can we understand ourselves?

Philosophical Investigations 20:3 July 1997ISSN 0190-0536

Can We Understand Ourselves?

Peter Winch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The origin of my title is of some relevance to the content of thispaper. I was, namely, invited to speak1 on the possibility or other-wise of our understanding foreign cultures. I did not wilfully turnmy back on that topic, but want to suggest that some at least of thedifficulties we see here spring from an inadequate attention to diffi-culties about how we should speak of ‘understanding’ in relation toour own culture.

Let us look briefly at the words ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’. Not sovery long ago it seemed impossible that human beings should everbe able to travel to the moon. The technical difficulties seemed sogreat that it would once have been quite reasonable to suppose thatthey would never be overcome, though of course they eventuallywere. Here the nature of the objective was clear enough.

Cultural anthropologists, historians and others concerned with theinvestigation of cultures other than their own – may in a somewhatanalogous way encounter difficulties of a ‘technical’ sort. Access tothe target culture may be impeded by factors of various kinds: insuf-ficient historical or archaeological evidence, the hostility of people toforeign snoopers, lack of sufficiently sophisticated techniques –whether statistical, mathematical or other, and so on. Here too theproject hindered by such deficiencies may be clear enough to thoseengaged in it; and such obstacles may or may not eventually be over-come. For an informed opinion about such matters one would bestconsult, not philosophers, but historians, archaeologists, linguists,ethnographers, statisticians, etc.

Consider the following contrasting case2: it is impossible to trisectan angle using ruler and compass. The impossibility here is not afunction of inadequate resources or technique or of overwhelmingly

1. At the conference Fremdheit und Vertrautheit: Hermeneutik im europäischen Kontext.Martin Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, 21–24 September 1994.2. One that Wittgenstein discusses at length more than once.

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difficult obstacles, but is demonstrated by a geometrical proof thatthe notion of trisecting an angle is a senseless one. To say, then, that itis impossible to trisect an angle could also be expressed by saying thatto speak of trisecting an angle makes no sense.

The example shows that the senselessness of a certain form ofwords need by no means be obvious. Somebody may for a long timedo things that he would describe as ‘trying to trisect an angle’; hecan perhaps be stopped only by a mathematical proof. Such a proofdoes not show that there are insuperable obstacles to trisecting anangle (or whatever), but that the expression ‘trisection of an angle’has no sense.

Now the questions before us about the possibility or impossibilityof understanding other cultures are not to be dealt with by anythingthat looks much like mathematical proof, but I want to suggest thatthey are questions about whether it makes sense to speak of ‘under-standing’ in this sort of context. This may sound absurd! How canthere be a serious question whether it makes sense or not to speak ofunderstanding a culture other than one’s own. People do after allspeak in such terms very commonly. Books in some profusion arewritten and read on such subjects by historians, anthropologists, lin-guists, textual scholars, etc. Large sums of money are disbursed forresearches in the field. It would seem hard to deny that workers inthese fields who claim to have reached this alleged kind of under-standing are speaking intelligibly. Something must be said, then, toshow how such an apparent absurdity can have gained currency.

There is a tempting parallel – which has often been drawn –between this ‘problem of other cultures’ and the ‘problem of otherminds’. One powerful element in this parallel is the idea that I havea certain sort of understanding of myself which I don’t, can’t, have ofanother. The idea here is that self-understanding sets a sort of standardof what the understanding of human beings can or should be, but astandard that cannot be met when what is in question is the under-standing of another, or of others.

In the case of individual self-understanding in relation to under-standing ‘other minds’ the dominating picture is somewhat asfollows. –

to understand oneself is, above all, to understand one’s own mental states

and processes: one’s thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions and decisions.

Understanding is itself one such mental state or process and the others are its

objects. Furthermore, there is a peculiar sort of ‘transparency’ that is charac-

194 Philosophical Investigations

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997

teristic of the mental; i.e. the subject is necessarily and immediately aware of

its own mental states, and this immediate self-awareness is the most import-

ant, indispensable element in understanding. However, mental states are only

transparent in this sense to their possessor and the flip side of this privileged

position is that the mental states of others are entirely opaque, even inaccessi-

ble to anyone else.

