The Problem of action and the problem of language: the "late" Wittgenstein as an anthropologist

Kulikov Anton Kirillovich Assistant, Department of Humanities, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125167, Russia, gorod Moskva, g. Moscow, ul. Leningradskii Prospekt, 51, korpus 1 anton.kuliko@yandex.ru

Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein is so popular among modern logicians and philosophers (both domestic and foreign), every word of his has been interpreted and reinterpreted in every way so many times that any claim to present the philosopher in a new light is doomed to seem amateurish and unfounded in advance. No matter what aspect of Wittgenstein's thought we take and from whatever angle we look at it, among the countless researchers and admirers of the author of the "Logical and Philosophical Treatise", there will certainly be those who have already done this before. Such a situation pushes us to start work not with any theoretical prerequisites and pre-accepted models, which would then be matched by Wittgenstein's aphorisms, appearing at the same time as an authoritative "supporter" of a particular theory, but on the contrary – with a refusal from those premises that Wittgenstein himself rejected.

This work, devoted to the relationship between the problem of action and the problem of language in the philosophy of the "late" Wittgenstein, proceeds from the antitheoretical and anti–formalist pathos of Wittgenstein - well-known and at the same time diligently obscured by theorists in the field of logic, philosophy of language, theory of action. The attempts to formalize Wittgenstein, paradoxical in their design and each time justifying their paradoxicity in a new way, have been made by philosophers for the last fifty years. Among foreign researchers, the works of J. Hintikka ^{[1, pp. 246-248],[2]} can serve as a striking example, among domestic ones – the studies of V. L. Vasyukov, E. G. Dragalina-Chernaya ^[3], V. V. Dolgorukova ^[4]. This powerful tradition, which finds in Wittgenstein a logician and the founder of analytical philosophy, should be contrasted with another Wittgenstein: an anthropologist who conceptualizes the phenomenon of action in an original way and proves that human activity does not lend itself to any formalization, criticizing the very idea of logical analysis of language.

Thus, through the negative definition of Wittgenstein's general pathos, one can come to a positive description of his plan and results. This is the main purpose of the work – to find out what is the constructive meaning of Wittgenstein's criticism of the formalist and intellectualist description of action and language. In other words, what positive contribution can Wittgenstein's antitheoretical pathos make to the scientific and philosophical research of action and language, which is inevitably associated with the construction of theoretical models?

Problem and research method

One of the main problems that an anthropologist (especially a philosophical anthropologist) faces in real work is the inevitable theoretical break with the practice that a scientist is trying to comprehend. This gap is inevitable and fruitful for philosophy and science: a person's ordinary, pre-reflexive understanding of himself and his actions should be included in the subject of anthropological research, but cannot be its methodological and ideological basis. But here lies the main danger: forgetting the price, such a gap, the epistemological and social conditions of its possibility. The thinker looks at the action from the outside: he explores, interprets the action and does nothing else with it.

We will point out only one extremely problematic effect associated with the researcher's own detachment from the action he is studying: the effect of scholastic detemporalization of practice, which one of the greatest anthropologists of the XX century critically comprehended. Pierre Bourdieu as a follower of Wittgenstein ^{[5, p. 230]} paid so much attention ^{[5, p. 103],[6, p. 40]}. The researcher takes up the case already "after the fight", according to Max Weber, the actual scientific practice is "turned off" from the duration, from the temporal structure into which the practice he analyzes is incorporated and which he is trying to beat. All this leads to a tendency to see in practice something like a direct linear relationship between the "initial" and "final" state of affairs. Therefore, the practice is described through references to a set of reasons (from the "past") and / or to acts of choice and goal-setting (associated with the "future").

In fact, all such states of affairs are not static, but dynamic: they can only be recorded as transitions to new positions, and practice is never directly determined by them: it is not formed by the unchanging necessities of the past, on the one hand, and not purely open, still uncertain possibilities of the future, on the other. Practice correlates with a whole range of more or less likely strategies for its execution, and they often have to be replaced "on the go", depending on the situation, through new strategies, reinterpreting or denying the meaning and significance of the already committed ones. For an agent, it is the ability to beat both the future and the past already in the course of practice itself, varying and re-playing his own strategies, to a great extent determines his practice, which imposes significant restrictions on both "determinism of goals" and "determinism of causes".

