Marx and Wittgenstein by David Rubenstein (review)

.290 BOOK REVIEWS and regards the B deduction as conspicuously inferior to the A deduction. He puts forward the astounding contention that Kant is committed by his own principles to the soundness of the ontological proof for God's existence . (It is as easy to believe that Plato was a sophist, or Augustine a Pelagian.) But there is no space here to go into detail on these matters. The idiosyncrasies of Kant and the Transcendental Object, together with its lack of thematic unity, perhaps prevent it from taking a place beside the standard and trustworthy commentaries on Kant's philosophy. On the other hand, it is at least as philosophically able as many of them, and more original. The characteristic lucidity of Findlay's prose, and his gift for penetrating difficult ideas and presenting them simply and free of jargon, recommends the book to those who are not specialists in Kant. In some ways Kant and the Transcendental Object is a strange and deformed monster of a book, so that its many fine parts are more attractive considered in abstraction from the whole. These parts add up to a unique and valuable contribution to the Kant literature. Cornell University Ithaca, New York ALLEN W. Woon Marx and Wittgenstein. By DAVID RUBENSTEIN. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Pp. 231. $25.00. The central feature of the later Wittgenstein's philosophy of language is his insistence that "the speaking of language is a part of an activity, or a form of life." His various uses of the concept "language-game," as well as his close attention to the actual use of language as part of the natural history of human beings, are grounded in the idea that the grammar of language, and indeed the logic, rationality, and images of reality embodied in language, stem ultimately from the pre-linguistic substrata of human interaction with the world. Yet Wittgenstein offers few investigative leads into forms of life. He does refer to natural human capacities and inclinations. He alludes to the importance of training in cultural practices and to the importance of untrained responses upon which such acculturation builds. And there are scattered remarks about the interpenetration of facts about the world into the grammar of language. But the phrase "form of life" itself appears a mere five times in the Philosophical Investigations, and nowhere does Wittgenstein show, in detail, how a particular form of life gives rise to a particular set of concepts. Nor are we givP.n a definition or even a clear paradigm of a form of life. Thus the BOOK REVIEWS 291 fundamental element in Wittgenstein's vision of language (and hence, in his vision of philosophical understanding) has remained a matter of elusiveness and contention. Yet, in the mass of scholarly work cin Wittgenstein's thought, comparatively little attention has been devoted to this issue. But as Wittgenstein's thought has begun to be assimilated by (or restored to) the continental tradition, the issue of " forms of life," with its overtones of large-scale problems about nature and culture, has begun to attract more attention. And since the central notion in " forms of life" is public, social action in the world, the possibility of continuity, congruence, or confluence with Marx is a promising line of investigation. David Rubinstein's Marx and Wittgenstein takes up this inquiry. But it would be misleading to suggest that Rubinstein's chief concern is the elucidation or extension1 of Wittgensteinian concepts. Rather, dividing his attention equally between the two philosophers, he aims to show substantial agreement shared by Marx and Wittgenstein on such basic issues as theory of knowledge, mind, meaning, and action. He pursues this primary aim with two further intentions. First, he wants to show how the perspective of Marx and Wittgenstein offers an alternative to the quandaries of "objectivism " and "subjectivism" in the philosophy of the social· sciences. Second, he wants to show how a philosophy of the social sciences based on Marx and Wittgenstein makes plain both the possibility and the necessity of social scientific explanation. According to Rubinstein, both philosophers firmly reject the dualism that has infested modern philosophy, and, through that rejection, offer the "insight that shows...