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Rush Rhees: “Discussion is my Only Medicine”

Hertzberg, Lars

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The Creation of Wittgenstein

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File name: CoW Ch 2 Lars Hertzberg, portrait Rhees, January 28th 2022

6231 words

Rush Rhees: “Discussion is My Only Medicine”

Lars Hertzberg

Life1
Rush Rhees was born in Rochester, New York, in 1905. His father, Rush Rhees Sr,
had been a professor of New Testament interpretation and was president of
Rochester University, which was at the time affiliated with the Baptist faith. Rush
Rhees Jr enrolled in the university in 1922 and took up philosophy. Two years later, a
headline in The New York Times read “Radicalism of Rochester President’s Son Causes
Professor to Bar Youth from Class”. Professor George Forbes had dropped Rhees
from his class because, he claimed, Rhees was bent on refuting everything Forbes
taught; according to Forbes he was guilty of shallow thinking and inordinate conceit.
Rhees on his part is supposed to have said: “I am radical. Dr Forbes is not. That is
why I am debarred… From a Puritan I have revolted into an atheist.”2 (It should be
mentioned that, while Rhees, as far as I know, remained unaffiliated with any church
for the remainder of his life, he later on came to have a deeply reflective
understanding of religious life.) Rush Rhees Sr was abroad at the time. The clash led
to Rhees leaving the university and the United States. It is my understanding that
after this he only returned to his country for a few short visits, sometimes staying at
the family’s cottage in Maine.

From Rochester Rhees went straight to Edinburgh, where he studied with A. E.

Taylor and Norman Kemp Smith. In a letter, Kemp Smith wrote about Rhees:

He is quite a picture, like the young Shelley, & rather lives up to it – tho’
quite a nice & simple youth – wearing his shirt collar loose and open at
the neck… He aspires to be a poet, but conceals this high ambition under
the very thin disguise of journalism.

However, his greatest influence at Edinburgh was John Anderson, who later went to
teach in Australia. (Anderson had a role in the shaping of Australian realism. Thus,
D. M. Armstrong acknowledged that Anderson had had a formative influence on his
thinking.) Anderson, who was an ardent believer in academic freedom of speech,
and who at times was a Trotskyite and an anarchist, seems to have had a long-lasting
influence on Rhees’s political attitudes.3

1
Rhees went to teach at Manchester for four years, then visited the University of
Innsbruck in order to work on the philosophy of Brentano with Alfred Kastil. At this
time he was particularly interested in the concept of continuity.

In 1933 Rhees was admitted as a doctoral student at Cambridge. His plan was to go
on with the work on continuity. (He would write an essay on the topic later on.4)
Rhees’s supervisor was G. E. Moore. At the insistence of Moore, he began attending
Wittgenstein’s lectures, at first finding it hard to make sense of them. However, his
doubts gradually vanished, and a friendship grew between the two philosophers.
Christian Erbacher suggests that

Rhees’ intelligent unruliness, his acquaintance with the University of

Manchester—where Wittgenstein had once studied engineering—and
his experiences in Wittgenstein’s homeland Austria may have further
contributed to a mutual sympathy. In any case, three years after their
first encounter, Rhees and Wittgenstein had become discussion partners
also outside class.5

In that same year Rhees wrote, in a statement about his work:

Notwithstanding the opportunities that were furnished to me and the

time I have allowed myself … I have succeeded neither in preparing
anything for publication nor in completing a thesis for a Ph.D. Nor can I
say that I see any great likelihood for my doing so.6

This report is indicative both of his strong tendency towards self-criticism - which
after all is not so very uncommon among doctoral candidates in philosophy - and a
much less common ability to be totally upfront about it. However, it should be noted
that at this time aiming for a doctorate was rather uncommon among those aspiring
for an academic career in Britain. A doctorate, it was thought, made for a narrower
range of competence, compared with spending the corresponding time teaching at a
university.7