The problem of the theoretical gap made by anthropology and the theory of action with real action (in particular, with language understood as activity) is, in essence, the problem of the very conditions of the possibility of anthropology. To comprehend it and find ways to resolve it, it seems fruitful to turn to the legacy of the philosopher who threw all his strength into eliminating this gap and the book wisdom associated with it – Wittgenstein.

The following methods are used in the study: synthetic and historical-analytical methods, hermeneutical interpretation and comparative analysis of texts. Comparative analysis makes it possible to identify the main similarities between Wittgenstein's critique of formalism and anthropological studies of the turn of the XX–XXI centuries (on the example of Bourdieu). Hermeneutical interpretation of the writings of Wittgenstein and a number of later thinkers (philosophers, linguists, anthropologists), who gravitated towards formalism and intellectualism, will allow us to show that these thinkers fall under Wittgenstein's criticism, thereby showing the relevance of this criticism. Historical analysis will reveal that the analysis of action and language, the collision with their formalist interpretations, is not a particular feature in Wittgenstein's work, but one of its key aspects, the study of which is able to point out new perspectives of philosophical anthropology and philosophy of language.

Action and theoretical attitude to action

Ludwig Wittgenstein's reflections on the phenomenon of action are directed primarily against attempts at an intellectualist and formalist description of action in terms of rules and abstract schemes. In simple and concise theses, Wittgenstein shows that such a philosophy, which depicts an action consciously, explicitly focused on a set of goals, rules, interests, or even more so – the supposed responses from other people (as in interactionists), is based on a number of premises uncritically borrowed from simple common sense. These premises usually do not become a matter of doubt, but in fact they do not stand up to critical analysis.

As it is said in "Notebooks 1914-1916", "It seems that the will should always relate to Representation. We cannot, for example, imagine an act of will without discovering that we have carried it out.

It is clear: it is impossible to express will without no longer representing an act of will.

The act of will is not the cause of the action, but the action itself.

No one can express his will without action" ^{[7, p. 87]}.

Indeed, if an action is carried out in accordance with a consciously accepted goal, then the definition of this goal itself as a separate action needs another goal for its implementation, and the pursuit of the goal after its adoption should have a separate goal of its own. If interests, needs, or motives are something different from the action they prompt, then new interests or needs would be needed to solve them. If an action is regulated by a rule, then there is also a rule according to which it would be adopted, as well as a rule for applying this rule, etc.

These thoughts of Wittgenstein are highlighted by modern researchers: foreign (M. Scott ^[8], D. Davidson ^{[9, p. 10-11]}) and Russian (A. S. Mishura ^[10]). However, their analysis of the non-phenomenal nature of the will, the "non-phenomenal aspect of the action", the non-conditionality of the action by the idea of the expected result, etc. remains insufficient. It is not enough to fix this position of Wittgenstein and correlate it with the data of experimental psychology, as Tinsel does, it is also necessary to understand and expose what it was built against by the author of "Philosophical Studies": what is the reason for the extreme stability of ideas about the determination of action by rules, conscious goals, "will" in the sense of phenomenal experience?

Wittgenstein is persistent in establishing and clarifying a deep difference between a scientist, or philosophical, and a real-practical attitude to action, i.e. between the point of view of a theoretical thinker who observes the commission of an action from the outside, and the point of view of a person who actually performs this action, directly participating in it. The thinker, thanks primarily to his scholarly leisure, is able to separate himself from his actions, he has the opportunity to "get out of the game" and reflect on it. He implicitly puts such a research attitude of the interpreter to his own actions into the heads of all acting people. In addition, he himself does not put vital, practical meaning into other people's actions, he strives to understand them only in order to understand.

Therefore, the thinker, firstly, does not know that becoming action as an incomplete process, which is directly familiar and understandable from the inside to those who are immersed in it, but knows what has already become purely externally an action that is opaque to him as an object. Secondly, he can make this objectified action understandable to himself only by deciphering it as a kind of encoded message, understanding its "meaning", as if this meaning was deliberately put into it by someone, as if the action was intended for such an interpretation. Thus, the researcher is forced to hypostatize various speculative abstractions, such as goals, rules, or rational planning and calculation, understood by him as special realities that exist on a par with the action, as if standing behind it and defining it.

