Wittgenstein And Rape
This is a topic that I am least qualified to write about. I am not female, and thus am unlikely to be subject to rape. My imagination is quite unable to construct a facsimile of the experience of rape. If I were female it would be otherwise.
A spirited email exchange was conducted yesterday between myself and several friends on the topic of “attempted rape.” A candidate for the Supreme Court of the United States has been accused. The alleged event is said to have occurred some thirty five years ago when he and the female were high school students. She says that it happened to her. He says that he does not remember, and thus how could he have done something that he does not remember.
Rape by common agreement is assault in the extreme, leaving lasting trauma, a sense of degradation, of enduring existential damage. Thus it follows for life together in what we call civilization, a society of humane order, a social context where it is sufficiently safe to care for children, to raise them to adulthood, —rape is forbidden. Rape merits the severest of legal sanctions. Rape and its attempt is a felony. This behavior is classed in severity with murder. That is what, by agreement, we mean by rape.
The accusation of attempted rape could not be more serious. Is the accuser making this up, conjured up out-of-whole-cloth as we would say? Or are there ancillary circumstances pointing to a nexus event, that an attempted rape occurred, and the accused was present? Its one way or the other. There is no distributed middle.
If the latter, Kavanaugh should not be approved to sit on the Supreme Court. Why? Because of his repudiation of the woman’s assertion that he was the agent of the action, showing his confusion regarding the function of telling the truth. “To tell the truth” is one of the first and most important lessons that we strive to convey to every child. To do less, to fail at this lesson is to lose what is meant by civilization, by a civil society.
To see this in any other way, by another rule, is to speak another language-game, to speak in advocacy of another way of life. We are speaking different languages.
Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.
–excerpt Philosophical Investigations v23 by Ludwig Wittgenstein
2 thoughts on “Wittgenstein And Rape”
Couldn’t you also be accused of playing a language game? Maybe that is the name of the game.
Yes! But I’d not characterize the matter as an “accusation.” It’s a fact, an unavoidable aspect of human social life. A language game is linked to a coordinate form of life, a way-of-being ……. The error that we must avoid is the assumption that language doesn’t matter, or to put it bluntly, that a person can speak like a son-of-a-bitch and yet somehow be proponent of a well ordered society, and have a sense of fairness. Where would that come from?
Ex nihilo, nihil fit. (From nothing, comes nothing.)