How Ludwig Wittgenstein destroyed the Woke

Political rhetoric beyond essentialism

‘79. That I am a man and not a woman can be verified, but if I were to say I was a woman, and then tried to explain the error by saying I hadn't checked the statement, the explanation would not be accepted.

80. The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements.

81. That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them.’

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘On Certainty’

I would like to begin this article with two short and distinctly un-Socratic dialogues:

Dialogue 1. Bazza and Otto:

Bazza: ‘Bits of London aren’t really English anymore, since there are barely any English people still living there.’

Otto: ‘Hmmm, but what exactly does it mean to be English? Are the Celts English? What about the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the Vikings? You ever heard of the Huguenots? Nigel Farage is one of them!’

Bazza: ‘You know exactly what I mean, Otto, there’s clearly something different between Cockneys — no matter which of those peoples you mentioned they’re originally descended from — and all the Bangladeshis now in Whitechapel where the Cockneys used to live.’

Otto: ‘You still haven’t told me who’s really English. You see, Britain is a nation of immigrants; nothing out of the ordinary is happening by some Bangladeshis moving here.’

Dialogue 2. Jane and ‘Lily’:

Jane: ‘You’re either born a woman or born a man, and you can never change which one you are.’

‘Lily’: ‘So trans women aren’t women?’

Jane: ‘Definitely not.’

‘Lily’: ‘But why is that the case?’

Jane: ‘Well, there’s a biological difference between men and women. Men have penises and testes, and women have uteruses and cervixes. So-called “trans women” have penises and testes whilst lacking cervixes and uteruses, so they aren’t actually women.’

‘Lily’: ‘But if we were to take a cis man and cut off his balls and penis, he’d still surely be a man; just a castrated one. Also, women can have hysterectomies and thereby lose their uteruses and cervixes, and you’d still probably recognise them as women!’

Jane: ‘Maybe so, but a woman who’s had a hysterectomy will still have XX chromosomes.’

‘Lily’: ‘But surely you don’t go around DNA testing people before deciding which pronouns to use for them? Besides, there are cases of people being born with some combination of chromosomes beyond just XX and XY — there are people with XXY chromosomes or just a single X chromosomes, and so trying to base gender off of chromosomes whilst also denying the existence of non-binary people doesn’t make sense. Your views on the existence of transgender people aren’t based on any good arguments, but are rather a result of your bigotry.’

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Conversations like Dialogue 1 and Dialogue 2 probably play out hundreds, if not thousands of times every day across the country and across all social classes. In both of these conversations the more ‘anti-Woke’ (in the broadest possible sense of the word) participant doesn’t do particularly well, even if most readers will intuitively feel that they are onto something. Some kind of error is being made by both characters in these two dialogues, and it is an error that is constantly exhibited in all political discourse that deals with what we might call ‘identity politics’.

This is no small matter: in many ways, disagreements about ‘identity’ are what divide the modern Left and Right. But unfortunately — from the perspective of the Right — there is something of an asymmetry in how political discourse about ‘identity’ occurs; an asymmetry that seems to systematically favour the left-wing point of view. For while the Right tries to affirm the existence of various majority groups, the Left tries to deconstruct their existence as a means of legitimising the political interests of minority groups. For example, by undermining the idea that there is any such thing as a ‘native British people’, the Left thereby seeks to legitimise the interests of ethnic minorities. For if there is no such thing as a ‘native British people’, then it is impossible to have any positive obligation to ensure (for instance) that this group remains a majority in its own ancestral homeland. Similarly, if there is no such thing as ‘biological sex’, then there is no way you can deny someone access to a certain changing room or prison on the basis of their ‘biological sex’.

Notice that the Right doesn’t generally try to pay the Left back in kind when the Left deconstructs the identity groups that the Right tries to advocate for. For instance, in a debate on reparations, your average GB News host will talk about how white people were sometimes enslaved too; and that there were those Songhai guys in Civilization V; and also that Britain abolished slavery, mate. Never will they question the existence of the ‘black race’, even though the Left will start playing the deconstruction game at even the faintest whiff of any ‘identity politics’ involving the ‘white race’.

Generally, what instead happens is that the Right argues that an identity group has a certain ‘essence’, and the linguistic description of that ‘essence’ is the definition. If something fits the definition of x, then it has the ‘essence’ of x corresponding to said definition, and so it can truly said to be x. Let’s call this view ‘essentialism’.