But in reality, the action would be impossible with any attempt to consciously correlate it with such mental guidelines. After all, any analysis or planning of actions themselves are also actions, it turns out that for their implementation it would be necessary to interrupt one activity that has already begun and engage in another – planning itself, but this latter would no longer be guided by any other planning, it would be done simply because it was being done. As Wittgenstein writes: "How can I follow a certain rule?”if it's not a question of the reasons, then it's a question of the grounds that I'm acting in agreement with him in this way. Having exhausted my foundations, I will reach the rocky ground, and my shovel will bend. In this case, I am inclined to say: "This is how I act"" ^{[11, p. 167]}.

Wittgenstein shows that any motive can theoretically be connected with any action: "Let's think about how, after Schubert's death, his brother cut his scores into small pieces and gave these pieces several bars in size to Schubert's favorite students. Such an act, as a sign of piety, is as understandable as the exact opposite: if the scores were kept intact, not accessible to anyone. And even if my brother had burned the scores, it could also be understood as a sign of piety" ^{[12, p. 254]}.

In the same way, we could bring any rule convenient for us under the action in question, because any incoherence can be given the appearance of a kind of order: "And imagine that he does not adhere to some single method of transcription, but changes it according to the following simple rule. Having once written A as n, he will write the next A as o, the next as p, etc. So where is the boundary between this procedure and random? Doesn't this mean that the word "reproduce" here, in fact, loses its meaning, because it turns out that when it is explained, it spreads into nothing" ^{[11, p. 146]}.

All this does not mean that the action should be interpreted as being performed unconsciously or purely instinctively, or, say, as an automatic response to an external stimulus. Wittgenstein's philosophy overcomes such fictitious, false oppositions as conscious and unconscious, free and forced, automatism and calculation.

Using simple examples, it is not difficult to show that most human actions are neither a mechanical submission to instinct, nor the result of a rationally transparent choice or calculation. Obeying a policeman in a public place, following the instructions of a teacher at school, buying a subway ticket, holding out a hand to a friend or starting to read a book in a language known to us, we commit meaningful and completely controlled actions, moreover, we feel that we (in a certain sense!) we understand and realize that all of them are aimed at achieving certain goals. All this cannot be considered simple automatism in the spirit of animal behavior.

But it is quite clear that at the same time we do not presuppose any conscious calculation or rational choice to these actions and do not recall a set of rules or plans when we commit them. We don't ask ourselves in the park or at school, should we fulfill the requirements of a law enforcement officer or a teacher? Or – on what basis should they be obeyed (if necessary)? When buying a ticket, shaking hands or reading a book, we do not think about why it is necessary and how best to do it? We already know how and for what. We know – but not because of conscious calculation, but because of our practical sense, that sense of life, which Wittgenstein often mentions.

Knowing does not necessarily mean thinking and being aware. All our basic knowledge is not mental knowledge, but rather bodily, implicit, never clearly thematized. Wittgenstein gives many examples of bodily, implicit knowledge: "Don't I also know that not a single staircase in this house goes six floors deep, even if I never thought about it?" and further – "I know that for the last month I took a bath every day." What do I remember? Every day and a bath every morning? No. I know that I took a bath every day, and I do not deduce this from some other direct data. <...> Isn't my understanding just blindness to my own misunderstanding? I often think so" ^{[13, pp. 371-372]}. Let us also quote "Philosophical Studies": ""To keep this in mind" does not mean to think about it at all" ^{[11, p. 259]}.

Thus, it must be recognized that action and speech as a form of action are meaningful without the act of making sense, purposeful without the act of goal-setting, reasonable and controlled without the act of calculation. It is pointless to try to imagine their intelligibility and expediency as the results of a special intellectual or spiritual activity, as if behind the "external" actions there was still a person's "inner" activity preparing and comprehending them: "Don't think at all about understanding as a "mental process"! For this is just a turn of speech that confuses you. And ask yourself in what case, under what circumstances, we say, “Now I know how to continue,” when I came up with the formula. In the sense in which there are processes characteristic of understanding (including mental processes), understanding is not a mental process" [ibid., p. 141].

So far, our conclusions have been mostly negative. But if intellectualist concepts are not suitable for describing action, what new thinking tools can replace them? Wittgenstein's positive answer is given in his analysis of language games, in which the problem of action and the problem of language are considered from the same angle.

Criticism of the formalist analysis of language (as an activity)

Wittgenstein's philosophy of action is the key to his understanding of language, because Wittgenstein interprets language as an activity.

