J.C. Nyíri:

Let me begin by explaining the title of my paper. The term "secondary orality" was coined by Walter J. Ong in the early 1970s.1 It refers to the new, electronically mediated culture of spoken, as contrasted with written, language. Secondary orality is post-literal in the sense of being different from, but also rooted in, grafted upon, literacy. Thus secondary orality is certainly not identical with the orality of preliteral cultures - with primary orality, as Ong calls it. While the orality of preliterate cultures serves as the sole medium of collective consciousness and memory - think, for instance, of Homer - secondary orality has recourse to writing, book printing, and the electronic recording of texts and data. However, from a semantic point of view, secondary orality does in important ways parallel primary orality. The meaning of utterances is in both cases intrinsically bound up with the extra-linguistic situations in which those utterances occur. Or rather there is no sharp dividing line between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic: Names have a fundamental function, but they belong together with, and do not merely designate, their bearers; and an utterance is not a complex of names, but a dynamic act in itself, a deed. By contrast, written language consists of separate words, each of which has a literal meaning, designates a definite concept or object. Context does play a role, but only as a guide to recognizing the proper designation. The meaning of a written text is open to interpretation, but does not alter with changing circumstances. As the metaphor has it: Spoken language is alive, written texts are dead.

The thesis I will here put forward is that the genesis and the direction of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is not independent of the emergence of secondary orality. The thesis as such is not new. I first propounded it in my essay "Wittgenstein and the Problem of Machine Consciousness"2. And Toulmin in his Cosmopolis, in the section "The Return to the Oral", pointed out that the later Wittgenstein "was moving away from the expression of beliefs in written propositions to their transient, contextual expression in language games, speech acts, and utterances generally".3 Now in order to render this thesis plausible - to show how natural it is to view Wittgenstein's later philosophy from the perspective of the orality/literacy chasm - I shall introduce my main argument via a three-stage detour. In the third stage of that detour I will draw attention to the importance Plato had for Wittgenstein in the early 1930s; in the second, I will briefly refer to Havelock's interpretation of Plato as the philosopher, of literacy triumphant, in Greece - a paradoxical and contested interpretation; and in order to prepare us for that paradoxical interpretation I will begin, in the first stage, by recalling some lecture notes made by José Ortega y Gasset made for a seminar he was to hold on Plato in 1946 - notes in which the orality/literacy distinction plays the central role.4

Ortega here points out that "if linguists understand by speech [hablar] the use of a language [usar de una lengua], they commit a radical error. Language [lengua] is not actually an effective usage [lenguaje], i.e. speech [habla], if it is not complemented by the modulations of voice, by facial expression, by gestures, and by the entire physical attitude of the person. Therefore the language [lengua] of the linguist is only a fragment of linguistic usage [lenguaje] in the sense of speech [habla]."5 Linguists have come to hold a misleading view of language, Ortega continues, because grammar is a theory that had been in fact developed as an answer to the then new technique, namely writing.6 However, written, or indeed printed, language is merely "petrified" speech [decir]; speech is authentic only if it arises out of a situation to which it is a reaction; speech is, at its most fundamental, dialogue or conversation. The effective unit of speech is the sentence in context; words in isolation do not have meanings.7 We have, Ortega concludes, grown imperceptive through the habit of reading that has become second nature with us, we profit from the advantages of the written word [palabra escrita] and feel an increasing disdain for the only language that deserves to be called so, namely oral speech [palabra oral] - a disdain for the wonders of the dialogue and of oratory.8 And what a paradox, adds Ortega, that it was precisely Plato - with his famous tirades against writing - who became the first writer of books in Greece.9

Now what Eric Havelock has shown in his monograph Preface to Plato, published in 1963,10 is that writing was, for Plato, not just a new medium in which to express his philosophy; on the contrary, writing, the experience of literacy, formed the very source of Platonism. When Plato inquired about the nature of justice, or the beautiful, or goodness, he was not merely asking new questions; he was asking questions with regard to abstract terms that were simply not there in the Greek language prior to the rise of literacy. It is the syntax of writing that creates abstract terms; and it is the impression given by written language that all words signify basically in the same manner, namely by designating something. That something, when it came to abstract terms, had to be an abstract object: thus were born Platonic ideas.

