understand and
bear the anxiety that comes with authentic Being-toward-death, and Wittgenstein
helps us to bear the irresoluble complexity of an indeterminate multiplicity of
language-games and perspectives, each serving particular human purposes, of
which the scientific perspective is only one. Through our therapeutic encounters
with the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, we are able to recognize
ourselves as ever more distinctively human.
80 SANCHEZ and STOLOROW

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Notes on contributor
Correspondence to: Robert Eli Sanchez, sanchezjr.robert@gmail.com; Robert D.
Stolorow, robertdstolorow@gmail.com.