Wittgenstein did not share Rhees’s low opinion of his abilities. In a letter of
recommendation in 1939 he wrote:

I have known Mr. R. Rhees for 4 years; he has attended my lectures on

philosophy and we have had a great many discussions both on
philosophical and general subjects. I have always been strongly
impressed by the great seriousness and intelligence with which he

2
 tackles any problem. Mr. Rhees is an exceptionally kind and helpful man
and will spare no trouble to assist his students.8

In 1938 Wittgenstein asked Rhees to do an English translation of the Philosophische

Untersuchungen (in the shape it had at the time). However, he did not approve of
Rhees’s attempt, actually calling it awful – although he was at pains to point out that
Rhees was a good man and philosopher, and that translating the text was a very
difficult task.9 (Wittgenstein’s reaction should perhaps be understood as a –
somewhat exaggerated – expression of the shock many writers are liable to feel on
seeing their own texts in translation. I am not aware of any problems in the
translation that would objectively justify Wittgenstein’s dismissal.)

In 1940 Rhees was appointed to a temporary teaching position in Swansea, having

worked for a time as a welder in a factory. Later on the teaching position was made
permanent, and he stayed on at the department as a lecturer (refusing promotion to a
senior lectureship), until he retired in 1966. Chance, it appears, had brought Rhees to
Wales, to the country from which his family name originated.

Wittgenstein enjoyed visiting and having discussions with Rhees in Swansea. While
he was staying in Newcastle during the war, he wrote to Malcolm: ”I am feeling
rather lonely here & may try to get to some place where I have someone to talk to.
E.g. to Swansea where Rhees is a lecturer in philosophy.”10 After the war, he would
like to escape Cambridge for Swansea.11

Rhees started the Philosophical Society which went on to have weekly meetings for
as long as the Swansea Philosophy Department continued in existence. He was a
powerful source of inspiration for those who came into contact with him. Rhees had
a formative influence on colleagues such as Peter Winch, Roy Holland, David
Cockburn, Ilham Dilman and Howard Mounce. Cora Diamond spent a year teaching
at Swansea, but she tells me his philosophical importance for her came later. A
prominent student of Rhees’s was D. Z. Phillips, who was to be senior lecturer and
then professor at Swansea from 1967 until his death in 2006.

On retiring Rhees moved to London, then to Cambridgeshire. During this period he

would have regular discussions with Peter Winch, Norman Malcolm (his fellow
student from his Cambridge years), and Raimond Gaita. From Cambridgeshire he
moved back to Swansea, where he led post-graduate seminars. He died there in 1989.
For Rhees, discussion was the core of a life in philosophy. During his final illness, he
is reported to have said, “Discussion is my only medicine. When that is finished, so
am I.”12sep

3
For my own part, I had the fortune of meeting Rush Rhees on a few occasions in the
1970’s and 1980’s. To me he was one of those very rare people whose seriousness and
lack of posturing strikes one immediately. Meeting him had the effect of making me
read him in a different spirit: to discern the absolute earnestness of his searching
style.

Work
Rhees was sparing when it came to publishing his own work. A handful of articles
appeared, most of which were brought together in the collection Discussions of
Wittgenstein (1970). Many of them were concerned with what might be called the
philosophy of logic, which is another way of saying that they contain reflections on
philosophical method. There are essays on the Tractatus, on Wittgenstein’s views on
ethics, on Philosophical Investigations. Rhees was one of the first to question the sharp
distinction that had been drawn between the earlier and the later Wittgenstein. The
essays that have received most attention are “Can There Be a Private Language?”,
and “Wittgenstein’s Builders”. In the huge discussion about private language that
has taken place since his essay on the topic appeared in 1954, very little has been
added to the clarity he achieves there. As for the essay on the builders, I want to
return to that later.13

In 1969, D. Z. Phillips, Rhees’s erstwhile student, then colleague at Swansea, collected

some of Rhees’s unpublished writings in Without Answers. Most of these papers had
not been written for publication, but were part of an interchange with individual
philosophers or for special occasions. Their themes, roughly, are science and society,
moral philosophy, the philosophy or religion, art and education.