It is known that Wittgenstein enjoyed reading Plato; but the significance Plato had for him is quite underrated, and has never been properly understood. In the year 1931 - i.e. during a crucial period in the development of his later philosophy - Wittgenstein refers, in his notebooks, at least eleven times to Plato, quoting a number of passages, even quite long ones. Plato certainly plays a role in those notebooks no other philosopher ever played. The passages Wittgenstein again and again quotes belong to those where Plato's path from a specific view of meaning to a specific ontology becomes particularly clear. Wittgenstein obviously had a feeling that the point in the history of philosophy to which he wanted to return is the one at which Plato had taken the wrong turning. As he said to Schlick in 1931: "I cannot characterize my standpoint better than by saying that it is opposed to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues."11 In fact it is quite striking how some of the central passages in Wittgenstein parallel, and run counter to, some of the central passages in Plato. Here is one from the Euthyphro, and one from the Philosophical Investigations. "[M]y friend, you did not give me sufficient information before, when I asked what holiness was, but you told me that this was holy which you are now doing, prosecuting your father for murder. - Euthyphro: Well, what I said was true, Socrates. - Socrates: Perhaps. But, Euthyphro, you say that many other things are holy, do you not? - Euthyphro: Why, so they are. - Socrates: Now call to mind that this is not what I asked you, to tell me one or two of the many holy acts, but to tell the essential aspect, by which all holy acts are holy..."12 - "You talk about all sorts of language games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. - And this is true. - Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, - but that they are related to one another in many different ways."13

If Wittgenstein's opposition to Plato was motivated, to some measure at least, by the emergence of post-literacy, he was certainly not aware of this. In fact he did not clearly perceive the radical epistemological differences between written and spoken language. Two authors who could have influenced him here, but, judging by the way Wittgenstein's arguments will proceed, clearly did not do so, were Oswald Spengler and Bronislaw Malinowski. In Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes - a book which, as is well-known, Wittgenstein read - he could have found the idea that writing is, as Spengler had put it, a quite new type of language, implying "a complete change in the relations of man's waking consciousness", liberating the mind "from the tyranny of the present"; so while speaking and hearing take place only in proximity and in the present, writing bridges distance both in space and in time.14 Malinowski's essay "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" appeared as an appendix to the Ogden and Richards volume The Meaning of Meaning.15 Wittgenstein of course must have had some acquaintance with this volume - he does, occasionally, refer to the views of Ogden and Richards on meaning - but he nowhere mentions Malinowski. In the latter's essay "primitive living tongue, existing only in actual utterance" is contrasted with "dead, inscribed languages". The former, Malinowski stresses, is "to be regarded as a mode of action, rather than as a countersign of thought".16 In a primitive language, he writes, "the meaning of any single word is to a very high degree dependent on its context"; indeed it is dependent, as he puts it, on the context of situation - i.e., on the extra-linguistic environment. Written documents, by contrast, are "naturally isolated", the statements contained in them "are set down with the purpose of being self-contained and self-explanatory".17 Spoken linguistic material "lives only in winged words, passing from man to man", word-meanings being "inextricably mixed up with, and dependent upon, the course of the activity in which the utterances are embedded".18 Language in a preliterate culture, Malinowski emphasizes, is never "a mere mirror of reflected thought". In writing however "language becomes a condensed piece of reflection", the reader "reasons, reflects, remembers, imagines".19 And it is significant that in Malinowski's estimate such reflection is a latephilosophically dangerous enterprise, leading to a "misuse of words", bestowing "real existence" upon meanings - giving rise, that is, to Plato's ideas and to medieval realism.20