‘Essentialism’, as above defined, is an idea that seems to have dominated philosophy and intellectual inquiry in general from its very beginnings in Ancient Greece. It still has a large influence over academic philosophy today and, somewhat surprisingly, a perhaps even larger influence over more informal discourse outside of academic philosophy, as demonstrated by the two dialogues above. For much of its history, philosophy was concerned with trying to find the definitions of things, and thereby their ‘essences’, with these definitions taking the form of necessary and sufficient conditions for being that thing. Plato and Aristotle were both infatuated with this search for ‘essences’: the former famously defined a human as a ‘featherless biped’, and the latter defined it as a ‘rational animal’. Their interests went beyond trying to capture the ‘essences’ of concrete objects, however, with Plato in particular spilling much ink trying to come up with definitions for such abstract concepts as ‘knowledge’, ‘virtue’, ‘justice’, et cetera.

‘Essentialism’ continued to hold a firm grip over mediaeval and early modern philosophers, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘essentialism’ increasingly came under attack from a variety of sources, perhaps the most important of which being Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In his Blue Book, Wittgenstein notes the obsession of older philosophers with trying to find definitions for concepts:

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications, has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.

As anyone who is familiar with contemporary epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) will know, we are not much closer to finding an adequate definition of ‘knowledge’ than the Ancient Greeks were. Philosophers were sure that they had cracked it — that ‘knowledge’ is ‘justified true belief’, nothing more and nothing less — but in 1963, along came Edmund Gettier’s ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, and ever since, epistemologists have been trying to work out what extra conditions are in need of being added to get the real definition of ‘knowledge’, with there still being no consensus as to how to properly analyse ‘knowledge’.

Wittgenstein says that a lot of the terms we use in ordinary language are in fact incapable of being defined, but that this need not mean that we are incapable of using said terms meaningfully. His famous example is that of a ‘game’. Think of everything we consider to be a ‘game’, from football to Minecraft. Is there any set of properties that all instances of ‘games’ share and that only ‘games’ have in common? That is to say, are there any necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘gamehood’? Is there an ‘essence’ of ‘gamehood’? You will very quickly find yourself unable to think of any adequate candidates, as Wittgenstein himself demonstrates in the Philosophical Investigations (1953) §66:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games’. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: ‘There must be something common, or they would not be called “games”’—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

Now, given that there seems to be no ‘essence’ of ‘gamehood’, are we thus incapable of using the term ‘game’ meaningfully? No, and so being definable is not something that all meaningful concepts are capable of. Rather, it is possible for a meaningful concept to be a family resemblance concept — a concept that is indefinable and so lacks an ‘essence’, but is characterised by overlapping resemblances which form a web of similarities. As Wittgenstein explains in the Blue Book, p. 27:

We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term ‘game’ to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful.

The analogy of using the common facial features of a family to understand a concept like ‘game’ is further expanded on by Renford Bambrough in his 1961 paper ‘Universals and Family Resemblances’:

Let us suppose that ‘the Churchill face’ is strikingly and obviously present in each of ten members of the Churchill family, and that when a family group photograph is set before us it is unmistakable that these ten people all belong to the same family. It may be that there are ten features in terms of which we can describe ‘the family face’ (high forehead, bushy eye-brows, blue eyes, Roman nose, high cheekbones, cleft chin, dark hair, dimpled cheeks, pointed ears and ruddy complexion). It is obvious that the unmistakable presence of the family face in every single one of the ten members of the family is compatible with the absence from each of the ten members of the family of one of the ten constituent features of the family face. It is also obvious that it does not matter if it happens that the feature which is absent from the face of each individual member of the family is present in every one of the others. The members of the family will then have no feature in common, and yet they will all unmistakably have the Churchill face in common.

There may be no property that all the different instances of ‘games’ or all the different instances of ‘the Churchill face’ have in common, but this doesn’t mean that ‘games’ or ‘the Churchill face’ aren’t real and meaningful terms.

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The main point of my article is this: just as we can best understand ‘games’ and ‘the Churchill face’ as family resemblance concepts, so too ought we to understand certain forms of human identity groups as family resemblance concepts. You cannot specify what it is to be ‘white’ or ‘English’ or ‘a woman’ in the form of necessary and sufficient conditions, as demanded by the ‘essentialist’ worldview; rather, we must understand these types as networks of similarities. In the case of an identity group like ‘white people’, almost all ‘white people’ will have a trait in common — e.g., pale skin — but this cannot form the ‘essence’ of ‘whiteness’ because K-Pop idols have pale skin too. Yet the K-Pop idol will still fail to be ‘white’ on account of his/her facial structure, genetic markers, etc., and therefore still lie outside of the family. Conversely, a heavily tanned man of entirely English ancestry from the West Country does not become ‘non-white’ by virtue of having a somewhat darker complexion than the K-Pop idol. As we can see, skin colour cannot function as either a necessary or sufficient condition for either including or excluding someone from the category of ‘white people’, but this does not necessarily mean that it is entirely irrelevant to the family resemblance concept either.