Rhees himself edited the collection Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, with
contributions by among others Hermione Wittgenstein, Fania Pascal, Maurice Drury
and a postscript by Rhees himself.

Apart from his own work, Rhees, along with Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik
von Wright, took an active part in the editing of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass.14

While a large part of Rhees’s time was devoted to the posthumous publication of
Wittgenstein’s work, most of what has appeared of his own work has been brought
out posthumously through the editorship of D. Z. Phillips. The published Nachlass,
seven volumes in all, consists of excerpts from Rhees’s manuscripts, letters and notes,
which Phillips had made in long hand.15 What apparently inspired Phillips to
undertake this Herculean task – which he completed in a surprisingly short time –

4
was his having discovered new dimensions of depth in his former teacher’s work,
centring around the concepts “growth of understanding”, “possibility of discourse”
and “unity of language”. Having completed the edition, Phillips devoted the
remaining years of his life to the attempt to make Rhees’s work more widely known.

Rhees and Wittgenstein

In the English-speaking philosophical establishment, Rush Rhees has come to be seen

as little more than a student and expounder of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views. This
characterization, however, is far from just: he was an original thinker in his own
right, as is obvious from a careful reading of what he published, and even more so
from the posthumous publications. In fact, the relation between his thought and that
of Wittgenstein would merit careful scrutiny.

There are, I believe, several reasons for the neglect of Rhees’s own philosophy. Apart
from the dearth of publications in his own name, much of which consists in editorial
comments or discussions of Wittgenstein’s life and his philosophy, Rhees seemed to
have little concern with his own fame. He felt no need to underscore his own
originality, and he was anxious to acknowledge his indebtedness, such as it was, to
Wittgenstein. But independently of that, there was a genuine affinity in philosophical
outlook between Wittgenstein and Rhees, as shown both in their style of doing
philosophy and in their view of the philosopher’s task. Rhees seems not to have fit
the conventional mould of academic philosopher any better than Wittgenstein did, as
shown, for instance, by his unwillingness or inability to play the game of self-
promotion. They both rejected the widely received idea of philosophy as the testing
ground of various philosophical theories: realism vs. idealism, materialism vs.
dualism, etc.; they shared the view that committing oneself to one or the other of
these abstract labels had little to do with thinking seriously about the issues. Both of
them exerted their influence, above all, through personal interaction with students
and colleagues; this was connected with the fact that their influence, by all accounts,
was not limited to a purely intellectual sphere, but was to a large extent what might
be called ethical or existential. They shared the idea that, rather than cleverness, what
philosophy requires is the strength to overcome one’s predilections concerning the
way the problems of philosophy are to be understood.

Much of Rhees’s writings is quite unlike Wittgenstein’s in its form of address. While
Rhees is responding to someone else’s remarks, Wittgenstein’s starting point is his
own intellectual temptations. Even when his notes are inspired by reading or talking
about some thinker (St Augustine, Goethe, Frege, Freud, Moore, Russell), that
thinker soon recedes to the background. Though Wittgenstein’s notes were not

5
intended as contributions to current debate in philosophy, neither were they written
for particular persons; rather, one might say, they were aimed at a timeless audience.
Wittgenstein may not have aspired to fame; his feelings on that score were probably
divided. In any case it is obvious that he was not indifferent to the sort of impact his
work would have on the course of philosophy. This is clear from some of the
reflections that have been assembled in Culture and Value.16

This is connected with another difference between their writings: Wittgenstein seems
to have made a clear separation between two sorts of question: on the one hand, the
(shall we say?) timeless and impersonal philosophical questions that are the subject
matter not only of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but also (though in a radically
different form) of Philosophical Investigations; and, on the other hand, what might be
labelled questions of ”culture and value”: questions engaging his individual
existence or provoked by his times, e.g. matters of art and aesthetics, religion, ethics,
psychoanalysis or anthropology. While there are plenty of discussions of such topics
both in his notebooks and in his lectures, no reference is made to any of them in the
selection which forms the basis of Philosophical Investigations. With Rhees the
situation is different.17