My suggestion is that although Wittgenstein, in his later philosophy, came to represent views we might regard as post-literal ones, he did not receive them from Spengler, Malinowski, or any possible similar source. Rather, he acquired these views through being directly influenced by phenomena of a secondarily oral type. To such influences Wittgenstein must have been particularly susceptible. Although he was an obsessive writer, Wittgenstein had a problematic relation to written language, especially to written language in its fully developed form: the printed book. Already in the preface to his Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, compiled in the early 1920s in the course of his activity as an elementary school teacher in Lower Austria, Wittgenstein had complained about the distorting effects of typography; and his reluctance to publish his writings is of course notorious. Here also come to mind his poor orthography; his anachronistic predilection for having people read out loud texts to him; the common observation that his favourite readings he really knew by heart; the aphorism and the dialogue as conspicuous stylistic features of his writing; and even his tendency to explain arguments by using pictures and diagrams.21

A post-literal phenomenon clearly having specific impact on Wittgenstein was the film, both in its silent and in its "talkie" versions - to apply here the terminology of the late twenties.22 Going to the movies was almost an addiction with Wittgenstein; and it is striking that he regularly used the film metaphor to illustrate philosophical points, in particular points where the relation of the signified to signs belonging to more than one media was at issue. Thus in a conversation with Schlick and others in Vienna in December 1929: "Nicht der Tonstreifen begleitet den Film, sondern die Musik. Der Tonstreifen begleitet den Bildstreifen. ... Die Musik begleitet den Film ... Die Sprache begleitet die Welt."23 In England the first "talkie" films were shown in 1928, in Vienna towards the end of 1929. Wittgenstein must have been exposed to new experiences of language through watching them, as also, earlier, through watching silent films. One is not left without possible conjectures as to the nature of those new experiences. Béla Balázs, in his book Der sichtbare Mensch, published in Vienna in 1924 - a book that soon became very influential - reflecting on the silent film makes the following observation: "In the film ... speaking is a play of facial gestures and immediately visual facial expression. They who see speaking, will learn things very different from what is learned by those who hear the words."24 Balázs, a playwright and critic, belonged to the circle of Georg Lukács, and to the circle of Robert Musil (one should be aware that there was more than one "Vienna circle"). Balázs published a second book on the film, this time on the sound film, as early as 1930, again addressing the issue of how language here comes to be seen in a new perspective.

Now even though coming to articulate linguistic intuitions characteristic of post-literacy, and developing arguments and notions which today serve as important instruments for dealing with philosophical problems pertaining to secondary orality, Wittgenstein, as I have already suggested, was not aware of the true nature of his enterprise. Not only did he never arrive at a text he was satisfied with; but his method of re-ordering, again and again, the passages in his manuscripts and typoscripts does not even leave one with the impression that he had a clear view of what he was ultimately trying to achieve. Wittgenstein does not appear to be a reliable guide as to what he was actually driven by, or striving at; the testimony of his notebooks might certainly invite a psychoanalytic interpretation. He did hit the nail on the head when he wrote, around September 1929: "In mir streubt sich ein Freudscher Widerstand gegen das Finden der Wahrheit."25 The word "sträubt" Wittgenstein himself here spells with an "e" instead of an "ä". In all other instances I have come across in his manuscripts he does get the word right. An appropriate Freudian explanation would be: his resistance is directed, really, against being coerced into standardized spelling - that is, directed against the norms of literacy, and ultimately against the recognition that his philosophical problems somehow pertained to the technique of writing, or to the alternatives to that technique. If I maintain that, all the same, it was precisely this fundamental issue which confronted Wittgenstein, my reason for this is the central place which the notion of meaning as use occupies in his arguments. To think of meaning as use means to think of language as spoken; written words are, typically, used to represent spoken words, and in this sense written words are, typically, names. Under conditions of secondary orality spoken language once more gains a certain dominance, without however losing its ties with writing. It is appropriate that in Wittgenstein's arguments references to both spoken and written signs should figure; a source of confusion, however, is that Wittgenstein himself is not aware of the radically different roles played by spoken signs on the one hand, and written signs on the other; and hence of the radically different implications his arguments can have, depending upon the examples chosen.