In order to understand the specific meaning of Wittgenstein's aphorisms devoted to the study of language, it seems useful and convenient to compare his analysis of language with the diametrically opposite analysis given in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Wittgenstein's ideas act as an exposure of those powerful, often unspoken premises on which the intellectualist linguistics of Saussure and his numerous followers are based.

Noticing from the very beginning that "the object does not predetermine the point of view at all; on the contrary, it can be said that here the point of view creates the object itself" ^{[14, p. 16]}, Saussure gets up with real speaking practices in the same detached attitude that we talked about earlier in relation to the theoretical analysis of action. A special subject of his linguistics has yet to be built at the cost of colossal abstraction and a break with speech as a concrete application of language in practice. Saussure proves – referring, in particular, to the existence of dead languages, the possibility of objective errors in the use of language, etc. – that the real medium of human communication is not speech in its material-sensory specificity and variability, but language as a purely intelligible system of objective relations and connections, in which and thanks to which individual signs receive its own meaning. Speech is given meaning only because it is backed by this abstract relational system of encoding and decoding meanings, this code is the key to decoding it.

It is obvious that against such a distinction between real speaking and its ideal meaning, speech as an action and language as a means of giving meaning to speech, all the arguments that we presented earlier can be applied, speaking about attempts to see behind the action of its speculative correlate, a kind of "signified" of this action in the form of its guiding purpose, rules or a rational choice. Wittgenstein writes: "They say: we are not talking about the word, but about its meaning; and at the same time they imagine the meaning as an object of the same kind as the word, although different from it. Here is the word, and here is its meaning. Money and a cow that can be bought with it. (But on the other hand: money and its use)" ^{[11, p. 129]}. However, in the light of all that has been said, it is clear that the meaning of a word or sentence cannot be a mental abstraction, it is indistinguishable from the very way of using this word.

Saussure draws a watershed between external and internal linguistics, "external" and "internal" points of view on language. Internal linguistics seeks to understand the linguistic structure based only on itself, from its internal structural moments. External linguistics explores the diverse external circumstances of the emergence, preservation and development of language: climatogeographic, socio-political, etc. ^{[14, pp. 28-31]}. Saussure insists that a genuine analysis of language, linguistic analysis proper, can only follow the "inner path", it consists in discovering the immanent laws and logic of the linguistic structure that constitutes the language of the system of differences. The external analysis of this structure inevitably runs along the periphery and does not concern language itself as an autonomous objective medium of communication.

It is curious that Saussure explains his idea of the independence of internal linguistics from external linguistics and the greater importance of the former in relation to the latter using the metaphor of the game, comparing language with the game of chess [ibid., p. 31].

But is this analogy valid? Is it possible to compare language with an intellectual game that is played at leisure, for its own sake, for intellectual pleasure, while really abstracting from external, for example, social circumstances for a while? Is this the attitude of a real speaking subject (Saussure would say "language user") to the language he uses?

Wittgenstein's language games are of a completely different kind: here we are no longer talking about intellectual fun that breaks with practical considerations and external conditions, but, on the contrary, about the inextricable connection of language with the life circumstances of its application: "I will also call a single whole a "language game": language and the actions with which it is intertwined" ^{[11, p. 83]}, says Wittgenstein, and further – "The term "language game" is intended to emphasize that speaking a language is a component of activity or a form of life" [ibid., p. 90].

It is worth noting that even among the students of Saussure himself, we find ideas in which it is impossible not to see doubts – nowhere openly expressed – in the legitimacy of a purely internal analysis of language. And these ideas, on closer examination, surprisingly accurately correspond to Wittgenstein's arguments and observations.

Thus, Charles Bally notes that usually incomplete, emotionally colored sentences of oral speech are possible only due to the empirical, vital and practical context of their use, whereas written speech is devoid of purely practical, non-verbal saturation and is forced to resort to more or less artificial, complex linguistic inventions to make up for its absence ^{[15, 134]}. The actual language structure, interpreted as a self-sufficient education, belongs exclusively to the written language. Internal linguistics participates in the creation of the fetish of the printed word, as Bally called it [ibid., p. 96]: a written and codified language – the language of literature, official documents, education and science – is described by it as a kind of "language" in general, natural and unique, whereas in fact it is created purely artificially by the work of many professionals and coexists with many different variants of a really practiced spoken language.