This brings us to some points of style and method. Wittgenstein’s aim in Philosophical
Investigations is to elicit the active cooperation of the reader. Many remarks are like a
tool kit: they often contain suggestions for thought-experiments, exercises to be
carried out by the reader, or small bits of dialogue, in which the reader must learn to
distinguish between the voice expressing the view of the writer’s alter ego still in the
grips of misleading pictures, or misunderstanding the other party’s responses, and
that of the writer himself, trying to disentangle the confusions.

Rhees’s rhetoric is very different from Wittgenstein’s, though quite as distinctive. Or

maybe it is better characterized as an absence of rhetoric: he does not use striking
simile, formulates no epigrams. The flow in his texts is much more even than that of
Wittgenstein: like that of an even breath (at the same time, his use of English has a
tinge of eccentricity). Rhees often proceeds by marking off the matter under
discussion – this might be language, conversation, faith in God, etc. – by alternately
pointing out how it differs from things with which we might be tempted to
assimilate it, and, on the other hand, how it resembles things with which we are not
used to comparing it. The differences between their philosophical temperaments is
visible even on a typographical level: Wittgenstein’s texts are made up of distinct
remarks, often connected with quick shifts of temper and rhythm (sometimes
moving from one genre to another), as against the continuous tread of Rhees’s
writing.

6
In Rhees’s texts there is a stronger sense of the author’s presence; this is undoubtedly
connected with the way in which they came about. Wittgenstein, for the most part, is
making us see how bewildering something may seem, rather than expressing his
own bewilderment. In most cases, the reason he asks the questions he asks is not that
he does not know the answer to them, rather, he is drawing attention to them as
questions, in order to show, for instance, that they are pointless or ambiguous. In
Rhees’s writing, on the other hand, the struggle seems to be present in the text itself.
With Rhees, much more than with Wittgenstein, one is witnessing philosophy
growing out of his own everyday experiences and encounters. (I am not suggesting
that one form of writing is more valuable than the other.)

Perhaps one difference in their style could be summed up by saying that in

Wittgenstein the second person is continually present, whereas in Rhees it is the first
person. Your troubles vs mine.

“Wittgenstein’s Builders”18
Rhees was not only an interpreter but, in a sense, also a critic of Wittgenstein. It is
true that Wittgenstein’s thought was the fertile ground from which Rhees’s thinking
grew, and in fact, calling him a critic of Wittgenstein might easily lead to
misunderstanding. In most other cases, the critique of Wittgenstein has been driven
by a desire to counteract his influence in philosophy. Rhees’s attitude is the opposite
of this. He considered Wittgenstein’s influence in philosophy to be a salutary one,
indeed, the most important contribution to philosophy in the 20th century; at the
same time, he thought, Wittgenstein on some points was liable to oversimplify
matters, and hence his thoughts were in need of modification.

This concerns, above all, Wittgenstein’s use of the notion of a language-game. In his
discussion of the Augustinian picture of language, Wittgenstein suggests that the
builders’ game, i.e. an Augustinian language suitably amended, might be the whole
language of a tribe; he also claims that all of human language could be thought of as
simply consisting of a range of different language games. Rhees finds these ideas
problematic. What is missing in the game perspective on language is the way
speaking is connected with life. Rhees reflected deeply on what is involved in the
game metaphor in a way that many other readers of Wittgenstein have not: this
primarily concerned the contrast between playing a game and really doing something
– really meaning what one says. In what follows, I shall give an outline of Rhees’s
critique of the language-game metaphor. After that, I shall make an attempt to
understand how Rhees thought about the connections between speaking and life. I

7
will suggest that one can distinguish between what might be called an
anthropological and an ethical strand in his thinking, and will raise the question how
these are related to one another.