Here I am not of course primarily concerned with this ‘problemof other minds’, but some of the considerations which contribute tothe problem do play an important role in the genesis of the ‘othercultures’ problem and I cannot avoid addressing them.

When not philosophizing we behave as though we think it oftenperfectly possible to understand someone else’s mental processes; andalso perfectly possible to misunderstand, or to fail to understand, one’sown mental processes. The philosophical picture can only have aprescriptive, or legislative, force: it enjoins us to think and speak dif-ferently.3 But what is it about our conception of understandingourselves and others that so easily convinces us of the need to adoptthat egocentric proposal?

My understanding of ‘what I do’ (using this phrase in a very largesense) manifests itself in two ways: in the character of my behaviouritself; and in what I may say about my behaviour.4 Imagine forinstance that I am sitting at a table with the pieces of a jigsaw puzzlebefore me. You see me sorting the pieces out in a certain way: per-haps putting together first all the pieces with matching colours, thenfitting together a number of pieces whose shapes make their belong-ing together obvious, and so on. You may not be sure that I reallyunderstand what I am doing and you ask me to explain. I say somethings that sound to you like good sense and that you recognize aselementary precepts on how to go about solving a jigsaw puzzle.

How, in respect of my understanding what I am doing, are mywords and my actions related? There are a number of considerationsthat tempt us to give my words a pre-eminent position in this respect.I may express my understanding by giving – in words – my reasonsfor what I am doing. These reasons characteristically look beyond

Peter Winch 195

3. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, § 303 and II, ix.4. Someone may object that my speech is part of my behaviour. I would emphati-cally agree with this and say simply that I am here drawing a distinction for aparticular purpose and not implying some fundamental dividing line. Indeed, as Ihope will become clear, it is precisely my main purpose to deny that there is any suchfundamental division ‘in the nature of things’.


the behaviour itself and if I am really acting for those reasons, it mayseem that those reasons must somehow be previously present to me:perhaps also in the form of internal words – or the equivalent ofwords.5 Hence, so it may be concluded, it is this immediate presenceof such reasons to my mind and their causal efficacy in producingmy behaviour that constitutes my understanding of what I do. Thisconception is captured in the dominant account of reasons for actingaccepted in the Anglo-American philosophical world as com-pounded of the agent’s beliefs and desires. What this picture suggests isthat I navigate myself towards the goal I wish to reach by followingan internal map of the terrain I have to traverse and a list of theresources at my disposal for doing so.

This conclusion may seem to be supported by the followingpowerful consideration. Whereas a spectator can only infer myreasons for acting from observation of what I do, I, the agent, donot have to do this. I can (very often) say straight off what myreasons are. We are tempted to think that these reasons – my desiresand my beliefs – are there before my mind, accessible to me alone.

Understanding another culture is not a matter of understandingthe behaviour of all or most individual participants in it; but perhapswe might try saying that it is understanding the inner maps accord-ing to which people of that culture navigate and the destinationsthey are trying to reach. Such maps will be to an indeterminately6

large extent culturally determined.The problem of understanding how our aliens ‘map’ their envir-

onment is not just analogous to that of a surveyor – determiningwhat goes on the map and where. We also have to understand themethod of projection used in constructing and applying the map; andfurthermore we have to remember that the talk of maps is, after all,only a metaphor. If we know that what we are trying to interpret isindeed a map, we know that talk about ‘methods of projection’ willbe appropriate and, roughly speaking, what to look for. But ofcourse, in trying to understand the activities and artifacts, etc. of analien culture we do not start off with that sort of knowledge. Asketch, whether physical or mental, is only a map by virtue of theway it is used or applied, and this can be discerned only through


5. Here we can see the genesis of the line of thinking which has led so many con-temporary linguists to talk about ‘mentalese’, ‘the language of thought’.6. ‘Indeterminately’ because no sharp boundary can be drawn between what is cul-tural and what is not.


study of the actions of those who do apply it. It is no use trying tostart with agents’ ‘internal maps’ – with their internal ‘desires andbeliefs’ in the hope that these will breathe sense and meaning intothe otherwise enigmatic actions we are confronted with. On thecontrary we see desires and beliefs for what they are only throughthe behaviour in which they are manifested.