Wittgenstein also notes that there is no way to talk about a certain language in general, as linguistics usually does. There is not one logically verified language codified in educational and scientific literature, but a great many mutating, emerging and disappearing ad hoc languages, the structure of which is consistent with the practical context of their origin and use: these are its language games. "Without taking into account the variety of language games," it says in Philosophical Studies, "you will probably be inclined to ask questions like: "What is a question?” Is it a statement of my ignorance of this or a statement of my desire for another person to inform me about...? Or is it a description of my mental state of uncertainty? And the call “Help!” is this also a description?" ^{[11, pp. 90-91]}.

Wittgenstein and Bally, in fact, express most of the main remarks of such a well–known critic of structuralist linguistics as Mikhail Bakhtin: a philologist, says Bakhtin, works with a foreign, dead, written word - it is in an attempt to read a foreign, dead language that the idea of an internal analysis of the linguistic structure as a key serving to decipher it arises ^{[16, p. 409]}. Internal linguistics in the spirit of Saussure spontaneously begins to describe every language as dead, and an extremely rare specifically scientific attitude to language is laid in the heads of all people. A philologist working with a foreign language strives to find the common and repetitive in it, to find patterns that would allow him to understand it, but at the same time declares these patterns deduced by himself for his own purposes an objective reality, the true basis of language: about his model he speaks as a real force constituting the practice of speaking and writing. In reality, as Bakhtin reminds, a person does not simply seek to learn something always identical and repetitive in the interlocutor's remarks, on the contrary, his task is to understand, catch that unique, unique thing that speech owes to each specific life situation [ibid., p. 404].

Wittgenstein also speaks about this, protesting against attempts to portray language as a logically closed stable structure: "There are countless such types – the types of use of all that we call "signs", "words", "sentences" are infinitely diverse. And this multiplicity does not represent something stable, given once and for all" ^{[11, p. 90]}.

Further, Bakhtin points out that speaking subjects do not interact at all with a word from the dictionary, with a word in the sense of linguists: "We, in fact, never pronounce words and do not hear words, but hear truth or falsehood, good or evil, important or unimportant, pleasant or unpleasant, etc.The word is always filled with ideological or vital content and meaning" ^{[16, p. 406]}. Language is the "arena of class struggle", and not some conflict–free, neutral logical whole, it is a stake in social conflicts, and the science of language cannot ignore this. Internal linguistics in the spirit of Saussure, Bakhtin argues, emasculates from language its vital ideological content, its social meaning, and therefore deals only with an empty and purely fictitious abstraction.

Wittgenstein, in one passage, argues that attempts to imitate someone else's game for the sake of the game itself, involving the removal of the game from the context, from the form of life in which and for which it is played, lead to the loss of the authentic meaning of this game and to its replacement with another, newly created meaning: "When children play in railway, their game is related to their knowledge of the railway. The children of some primitive tribe that does not know the railways, could adopt this game from others and play it, unaware that thereby they imitate something that really exists. One could say that the game for them would not have the same meaning as for us" ^{[11, p. 180]}. Similarly, for a theoretical attitude to language, for a researcher who is not familiar with language practically, but builds a system of abstract norms as an abstract surrogate of a real, active attitude to a living language, language games do not and cannot have the same meaning as for people playing them.

The formalist, logical analysis of language is violence against language, it is an attempt to find in language and attribute to language what is not in it. The famous passage from "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics" devoted to the liar's paradox is very indicative in this regard: "But there is a contradiction here! – Well, yes, there is a contradiction here. And what does it interfere with here? Does the contradiction that arises when someone says, “I'm lying. Therefore, I am not lying. Therefore, I am lying. – Etc."? I mean: does our language become less usable due to the fact that in this case, according to the usual rules, its opposite can be deduced from one sentence, and the first sentence from it again?" ^{[17, pp. 55-56]}.

Modern logicians (Dragalina ^[3], Dolgorukov ^[4]), who seek to find in Wittgenstein's language games the possibility of constructing formal models, often see in his attitude to paradoxes simply the establishment of a criterion for the uselessness of a language game (it is useless if a paradox arises in it): "The paradox is evidence of the futility of the original formulation of the problem, and, consequently, the irrationality of all that it a priori assumed to be rational" ^{[3, p. 79]}. But, firstly, rationality and irrationality have nothing to do with it: these mysterious terms (it is impossible to rationally define the criteria of rationality, since there are no such criteria yet) they have nothing to do with language games and are practically not found in Wittgenstein. Secondly, this interpretation makes Wittgenstein's paradox just a logical consequence of tacitly accepted premises of the game. But such a position would be pure relativism, paradoxical by its very nature, because his main thesis about the relativity of any paradox that occurs only in some language games and only for them, in itself would not be relative, but absolute, and would not belong to any language game itself. But this is not possible in Wittgenstein's philosophy. In fact, for him, the point is not that paradoxes logically follow from the basic provisions of a particular language, but in a scientific attitude to the language, not in logical, but in the vital practical prerequisites of the game. It is not the language game itself that creates paradoxes, but those who play it – if they are placed in the specific conditions of a theoretical scientist, in particular, logic.

