Wittgenstein and Modernism

Walter Jost has undertaken the ambitious task of explaining and exemplifying the critical practice of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, especially as this practice has been interpreted by Stanley Cavell. This highly original and, for some of us, fruitful way of doing criticism has been dubbed by Jost and his associate Ken Dauber "ordinary language criticism," a felicitous coinage that gave the title to Dauber and Jost's edited collection of essays, Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (2003). Jost's new book serves as a kind of theoretical elaboration of the practice exemplified in the earlier volume. For Jost, ordinary language criticism is a distinctively rhetorical investigation, where rhetoric forms a "middle term" between philosophy and literature. Exactly what this middle term signifies is at times unclear, partly because Jost is at such pains to repudiate any narrow, formalistic, or logical model of rhetoric. In Jost's account rhetoric is "an intellectual method of thinking" (62), one that emphasizes the investigation of the particulars of a given case and their organization in accord with familiar topics or commonplaces (14-15). These organizing topics (an example of which, for Jost, is the modernist-postmodern theme of "crisis" [73-77]) determine the significance of the particulars, forming them into narratives so that we can tell what is happening. Jost is not unaware of the political inequalities of different topics. At any historical moment some commonplaces or topoi will acquire naturalness and achieve dominance over others, organizing the particulars of nearly every case in accord with hegemonic intellectual fashions and material interests. In fact, Jost takes high modernism's putatively skeptical account of ordinary language as just such a hegemonic topic. However, for him, rhetorical investigations are essentially liberal and democratic, treating available commonplaces as "conflicting possibilities, not fixed positions," which enable debate within a pluralistic society (63).

It is not immediately obvious in Rhetorical Investigations how Jost's "middle term" relates to ordinary language philosophy. To align Wittgensteinian criteria, attunements, and forms of life with rhetorical commonplaces would be to distort Wittgenstein's philosophical achievement beyond recognition, and Jost is careful to supplement the organizing topoi of rhetorical discussion with a more fundamental level of human agreements ("'natural' linguistic criteria, rules, and social practices" [63]) without which no rhetorical discussion could occur. In Wittgenstein's later philosophy, it is precisely the difficulty of making the existence of the material world or of another's pain into topics which turns out to be most elucidating, and Jost does not want to slight this idea. He explains that every assertion of truth or falsity, even the assertion that a given commonplace—e.g., the crisis of Western culture—is applicable to a case, presupposes "a constancy in human actions" not itself a function of any agreement about the truth or falsity of assertions. It is with such constancies of action that, for Wittgenstein, all theories and explanatory models come to an end. The world in which we know does not wait on knowledge for its constitution. Or in Jost's Heideggerian terminology, "true and false, correct and incorrect, beautiful and not beautiful, do not operate at the ontological level of founding entities, of being" (96).

Jost attempts to clarify this distinction between ontological and epistemological levels by reading Robert Frost's poem "The Black Cottage" as a narrative of their conflation. According to Jost, the minister who narrates Frost's poem has succumbed to fashionable skepticism, treating as mere empirical statements what Jost calls "credal statements" (55), fundamental expressions of principle or belief about which it makes sense to ask, "What does it mean?" but not, "Is it true?" In "The Black Cottage" two such statements are at issue: "That all men are created free and equal" and that "[Christ] descended into Hades." Jost's idea is that these statements are constitutive of a community's form of life, its norms of truth and value, and so when the minister questions them, he does not question their relation to reality but rather his own relation to his community, both state and church. Jost argues that such statements cannot be changed...