Consider the landscape into which Wittgenstein introduced the concept of a

language-game. Starting earlier but culminating around the turn of the previous
century, there had been a shift in philosophers’ focus, within the Anglo-American
tradition, from thoughts or judgments to sentences or propositions. This shift has
been characterized as a rejection of what came to be called psychologism – a
conception of meaning as a matter of the mental contents associated with speaking or
hearing words spoken - in favour of a perspective on language as a logical structure.
A basic assumption was that a judgment could, ideally, be identified on the basis of
the composition of a sentence expressing the judgment. In principle, if not always in
practice, it was thought, one could determine the logical properties of a judgment on
the basis of the composition of the sentence expressing it. The sense was, as it were,
packaged into the sequence of words (sounds or marks) of which the sentence
consisted.

This perspective on language offered an excuse for not looking at what speakers are
actually doing when they utter words in specific contexts, since what is expressed is
taken to be laid down in the form of words itself. It encouraged what I should like to
call a spirit of apriorism: the feeling that we can survey the possible uses of a word or
sentence by simply contemplating it, in a vacuum as it were. This inclination was
what Wittgenstein was trying to battle. (“Don’t think but look”, he says in discussing
the meanings of the word “game”. PI 2009, § 66.) Against the fixation on words and
sentences, he introduced the notion that in order to get at the sense of what someone
is saying we need to be clear about its role in a larger context, in what he called a
language game. It is only as used in a context that a sentence can be said to possess a
distinct form. This, it should be clear, is not a return to psychologism. For instance,
the way a person’s words are to be taken is a matter that may be debated; it is not
fixed, say, by the contents of her mind at the moment of speaking.

Rhees, on his part, considered the holistic perspective developed by Wittgenstein an

unqualified advance in our thinking about what it is to speak. However, in Rhees’s
view Wittgenstein did not go far enough in his holism. According to Rhees, the
fragmentation in the view of language evident in the emphasis on sentences
(propositions) was to some degree preserved in the idea of language being made up
of a range of independent language-games. This conception led to a schematic view
of the relation between different uses of language: in fact, to a new apriorism (this
term is not used by Rhees). Against this, Rhees emphasized the way things said are

8
bound up with the relations between speakers, within the context of a life lived with
language. As Rhees puts it:

When [someone] makes the move in chess he is not telling me anything.

And if I understand what he is telling me, it is not just like
understanding the sort of moves he is making: knowing the rules or the
uses of the expressions he is ‘moving’. There is much more of a background
of common understanding than that… In understanding one another,
there are other standards than simply those of what is grammatically
correct; standards such as good faith, and so on, come in here as well.
And more is taken for granted than is held in grammar books and
dictionaries. You have to learn the way people speak. 19

Comparing speaking to a game might encourage us to consider simply the

behaviour: the uttering of certain sounds, in conjunction with the immediate context.
Rhees is telling us to look beyond this. But what is this larger context that is relevant?
In fact Rhees’s discussion might be thought to point in two different directions: to
what might be called the ”having something to say” theme (or ”the place in life”
theme) on the one hand, and the ”remarks hanging together” theme on the other
hand.

“The unity of language”

Rhees sometimes speaks about sharing a language, speaking the same language, but it
is important not to give this idea the wrong emphasis. We might be tempted to put
the focus on what distinguishes some cases of speaking (say, cases of speaking English
or cases of playing this language game) from others (say, those of speaking Swedish
or playing another language game), whereas what Rhees was concerned with was
the way speakers’ words are connected. (It might be said that the notion of languages
as delimited from one another has no role here.) Central notions here are those of “a
common understanding”, a shared view of ”what makes sense, what can be
understood, what it is possible to say, what one might try to say” (WPD, p. 193).