Let me first give two straightforward illustrations.

In a crucially important passage from August 25, 1930, Wittgenstein writes:

If I were to resolve (in my thoughts) to say "abracadabra" instead of "red", how would it show itself that "abracadabra" stood in place of "red"? How is the position of a word determined? Supposing that I were to replace all the words of my language simultaneously by others, how could I know which word stood in place of which other word? Is it here the ideas [Vorstellungen] that remain and hold fixed the positions of the words? As if there were a sort of hook attached to each idea, upon which I hang a word, which would indicate the position? This I can't believe. I cannot make myself think that ideas have a place in understanding different from that of words.26

On p.488 of TS 211, compiled in 1932, one reads: "Die Worte sind diskontinuierlich; die Wortsprache eine Abbildung durch diskontinuierliche Zeichen. Das ist einer der wichtigsten Gesichtspunkte, von der man sie betrachten muss." Here we might recall that spoken language is not a discontinuous string of words; rather, it is made up of speech acts inextricably bound up with the situations in which they play their role. Written language however is discontinuous; and in the case of written language one can say that words are pictures, in the sense that written words do indeed represent spoken words.27 Wittgenstein, here, was thinking about written language.

There are, of course, a number of crucial passages in Wittgenstein's later texts where it becomes explicit that the focus is on written, or indeed printed, language. Thus in Philosophical Investigations 167: "the mere look of a printed line is itself extremely characteristic - it presents ... a quite special appearance, the letters all roughly the same size, akin in shape too, and always recurring; most of the words constantly repeated and enormously familiar to us, like well-known faces." The tone here is friendly, reassuring, with no anxieties felt. In the Wörterbuch für Volksschulen,28 referred to above, those anxieties are not yet suppressed. This is the remark Wittgenstein makes in the (originally unpublished) preface to the dictionary: "Again and again psychological principles (where will the student look for the word, how does one guard him against confusions in the best possible manner) clash with grammatical ones (base word, derivative) and with the typographical utilization of space, with the well-organized appearance of the printed page, etc."29 Rather than strictly adhering to the principles of alphabetic order, Wittgenstein envisages various different entry arrangements. Nor does Wittgenstein invariably adhere to literary German. The Wörterbuch does not avoid dialect expressions, and includes some very common words which are typically used in speech, like "geh!" or "hierher". It even utilizes dialect pronunciation in order to bring home some grammatical points, like: "ihm, in der Mundart: 'eam', z.B.: 'I hob eam g'sogt' - ihn, in der Mundart: 'n' oder 'm', z.B.: 'I hob m g'sehn'".30

The principles of written, as contrasted with the workings of spoken, language can confuse the elementary school student; but apparently they can also lead to more profound confusions. In MS 113, this is how p.55431 begins: "Vom Substantiven verleitet, glauben wir an eine Substanz // ... verleitet, nehmen wir eine Substanz an//. Ja, wenn wir der Sprache die Zügel überlassen & nicht dem Leben, dann entstehen die philosophischen Probleme. Was ist die Zeit? - schon in der Frage liegt der Irrtum: als wäre die Frage: woraus, aus welchem Stoff, ist die Zeit gemacht."32 There follow some lines on the notion of time in mathematical calculations, and then comes, still on p.554, the well-known passage: "Die alles gleichmachende Gewalt der Sprache, die sich am krassesten im Wörterbuch zeigt, & die es möglich macht, daß die Zeit personifiziert werden konnte..."33 The reference to the dictionary of course amounts to a reference to written, and, in particular, to printed language; Wittgenstein's problem here is the power writing has in making us misunderstand the logic of our language.34 The reference to the misleading role of substantives is just one among many similar remarks by Wittgenstein; like, for instance, the one he makes on July 15, 1931: "Augustinus, wenn er vom Lernen der Sprache redet, redet ausschließlich davon, wie wir den Dingen Namen beilegen, oder die Namen der Dinge verstehen. Hier scheint also das Benennen Fundament & Um-und-Auf der Sprache zu sein. ... Von einem Unterschied der Wörter redet Augustinus nicht... Gewiß aber denkt er zunächst an Hauptwörter & an die übrigen als etwas, was sich finden wird."35

