Fluent

‘I’d like you to be the one who tells him.’ There is not a word in it a child would not know, and nine days after hearing it, a man says he still cannot tell what his sister wants.

The companion reaches for the lion. In the revised fourth edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which prints what was Part II as Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment, it is §327: ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.’ Taken on its own, the remark can seem to describe a gap no words could cross, and a gap like that brings a certain comfort, since nothing can be done about it.

Two remarks before it, in §325, Wittgenstein is writing about people. He says that ‘one human being can be a complete enigma to another’, and that we learn this in a country with entirely strange traditions, where having the language is not enough: ‘One does not understand the people’, and ‘We can’t find our feet with them’. Between that remark and the lion, §326 calls the claim that we cannot know what is going on in another person a picture, one that expresses a conviction and does not supply the reasons for it.

Read together, §§325 and 326 put the difficulty among people who share a language. Knowing what someone’s words mean need not tell us what they are doing with them, or why a response matters, and, as the companion says, a brother is not exempt. Beside those remarks the lion looks like what it is in this session, a temptation. There is more than one thing a man can mean when he says he does not understand his sister.

Left open

Whose every word do we understand, without ever quite finding our feet with them?

What might not understanding them be saving us from?