Now, spelling out what Rhees means by the unity of language is no simple matter.
He makes it clear that he is not speaking about a common (logical) system
underlying all the different things we say, the way pure mathematics underlies all
the different applications of mathematics (ibid.). The unity of language is not a
formal unity in the sense of formal logic.20 In fact, I believe he would have argued,
making the unity of language a matter of deductive relations would be a case of
putting the cart before the horse: it is only because of the way things said are

9
interrelated in people's lives that we can speak of utterances standing in deductive
relations. How what I say in this situation is taken up is shown in how others go on
with it. The dependence is shown in people’s lives with language, it is not something
that can be ascertained from outside.

As the matter is put in David Cockburn’s illuminating discussion of Rhees’s thoughts

about the unity of language:

Rhees writes: “Philosophy is concerned with the intelligibility of

language, or the possibility of understanding. And in that way it is
concerned with the possibility of discourse.” It is, I think, important to be
clear what Rhees does not mean by this. His suggestion is not that
philosophy is concerned with “the conditions of the possibility of
discourse”. We are tempted to think that one of the aims of philosophy is
to investigate something – the nature of language perhaps – on which
our speaking with each other depends. Many philosophers have seen
their task in that way; and many – perhaps including Rhees – have taken
this to be one of Wittgenstein’s concerns. Rhees’s opposition to this view
of philosophy is seen in remarks such as the following: “The language –
what you understand when you understand the language – is not
something apart from understanding people and speaking with them.
Something which makes that possible”. Sharing a language with another
is not what makes discussion between us possible. Sharing a language
with another is nothing other than being able to speak with her. 21

For Rhees, then, philosophy’s concern is with the question, not how language is
possible, but what it means for there to be language. What we say does not make sense
because it belongs to the language, rather speaking a language simply consists in being
able to make oneself understood by means of words.

“The unity of language” is not to be regarded as a well-defined technical term. It is

rather a way of gesturing towards certain aspects of our life with language, how the
different things we say hang together and bear on one another, something that a
preoccupation with language games tends to make us overlook. Rhees, we might say,
is trying to restore the balance upset by Wittgenstein’s critique of the philosophical
idea of language as a formal unity; a critique which led Wittgenstein’s readers to
suppose that he thought of language as fragmented into a range of watertight
compartments. What Wittgenstein did emphasize, however, was the different things
speaking can be – an emphasis that Rhees would endorse.

10
I should like to quote a passage from a note written by Rhees in July 1958, in which a
number of the themes that recur in these notes are brought up:

Perhaps at this point one would have to bring in the matter of the
various standards that are relevant to discourse between people; which
makes it possible for them to understand one another. It is always
important that we may use the same language in pretence or deceit.
Genuineness and deceit. The possibility of this distinction belongs to
what we mean by speaking: saying something, telling one something.22

Rhees keeps coming back to the point that the language game metaphor encourages
us to think of acquiring language as a matter of acquiring a skill or a technique. This
is connected with Wittgenstein’s emphasis, especially in the early parts of the
Philosophical Investigations, on the central role of drill in the acquisition of language,
apparent in the remarks on ostensive definition in connection with the discussion of
Augustine, in the discussion of rule-following, in the discussion of knowing how to
continue a number series. The issue in these sequences of remarks turns on the
central role of reaching conformity in our judgments.

Rhees suggests that Wittgenstein tended to model his thinking about language too
much on mathematics. He may well be right about this. Wittgenstein had of course to
some extent been moulded by the inheritance of logicism.23 It could be suggested that
in mathematics the signs used are internal to what is being said. Or differently put, to
regard something as a mathematical expression is already to consider it as being
used in a particular type of context. In thinking about mathematics, the emphasis in
connection with learning will be on gaining mastery of the signs to be used, the
criterion of mastery being conformity with one’s community; the speaker’s relation to
the signs she produces will not be important. What tends to be left out in the account
Rhees attributes to Wittgenstein is the importance, in learning to speak, of the
speaker’s coming to express herself. (This critique, I believe, applies in particular to the
early part of the Philosophical Investigations, maybe up to and including § 242.)