I noted earlier the temptation we are under to give the wordssomeone utters a preeminent position as constituting, as it were, adirect report on the mental state which gives the behaviour itsmeaning. But neither words nor actions have per se any preeminentposition. Sometimes we can check whether agents understand whatthey are doing by listening to what they say; but sometimes we needto check whether agents understand what they are saying by studyingwhat they do. And in each case an important aspect of the listeningand the studying will be putting the words and/or the actions into awider context, often enough a cultural context.

Prima facie the natural place to look for such a putting into contextmay seem to be in the writings of ethnographers, cultural historiansand the like, where they try to make intelligible social events andindividual actions of a kind with which their readers may beexpected to be unfamiliar or which even may be expected to comeinto conflict with their readers’ natural expectations. We shall hopefor a description of the alien practices that creates some pattern thatwe can recognize; we shall also perhaps hope to find some analogieswith practices characteristic of our own culture which will give ussome landmarks with reference to which we can take our bearings.

Such attempted explanations may go wrong in various ways.Attempted explanatory patterns may later simply come to be rejectedas mistaken on the basis of new discoveries. More interestingly, theymay fail to construct a pattern of which contemporary readers canmake sense. A reader brought up on modern chemistry for instance,might fail to see how a medieval alchemist’s spiritual purity couldpossibly be thought to have any bearing on the success or otherwiseof the experiments he conducts in his laboratory.

The ‘hermeneutical’ problem of understanding alien cultures issometimes located at this point. But I think it is important to noticethat, whatever the nature of this problem, it is not one that arisesonly when we are dealing with historically or geographically remotecultures. Mistakes and uncertainties are as liable to arise concerningour own culture as concerning another. How, for instance, should we

Peter Winch 197


think of the practice of certain youth groups within contemporaryBritish pop culture of assembling at Stonehenge once a year to cele-brate the summer solstice?7 How much, and what kind of, relationdoes it have to ancient Druidical religious practices on which it isostensibly modelled? To what extent is it a manifestation of contem-porary pop culture commercialism? Does it in any way mark agenuine recrudescence of an authentic sun worship? And if we are tothink of it in this latter way, what sort of sense can we make of such aform of worship given the role that nature plays, or perhaps fails toplay, in the life of modern industrial societies? Such questions are realenough. Sometimes they may receive a satisfactory answer, some-times not. But there are no good grounds for thinking it impossibleever to know how to interpret a cultural phenomenon.

It is in any case misleading to distinguish in a wholesale waybetween ‘our own’ and ‘alien’ cultures; parts of ‘our’ culture may bequite alien to one of ‘us’; indeed some parts of it may be more alienthan cultural manifestations which are geographically or historicallyremote. I see no reason why a contemporary historical scholar mightnot feel himself more at home in the world of medieval alchemythan in that of twentieth century professional football.

A ‘culture’ is not a seamless web and this is true in more than onesense. On the one hand individuals are very variously exposed, inthe course of their upbringing and after, to different facets of a singleculture. But at least as important as this is the fact that different indi-viduals respond to what they encounter in enormously varied ways.The importance of this factor is obscured by the passive soundingterm ‘internalization’, so beloved of sociologists and social psycholo-gists. We do not merely imbibe or absorb those aspects of ourculture with which we come into contact, we react. The charactersof individual reactions to what we may be prepared to call the ‘same’cultural manifestation, are enormously diverse. The diversity mayextend to quite radical conflict; in some areas of life, indeed, this ischaracteristic. (Think of morality, politics, religion.) The fact thatsome cultural manifestations are less intelligible (if intelligible at all!)to some than they are to others is clearly closely connected with thisphenomenon, as is the possibility that an individual may fail torespond significantly to, and hence to see any sense in, most of the


7. I am not concerned here with the kind of unnecessarily heavy weather the Britishpolice authorities make of this. This is a different, and in its own way equally hard tomake sense of, contemporary cultural phenomenon.


culture into which he is born. I think here particularly of Faust atthe opening of Part I of Goethe’s drama.8

The idea, then, that one’s own culture, in contrast to others, issomehow transparent to one, will not bear examination.