What does it mean, however: "if we leave the rein to language & not to life, then there arise the philosophical problems"? My hypothesis is that, according to Wittgenstein's actual logic, "language" here should stand for "written language"; and "life" for "spoken language". In order to prove this, let me compile some more passages from Wittgenstein's Nachlaß. The first one, providing context for the term "life": "The stream of life, or the stream of the world, flows on [alles fließt] and our propositions are so to speak verified only at instants. - Our propositions are only verified by the present."36 A second one, taking up the theme "alles fließt": "It's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux [Fluß] of appearance, but only when we philosophize. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language. - The feeling we have is that the present disappears into the past without our being able to prevent it. And here we are obviously using the picture of a film strip remorselessly [unaufhörlich] moving past us..."37 We have arrived at the film metaphor. So let us continue with the theme "film": "The whole is a talking film, and the spoken word that goes with the events on the screen is just as fleeting as those events and not the same as the sound track. The sound track doesn't accompany the scenes on the screen."38 And, taking up the term "screen", a fourth passage: "what I call a sign must be what is called a sign in grammar; something on the film, not on the screen"39.

Comparing these passages, some clear parallels and oppositions meet the eye. The sign - in "grammar", i.e. in written language - is on the film strip, i.e. on the sound track. Onto the sound track signs are written. On the other side of the divide, there is the spoken word, the screen, and fleeting events, "fließende Vorgänge". We are now almost in a position to arrive at a conclusion. Let us, however, look at one more passage dealing with the fleeting, this time Zettel 135: "Das Gespräch, die Anwendung und Ausdeutung der Worte fließt dahin, und nur im Fluß hat das Wort seine Bedeutung."40 Here the cluster is: the spoken word, application or use, and meaning. The conclusion, then: the carrier of uncorrupted meaning is spoken language; if we leave the rein to written language, philosophical problems will arise. A conclusion, to repeat, Wittgenstein himself has never explicitly drawn.

Let me end by pointing out that although by 1931 practically all the main discoveries of the later Wittgenstein have made their appearance in his manuscripts, those discoveries were, well until 1934, again and again lost sight of by him. Wittgenstein's failure to make the distinctions I have referred to earlier, distinctions between language spoken and language written, might serve as an explanation, at least in part, for this frustrating state of affairs; but also for Wittgenstein's ultimate inability to complete the "book" he always wanted to complete. Looking at Wittgenstein scholarship today, it would be difficult to deny that the profession is in a state of crisis. The point I was trying to make here is that coming to terms with the orality/literacy issue could be one of the preconditions for that crisis to be overcome.

* Substantially expanded text of a talk given at the conference Wittgenstein y el Circulo de Viena, organized by the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha with the collaboration of the Forschungsstelle und Dokumentationszentrum für Österreichische Philosophie, at Toledo, November 3-5, 1995. A drastically abridged version of the paper was presented at the 18th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 13-20 August 1995, Kirchberg am Wechsel.

1. Cf. Walter J. Ong, "The Literate Orality of Popular Culture", in: Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Ong's major monograph on the subject is his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982.

2. J.C. Nyíri, "Wittgenstein and the Problem of Machine Consciousness", Grazer Philosophische Studien 33/34 (1989), 375-394.

3. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, New York: The Free Press, 1990, p.187.

4. José Ortega y Gasset, "Comentario al Banquete de Platon", Part I: "Qué es leer", in: Ortega, Obras Completas, vol.IX, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1962, 3rd ed. 1971, pp.751-67.

5. Loc. cit., pp.757f.

6. Ibid., p.759.

7. Ibid., pp.762ff.

8. Ibid., p.765.

9. Ibid., p.765.

10. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

11. MS 302:14

12. Transl. by Harold North Fowler. Plato with an English translation, vol.I, Loeb Library, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914.

