MARJORIE GRENE
275
tion-as Novalis put it, language is language of mouth and fingers :
"Mund und Fingersprache." We mime at one another in the antics
of social role-playing, including the social roles of language, Wittgen–
stein's
Sprachspiele,
because the pure expression of our thought, the
natural aim of language, always eludes us. Wittgenstein is content, at
least on the surface
(I
can't dismiss entirely Findlay'S interpretation),
to put the conventions of ordinary usage "normally" and "natural–
ly" to work. He seems to be satisfied, with Hume, that custom is
second nature. Grease the machinery and let it rip: men have always
taken naturally to their machines, become part of them: bows and
arrows, boats, cars, planes, languages. So they have , Derrida would
answer, but isn't that so precisely because we have no nature, because
everything human is something made? Custom may indeed be sec–
ond nature, but can we ask with Montaigne: what if nature were but
first custom?
Of course we can turn this reversal round again. If, as it does, our
very nature needs culture, then culture is nature; our nature. Even
what is natural to us can only become what it is through cultural arti–
facts, which thus turn out, like
Sprachspiele,
to be natural after all.
One can take it either way. Yet the difference in emphasis is glaring.
Where Wittgenstein wants to restore the artifacts of language to their
natural unreflective roles, or family of roles, Derrida wants to show us
that hope for a natural human life is vain: the artificial dominates the
natural and holds it in abeyance with every step we take-certainly
with every word we utter.
Nature is life. The roles Wittgenstein and Derrida assign to life
and death may furnish us with one more and, it seems to me, culmi–
nating, contrast between their views of language . What does the
word "life" (strictly
Leben
and
vie
respectively) mean to each of
them? What does this key word do in their respective prescriptions
for treating our philosophic ills? Physicians in general are supposed
to want to save life and to fight the enemy death. So it seems to be
with Wittgensteinian therapy. Language games of every style from
mathematics to religion must be freed from the self-consciousness
that philosophical reflection chronically produces and let live again,
each in its own way. Philosophy is a kind of stage-fright; that's death,
or at least the image of death . We should learn to master it . We
should learn to be able to abandon reflection when we like and get