The logician does not discover paradoxes and other logical problems in the language as logical, as if they existed in it and by themselves, waiting for them to be discovered. Only a specific theoretical attitude to language allows him to invent these problems in the course of purely artificial and abstract treatment of language removed from the context of its actual use (it is enough to recall the "bald king of France"!). Logical analysis of language is something like a long painful torture inflicted on language, during which the language is forced to admit that it contains such and such contradictions, that it obeys such and such rules, etc. In fact, neither these contradictions nor the rules constitute any problem, have no practical significance, and in this sense do not exist at all before and independently of the logical anatomy of the language ^{[18, p. 415]}. What Wittgenstein says about mathematics: "A mathematician is an inventor, not a discoverer" ^{[17, p. 52]} is equally true in relation to a logician and a linguist.

The question of the price at which a theoretical break with action and language is made, how the model artificially created by the theorist, designed to explain human activity and, in particular, the language game, and the practical reality of this activity relate to each other, is often hushed up and tacitly resolved with the help of such ambiguous concepts, as a rule. Structuralism is particularly adept at maneuvering between rules in the sense of a model created to explain actions and rules in the sense of norms consciously adopted by those who commit these actions: Bourdieu has repeatedly pointed this out ^{[5, pp. 191-192]}.

In Philosophical Studies, Wittgenstein is ironic about such ambiguities of intellectualist terminology: "What do I call 'the rule by which he acts'? – A hypothesis that satisfactorily describes the use of words observed by us; or the rule by which he is guided in the use of signs; or what he tells us in response to our question about his rule? – But what if the observation does not allow you to clearly establish the rule and does not help clarify the issue? After giving me, for example, to my question about what he understands by “N”, this or that definition, he was immediately ready to take it back and somehow change it. – Well, how to determine the rule by which he plays? He doesn't know it himself. – Or rather: what should the phrase "The rule by which he acts" mean in this case?" ^{[11, p. 118]}.

The linguistic structures and norms of Saussure can serve as a living illustration of this reasoning, as well as in many respects the generative grammars of Noem Chomsky, which Chomsky himself literally declares on one page either hypothetical structures that "need to be postulated" to systematize and explain speaking, or a "very abstract" system of norms that he consciously guides himself. the speaker, then an innate "property of any mind", finally – neuropsychic structures, an element of the biological constitution of a person ^{[19, pp. 96-97]}.

This also undoubtedly includes Claude Levi-Strauss, who notes in his structural analysis of myths that "there is neither a real limit to the analysis of myths, nor a hidden integrity that could be caught as a result of decomposition work. The themes multiply to infinity <...> the unity of the myth manifests itself only as a project and a trend, but not as a state of the myth itself. This unity is an imaginary phenomenon generated by the efforts of interpretation" ^{[20, p. 15]}. However, then he says: "We are trying to show not how people think in myths, but how myths think in people without their knowledge. And, perhaps, it is worth going even further, abstracting from any subject and considering myths as thinking themselves in a certain sense" [ibid., p. 20]. It turns out that the "imaginary phenomenon generated by the efforts of interpretation" also turns out to be a real substantial force: a myth that thinks of itself. Similarly, in "Untamed Thought" we read: "Since the mind is also a thing, the functioning of this thing allows us to comprehend the nature of things, even pure reflection is reduced to the internalization of the cosmos" ^{[21, p. 456]}. One can see how in such formulations the researcher hesitates between the idea of the essential, internal identity of the mind and its object ("mind is a thing") and the identity achieved as a result of learning and research ("interiorization of the cosmos").