The reason why the Right leaves itself open to deconstruction from the Left is because the Right knowingly or unknowingly assumes an ‘essentialist’ understanding of identity groups — that there is some ‘essence’ of ‘woman-ness’, ‘Englishness’, ‘whiteness’, etc., that is captured by some hypothetical definition. The leftist shows that there can be no such definition, and then concludes that the concept itself, in its standard use, is meaningless, and that therefore any political action predicated on the existence of the identity group which instantiates the concept is both illogical and illegitimate.

The way to avoid being logically trapped by the Woke is to refuse to play the definitions-game before it’s used against you. When the Woke ask you to define the ‘essence’ (whether or not they use that word) of ‘Englishness’, reject their question. In order to use the term ‘English’ meaningfully, we don’t need to think about whether ‘Englishness’ includes those with ancestry from Huguenots or Norse raiders. We don’t need to find some Y-DNA haplogroup and declare it ‘the English haplogroup’, or to declare that certain types of noses are ‘English noses’. We just need to observe that there are sets of resemblances that all people we intuitively view as English share. The second you start playing these ‘essentialist’ definition-games, you open yourself up to having your identity group deconstructed, since there will inevitably be cases where the definition you pick fails to range over all the intuitive cases of instances of said identity group.

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I would like to end this piece by discussing a recent example where the Right and their heterodox left-wing allies, the ‘TERFs’, have achieved significant victories over the Woke by adopting an essentialist frame and challenging the Left through this frame: the ‘what is a woman?’ debacle.

Undermining transgender ideology through asking its proponents how they define ‘woman’ works stunningly well when used against the average politician, since most politicians are not particularly smart. Nevertheless, this strategy has limitations. It is of course very entertaining watching Matt Walsh run circles around various transgender rights activists, but I fear that if a Matt Walsh-inspired right-winger were to be put in a room with a more intellectually robust ‘theorycel’ member of the Woke mob, he may find his question of ‘What is a woman?’ greeted by ‘What is a biological human female?’. If he were to take the bait, an exchange along the lines of Dialogue 2 would play out, and the Woke will have gained the rhetorical upper hand.

However, supposing this hypothetical right-winger knew his Wittgenstein, he may say, ‘The concept of a “biological human female” is a family resemblance concept, with [insert various biological markers here] being common resemblances between women’.

What would happen if the Woke were to respond, ‘Can we not use the idea of a family resemblance concept to vindicate the idea that transgender women are women, transgender men are men, and so on?’. How ought the Patriot to reply?

He ought to reply with something like this: the transgender ideologue’s conception of ‘gender’ cannot be turned into a family resemblance concept in order to save the notion of transgender identity because there is only one thing that the transgender ideologue believes makes you the gender that you are — your sincere identification with said gender. The transgender ideologue believes that someone who has all the biological traits associated with ‘maleness’, all the behaviours associated with ‘masculinity’, uses masculine pronouns, and so on, can still be a woman so long as they sincerely assent to the proposition ‘I am a woman’. In fact, we can take any person whatsoever and duplicate everything about them, but so long as we reprogram whatever brain states govern ‘gender avowal’ to make them sincerely believe they are another gender then the person and their duplicate are of different genders. There is thus no way of being able to empirically detect what gender someone is — unless we have futuristic brain scanning technology — and so gender becomes an occult property lacking in any significance. What actually is the use of this concept of ‘gender’ now that we’ve established that, by the principles of the Woke, it can only really refer to a thought? When we use gendered language to refer to people, do we do this based on the thought, ‘That person over there assents to the proposition “I am a man”’? Of course not.

Moreover, what does this thought actually refer to? When I say ‘I am a man’, what is this a thought about? One could respond ‘being a man’, but this is obviously circular. Maybe it just means ‘I have a certain brain state’, but when I say ‘“woman” is “femme” in French’, how do I know that someone has checked to make sure that when an English speaker says ‘I am a woman’ and a French speaker says ‘Je suis une femme’ that the same brain states light up in both cases?

I could go on highlighting the absurdity of the Woke notion of ‘gender’ — maybe invoking further Wittgensteinian ideas about language along the way — but the reader is probably smart enough to see that the Woke have an impossible task when it comes to explaining what they mean by ‘I am [gender]’, and in any case, the so-called ‘trans debate’ is already pretty stale at the time of writing. Nevertheless, I add this last section to preempt any criticism of this article from the Right on the basis that understanding concepts like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in terms of family resemblance is scoring an own goal. There can be no own goal because the Woke are committed by their principle of ‘inclusivity’ to uncritically accepting any gender-claims, and so the Woke cannot appropriate Wittgenstein to vindicate themselves on this issue.