13. Philosophical Investigations, Part I, 65.

14. The Decline of the West, New York: 1934, vol.II, pp.149f.

15. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923.

16. Op. cit., p.296.

17. Ibid., p.306.

18. Ibid., pp.307 and 311.

19. Ibid., pp.312 and 307.

20. Ibid., p.308. Ogden and Richards, too, associate Platonism with specific "linguistic habits" (ibid., pp.30f.), without however recognizing the role writing here plays.

21. I owe this point to Andreas Roser.

22. See e.g Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, vol.2: 1928-1933, Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1985, pp.38ff.

23. Ludwig Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1967, p.50.

24. "Auf dem Film ... ist das Sprechen ein Mienenspiel und unmittelbar-visueller Gesichtsausdruck. Wer das Sprechen sieht, erfährt ganz andere Dinge als jener, der die Worte hört." Béla Balázs, Schriften zum Film, vol.1, Budapest: Akadémiai, 1982, p.68.

25. "There arises in me a Freudian resistance against the finding of truth", MS 107:100.

26. MS 109, pp.45f.

27. Western philosophy, ever since Plato, ascribes to spoken language, and to language generally, the attributes of written language. The definitive formula was provided by Aristotle, in the second sentence of De interpretatione: "spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds".

28. 1926 - repr. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977, eds. A. Hübner et al.

29. Loc. cit., p.XXXV, transl. by Elisabeth Leinfellner.

30. Ibid., p.15.

31. I am quoting MS 213 according to the page numbers of the copy in the Helsinki Archives. Wittgenstein compiled this manuscript late in 1931.

32. "Led astray by the substantive, we assume a substance. Indeed, if we leave the rein to language & not to life, then there arise the philosophical problems. What is time? - in the question already there lies the error: as if the question was: what from, from what material, is time made."

33. "The power language has to make everything look the same, which is most glaringly evident in the dictionary and which makes the personification of time possible", Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, p.22e.

34. Let me point out once more that it is the intuitions of written language which suggest that meaning equals naming; and of course it is this very equation which is responsible for our bewitchment by language.

35. MS 111, pp.15f. A version of this passage occurs in Philosophical Grammar (translated by Anthony Kenny, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974, p.56): "When Augustine talks about the learning of language he talks about how we attach names to things, or understand the names of things. Naming here appears as the foundation, the be all and end all of language. - Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between parts of speech... Certainly he's thinking first and foremost of nouns, and of the remaining words as something that will take care of itself." After undergoing a number of re-editings, the passage will of course reappear in 1 of Philosophical Investigations.

36. Philosophical Remarks, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975, p.81. The passage comes from MS 107, p.222: "Der Strom des Lebens, oder der Strom der Welt, fließt dahin [alles fließt] & unsere Sätze werden sozusagen nur durch Augenblicke verifiziert." The entry is from Dec. 1, 1929, and comes immediately after the psychologically crucial "Vertsag" dream (I have analysed this dream in my "Wittgenstein 1929-1931: Die Rückkehr", KODIKAS/CODE - Ars Semeiotica 4-5/2 [1982], repr. in my Gefühl und Gefüge: Studien zum Entstehen der Philosophie Wittgensteins [Studien zur Österreichischen Philosophie, ed. Rudolf Haller, vol.11], Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986, p.177, Engl. transl. in my Tradition and Individuality, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992, p.22).

37. Philosophical Remarks, p.83, from MS 108, p.32, entry of Dec. 23, 1929.

38. Philosophical Remarks, p.104. Originally: "Das gesprochene Wort im Sprechfilm, das die Vorgänge auf der Leinwand begleitet, ist ebenso fliehend // fliessend//, wie diese Vorgänge und nicht das Gleiche wie der Tonstreifen. Der Tonstreifen begleitet nicht das Spiel auf der Leinwand" (MS 113, p.519, subsequently reappearing as TS 211, p.708).

39. Philosophical Remarks, p.98.

40. "Conversation flows on, the application and interpretation of words, and only in its course do words have their meaning", translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, 2nd ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.