On the way out of the traps of formalism

Wittgenstein opposes his own method of research to all the spells of intellectualism, which structuralism is particularly rich in (the word "method" here, of course, does not mean a set of abstract rules, but rather a set of useful habits, cognitive attitudes oriented to practical work): "All we achieve is, in fact, observations on the natural history of people; moreover, not the extraction of curiosities, but the statement of what no one doubted, which escaped our attention only because it was constantly before our eyes" ^{[11, p. 209]}. It is the clarification of platitudes, like following a rule, that reveals the most amazing things that are usually overlooked and not questioned because of their banality. Remarks on the natural history of people are a refutation of book wisdom, the desire to give this story such logic, rigor and meaningfulness, which it does not possess in itself. One of the most important problems of any study of a person and his activities is precisely that our thinking tools, concepts and methods are much more rigorous and logical than the subject under study. Hence the risk of replacing the real object with a purely speculative abstraction.

Wittgenstein warns: "We don't need to develop any theory. Something hypothetical is wrong in our reasoning. We should abandon any explanation and replace it only with a description" [ibid., p. 127]. Wittgenstein himself in the study of language games requires the construction of open concepts. Their flexibility and some uncertainty are opposed to the false strictures of logic and positivist methodology (with its demands for precise "preliminary definitions", etc.) and do not mean ambiguity or uselessness at all, but adequately express the nature of the subject of his research. "We can say that the concept of 'games' is a concept with vague boundaries," he notes, "But is a vague concept a concept at all?” Is a fuzzy photograph even an image of a person? Is it always advisable to replace a fuzzy image with a clear one? Isn't the indistinct often just what we need? Frege compares the concept with some outlined area and says that with unclear outlines it cannot be called a region at all. This means, perhaps, that it is of little use. But is it pointless to say: “Stand approximately there!”?» [ibid., p. 113].

The use of open concepts with "vague boundaries" allows us to get away from the objectifying, detached-theoretical view of language as a closed system of rules and structures, as a ready-made logical whole, impenetrable for direct understanding and in need of deciphering. This means getting closer to a practical, vital attitude to language as diverse games associated with various changeable external circumstances. All the infinite variety of game situations, of course, cannot be covered by any arbitrarily detailed system of rules, it is clear that the game is creative, and each specific situation in it requires a special, unique maneuver that no rules will prompt.

This does not mean that there are no rules in the game at all, or that they do not mean anything – there is no automatism of rules: rules do not control and, as we have seen, cannot control people's actions directly, rules are not enough for the game to take place (accordingly, it is not enough to study the rules in order to successfully play, just as it is not enough to read textbooks and dictionaries for language acquisition). The most ingenious strategies in the game are aimed at beating the rules themselves in their favor, justifying their actions with them, provoking violations on the part of the opponent, etc. The uncertainty of the rules, the inevitable lacunae and ambiguities, which also become both bets and tools in the game, are of great importance in the game.

At the heart of any language game, there are undoubtedly many implicit, unspoken prerequisites that can regulate the course of the game and limit its participants, but these prerequisites have nothing to do with a system of explicit rules or conscious conventions. In the treatise "On Authenticity" Wittgenstein describes these unspoken, practically assimilated prerequisites of the language game as a "picture of the world" associated with it. The basic prerequisites of the game cannot be questioned or made the subject of reflection (this would mean leaving one game and doing another, while, of course, no longer questioning the prerequisites of this last, but always already relying on them), because they only make it possible doubt is within the scope of this game. They are not assimilated in the course of rational and transparent study or memorization. "A child learns by believing an adult. Doubt comes after faith"^{[13, p. 343]}, Wittgenstein writes.

Then we read: "94. But I did not find my picture of the world by confirming its correctness, and I also adhere to this picture not because I was convinced of its correctness. Not at all: this is an inherited experience, based on which I distinguish between true and false.

95. Sentences describing this picture of the world could be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is similar to the role of the rules of the game; the game can be mastered purely practically, without memorizing any explicit rules" [ibid., p. 335].

Modern researchers (Rodin ^[22], Dragalina ^[23]) actively turn to Wittgenstein's teaching about rules and about the form of life as the basis of the language game. However, their conclusions tend more often to intellectualism. For example, referring to J. Bouvress, Dragalina notes that "a social convention is not an agreement of opinions, but a form of life," and following the rule is characterized by "creativity of use" [ibid., p. 90]. This is true and fully corresponds to Wittgenstein's thought, but without a number of important additions, such "creativity of use" will lead us rather to Chomsky's formalism with its generative grammars than to language games. It is necessary to clarify that the rules that really guide people are not intelligible structures, general patterns of behavior, consciously creatively applied to a particular situation, but rather pre-reflexive dispositions of a form of life. The form of life is assimilated bodily, not mentally, the rules are applied not only creatively, but also due to the spontaneity of the practical "sense of play" developed in a particular game.