Rhees found it particularly important to emphasize the ability to take part in

conversation with others. In order to carry on a conversation one would have to have
an understanding of the people one is talking to and the things one is talking about,
one would have to see the point of remarks made. Rhees discusses this issue in some
notes from September 1957:

Understanding the remark he is making is not simply a question of

knowing English. It is a question of finding that he is saying something

11
 intelligible; that he is saying something sensible. And what do you have
to know, in order to see that? ... It does not do to say that you have to
learn the language ..., if that means that you have to acquire a kind of
equipment.24

As for finding that the other is “saying something sensible”: what does this amount
to? I guess what Rhees has in mind here is that we must have some idea of how
uttering these words in these circumstances might be an expression of this speaker: if
we have no idea of what the speaker is expressing, of what sense it makes for her to
utter those words in that situation, we would have no sense of the speaker having
said something, whether or not it had the ring of an English sentence.

In this connection, Rhees talks about “the growth of understanding”. This notion,
according to Rhees, was central to Plato, and it was something the sophists
questioned. He wrote (in May-June 1957):

If you understand anything in language, you must understand what

dialogue is, and you must see how understanding grows as the dialogue
grows. How understanding the language grows. For the language is
discourse, is speaking. It is telling people things and trying to follow
them...

You understand what is said when you learn from it, not otherwise – or
not fully anyway.25

“Learning from it” must involve more than simply receiving information. It may
involve things like discovering alternative ways of seeing things, where this may be a
way of learning about the world and at the same time learning about other people.

What we have been discussing so far are what might be called the anthropological
aspects of speaking and intelligibility. However, for Rhees, these issues evidently
also had a moral dimension. This is connected with the centrality of the distinction
between the genuine and the deceitful.

In Rhees’s view, Plato’s critique of the sophists has bearing on this issue. According
to the sophists, to speak intelligibly is to speak effectively (p. 24). I succeed in making
myself understood if I succeed in getting my interlocutor where I want her; if I am
able the get her to agree with whatever it is I want her to agree with. Since effects are
what matters to the sophists, they have no use for the distinction between the
genuine and the deceitful. Accordingly, the image of language as a collection of

12
games or a toolbox would have been adequate for their view of what it is to speak.
Plato, on the other hand, says Rhees,

thought it particularly important to be able to recognize discourse: to be

able to recognize when something is being said, and to tell the difference
between this and the imitations that were offered by the rhetoricians and
the sophists... here the point is that there must be a distinction between
what is real understanding and what passes for understanding.26

We are now moving on ground that is markedly different from the anthropological
reaches of Philosophical Investigations. How are we to understand the discussion about
the sophists? What are they to us?

Obviously, the reason Rhees finds it important to reflect on the sophists is that in his
view the sophist is someone who lurks in each one of us. The word “sophist” marks a
certain kind of moral temptation that besets our attempts at conversation. Sophistry
is a guard against an openness we find counterproductive or embarrassing, though
unlike the professional sophists we are liable to do so without acknowledging it even
to ourselves. Conversations often fail because we yield to self-deception. On this
reading, when Rhees criticizes the sophists he is challenging us to keep our
conversations genuine, to keep them such as to contribute, if possible, to a growth of
understanding on the part of the participants, rather than resort to strategies like
flattery or obfuscation. We should refrain from thinking of speaking as similar to
playing a game, on the one hand because this view is philosophically limiting, but on
the other hand also because our own conversations will suffer if we do. What would
need spelling out is how the ethical unity Rhees is speaking about here is related to
the connectedness between remarks in a conversation that we were discussing
earlier. That is a task that I am not able to undertake in the present context.

For all their differences, there was a close temperamental affinity between
Wittgenstein and Rhees, closer, I think it can be said, than that between Wittgenstein
and his other literary executors, Anscombe and von Wright. The interaction between
Wittgenstein and Rhees came to form a vigorous source of philosophical
regeneration, succeeding, at least for a time, in giving some of its saltiness back to
English-speaking philosophy. What their influence will be in the long run is hard to
predict. At present, that influence seems largely to be in abeyance.27

1 This section is largely based on D. Z. Phillips’s introduction to Rush Rhees on Religion and
Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. xi-xxii.

