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PARTISAN REVIEW
attitudes toward knowledge, especially toward the enterprise of scientific as
opposed to mythic forms of explanation.
Freud, at least in his ambitions, was a true child of the Enlightenment.
Despite occasional gestures to the contrary ("The theory of instincts is, so
to say, our mythology; instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their
indefiniteness," he wrote in the
New Introductory Lectures),
he was, for the
most part, deeply committed to causal-deterministic forms of scientific
explanation, and inclined to skeptical dismissal of the claims of myth and
religion. Wittgenstein's view was very different. Though he is in many
respects the deeper skeptic of the two, his is a curious skepticism, pro–
foundly dubious about doubt itself and peculiarly sympathetic to belief.
Wittgenstein, who had been trained as an engineer, wrote that he himself
found scientific questions interesting, but never really gripping. Hypotheses,
cause and effect relationships, even the sorts of insight psychoanalysis could
offer: in his view, none of these could address the truly significant issues or
existential dilemmas of our lives. "In a way, having oneself psychoanalyzed
is like eating from the tree of knowledge. The knowledge acquired sets us
[new] ethical problems; but contributes nothing to their solution," he
wrote. Wittgenstein believed, in fact, that the causal and scientific under–
standing so prominent in our age often had the insidious effect of
concealing
important questions-by giving a false sense of inevitability and turning us
away from the richness and multiplicity of the world. "People who are con–
stantly asking 'why'," he wrote, "are like tourists who stand in front of a
building reading
Baedeker
and are so busy reading the history of its con–
struction, etc., they are prevented from
seeing
the building."
Here, perhaps, lies the most significant contrast between Freud, child of
the Enlightenment and would-be scientist of the mind, and Wittgenstein,
the near-mystic and harsh critic of the present age. Wittgenstein occasion–
ally wrote of what he saw as the greater wisdom implicit in mythic as
against scientific accounts of the world. If religious myths "explain," it is by
pos tulating enti ties that are flagrantly, even proudly, inexplicable-miracles,
gods, and the like; these do not dissipate our awe but merely focus it. By
contrast, scientific myths-and here Wittgenstein would surely have
included many of the claims of psychoanalysis-leave us with the distinct
impression that everything has been accounted for; they give us the illusion
of explaining a world that we would do better to wonder at.
We must realize, then, how very different were Wittgenstein's and
Freud's
motives
for their respective attempts to clarify hidden analogies and
pictures underlying human thought and understanding. Both men did, in
some sense, travel to the depths; but whereas Freud was searching for ulti–
mate, underlying truths, Wittgenstein's goal was to disabuse us of any such
expectation. Indeed, one might say that clarity, for Wittgenstein, was largely