A striking example of the scientific fruitfulness of these conclusions of Wittgenstein, as well as the general pathos of his work, can be the socioanalysis of Bourdieu, who built his concept of habitus largely based on Wittgenstein's understanding of action, and the concept of the field – based on the concept of language game. In one of his interviews, Bourdieu speaks about the field in almost Wittgenstein's words: "We can indeed, with caution, compare the field with a game (jeu), although unlike the latter, the field is not the product of intentional acts of creation, and it follows rules or, better, regularities that are not explicit and codified <...> Players agree, by virtue of the very fact of the game, and not by means of a “contract”, that the game is worth playing, that it is “worth the candle”, and this implicit collusion is the very basis of their competition" ^{[24, p. 98]}. We have just seen that this kind of implicit collusion is the only thing that can constitute a language game.

But Bourdieu had even more reason to call himself a follower of Wittgenstein because his concepts were not theoretically abstractions intended for abstract speculation about society or language, they were working and, above all, open concepts that received concrete meaning only in the course of empirical research directed by them. The French anthropologist spoke about concepts as a researcher 's tools: "I could also, and mainly, appeal to those who, like Wittgenstein, declared open concepts to be a heuristic virtue, and who revealed the "closure effect" of too well-constructed concepts, "preliminary definitions" and other false strictures of positivist methodology <...> I suspect that some concepts I have constructed can produce a vague the impression, if we consider them as a product of conceptual work, but I myself tend to make them function in empirical analysis, rather than allow them to “spin around”: each of these concepts (I think, for example, about the concept of a field) is in some way a search program and the principle of avoiding a whole set of errors. Concepts can – and to some extent, should – remain open, temporary, which does not mean to be vague, approximate or confused" ^{[6, p. 41]}.

Wittgenstein 's legacy has been linked more than once with the development of anthropology and sociology in the XX century . Among modern Russian authors, Rodin's works on this topic are notable. But his results are more negative: the analysis done, he writes in one of his articles, "does not allow us to assert the existence of a serious dependence of ethnomethodology or even Bloor (who sometimes only embeds his own interpretation of Wittgenstein into a long-existing sociological context) on Wittgenstein" ^{[22, p. 32]}. In my opinion, this does not need any proof: neither Bloor nor Garfinkel and ethnomethodologists are close to Wittgenstein. Discussion of the views of Peter Winch (whose ideological ties with Wittgenstein, in fact, are much more significant) it does not lead the researcher to any specific methodological or philosophical-anthropological conclusions. It's amazing that Rodin doesn't even mention Bourdieu's name at the same time!

Whereas it is Bourdieu's example that shows that Wittgenstein's critical arguments do not paralyze anthropology and linguistics, but feed science with new methodological requirements and precautions that may well lead to positive results without any formalist violence against Wittgenstein's legacy. Of course, it is necessary to avoid the temptation to accept Wittgenstein's aphorisms themselves for a scientific, linguistic or anthropological study of action and language – for some already formed theoretical model. But we undoubtedly find a powerful foundation and incentive for building such a model, less strict and therefore more humane, closer to real human activity, in them.

Conclusion

Thus, it becomes clear that the most closely related research in the field of philosophy of action and philosophy of language in the "late" Wittgenstein is not just a criticism and denial of intellectualist and formal-theoretical attempts to comprehend human behavior – too strict, too logical and too abstract for such a subject – but it is also a positive program of its study. This is a program based on rethinking the cognitive tools and prerequisites of scientific analysis, among which the theoretical gap with real actions and practical application of language is especially important.

The scientist observes the action and, in particular, speaking from the outside, without linking his practical interests with them, he does not know a time-stretched, unfinished action, the meaning of which has not yet been determined, so in fact it can still be turned and beaten depending on the situation. This situativeness and uncertainty, linked to the form of life, with an extra-linguistic, practical context, and breathes life into the language game. The scientist is then able to adequately understand the language when he also makes his own scientific attitude to the language the subject of his analysis. Only in this way can we hope to transform Wittgenstein's antitheoretical pathos into the basis of a constructive study of language in which the language actually used by living people would not be replaced by its abstract speculative model.