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2 See http://www.campustimes.org/2016/03/24/when-rush-rhees-son-dropped-out/. Accessed on
December 31, 2019.
3 For a discussion between Wittgenstein and Rhees, in which Wittgenstein is trying to talk Rhees
out of joining a Trotskyite party, see Rush Rhees “Postscript” in Rhees (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal
Recollections (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 229 f.
4 ”On Continuity: Wittgenstein’s Ideas, 1938”, in his collection Discussions of Wittgenstein
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 104-157.
5 Christian Erbacher, “Wittgenstein and His Literary Executors”, Journal for the History of
Analytical Philosophy, Volume 4, Number 3 (2016), p. 4.
6 Phillips, ”Introduction”, p. xv.
7 On this, see Cora Diamond, ”Reflections of a Dinosaur”, in Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association, Volume 93, November 2019, pp. 87-104. Diamond points out that at one
time the British D.Phil. ”was a degree largely for Americans”. This might explain why Rhees took the unusual step
of enrolling for a doctorate.
8 Wittgenstein: Gesamtbriefwechsel/Complete Correspondence: Innsbrucker Electronic Edition,
second edition, ed. Brian McGuinness et al. Innsbruck: Intelex. Quoted in Phillips, op. cit., p. xvii.
9 Erbacher, op.cit., p. 8. For the translation, see http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/.
10 Quoted in Wittgenstein, Ludwig and Rush Rhees, 2015. “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Conversations with Rush Rhees (1939–50): From the Notes of Rush Rhees”, edited by G. Citron. Mind 142
(2015), pp. 1–71.
11 Phillips, op.cit., p. xix, Citron, op.cit.
12 Phillips, op.cit., p. xx.
13 For an (incomplete) bibliography of Rhees’s life-time publications, see the memorial volume
Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars – Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees, ed. by D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch
(Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 200 f.
14 On Rhees as editor of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, see the contributions to the present volume by
Solin, Westergaard and Jakola.
15 These are On Religion and Philosophy (1997), Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse
(1998; 2 edition 2006), Moral Questions (1998), Discussions of Simone Weil (1998), Wittgenstein’s “On
nd

Certainty” (2003), In Dialogue with the Greeks, Volume I: The Presocratics and Reality (2004) Volume II: Plato
and Dialectic (2004).

16 For instance:

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so? I cannot
found a school, because I actually want not to be imitated. In any case not by those who publish
articles in philosophical journals. (VB 1998.)

17 Cp Bernt Österman’s discussion of von Wright’s editing of Culture and Value and Peter
Westergaard’s discussion of Rhees as editor of Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” in their
contributions to this volume.

18 The following section largely draws on two earlier papers of mine: “Rush Rhees on Philosophy
and Religious Discourse” (Faith and Philosophy 18 (2001)), pp. 431-442, and “Rhees on the Unity of Language”
(Philosophical Investigations 33 (2012), pp. 224-237).

19 Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, 1 ed., p. 62. First italics mine. This work will
henceforth be referred to as WPD.
20 WPD, p. 193 and pp. 245 f.
21 David Cockburn, “Rush Rhees: The Reality of Discourse”, in John Edelman (ed.), Sense and
Reality: Essays out of Swansea, Heusenstamm: ontos verlag, 2009, pp. 1-22. The quotation is from pp. 1f. (The
Rhees quotations are from WPD, p. 32 and p. 277.)
22 WPD p. 263 f.

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23 On the contrast between speaking and the mathematical use of expressions, see Rhees,
“Continuity: on Wittgenstein’s Ideas, 1938”, op. cit.
24 WPD pp. 206 f.
25 WPD p. 27.
26 WPD p. 258; August 1958.
27 I wish to thank David Cockburn and Thomas Wallgren for useful comments on this essay.

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