Nevertheless, there is no denying that all this leaves somethingimportant out, which I will now try to address. I will return to anexample that I discussed long ago:9 E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s descriptionof the Zande poison oracle.10 Evans-Pritchard describes in great detailand with great sensitivity and lucidity what goes into the consultationof the oracle, and also the occasions on which the oracle is character-istically consulted, the consequences of such a consultation and theconnections between these practices and other aspects of the tribe’slife and of their beliefs. Insofar as there are errors or misunderstandingsin these descriptions there is no reason why they cannot be quite satis-factorily filled out and/or corrected by other investigators. There is noreason why, in these terms, we should not be able to gain as full anunderstanding of the Zande poison oracle as we might gain from acomparable description of, let us say, concert going in the westernworld. We may still feel, nevertheless, that there is something aboutthe Zande practice that we do not, perhaps even that we never shall,understand. Or rather, as I think it better to say, there is a kind of

understanding of this practice that we still do not have. I will try toexpress this by saying that we cannot imagine what it would be likefor us to behave as the Azande do and to make the kind of sense ofwhat we were doing as the Azande, we assume, do make of what theydo; or perhaps: we cannot imagine taking the consultation of the ora-cle seriously, as the Azande do. In a similar way an anthropologist whofor one reason or another had absolutely no appreciation of musicmight be able to construct a very perspicuous description of how theparticipants in the musical life of a community characteristically

Peter Winch 199

8. Habe nun, ach! die Philosophie,Juristerei und Medizin,Und leider auch TheologieDurchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor!Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;. . .

9. In ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, originally published in the AmericanPhilosophical Quarterly, Vol. I (1964) and reprinted in my Ethics and Action (London,Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).10. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (London & New York, 1958).


behave and yet find this whole pattern of behaviour completelyopaque and mysterious.

In one way it hardly makes sense for me to speak of taking thepoison oracle seriously in my own life as Azande do in theirs.11

Much as I can apply a map only to a landscape with suitable features– there is no such thing as applying a map of Central London to theSahara Desert for example – so I cannot apply the Azande’s ‘culturalmap’ to my own cultural environment. Evans-Pritchard could intel-ligibly (and only half humorously) remark that during his field workhe ran his own household by consulting oracles à la Zande and say:‘I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs asany other I know of ’; but only because the oracle and related insti-tutions played a living role in the lives of the people amongst whomhe was living. His actions, therefore, could be met with the kinds ofresponse and resonance which would give them sense.

Furthermore, we have to reckon with the possibility that twostyles of thinking may actually be at conceptual odds with eachother. It is sometimes remarked, for instance, that the kind of disin-terested, intellectual enquiry, based perhaps on a naturalistic worldview, characteristic of the sciences as we now know them, is atlogical odds with magical ways of thinking like the Zande. This maywell be true; the difficulty – for some the virtual impossibility – of‘taking the poison oracle seriously’ is perhaps an example. But wehave to be careful what conclusions we draw from such a fact. It isirresponsible, for instance, to conclude that it will be ‘impossible forus to understand such an alien cultural phenomenon in terms of ourown culture’. There is on the one hand no reason at all why weshould not be able to produce a finely articulated description of thephenomenon in question in its own cultural context; and it wouldbe dogmatism to refuse this the name ‘understanding’. And on theother hand, as I remarked earlier, culture is not a seamless web.‘Scientific’ attitudes are an important aspect of our particular culture,but they certainly do not exhaust it. None of us – none of us – thinkslike that all the time. Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind12 is a satirical portrayalof the vanity of any attempt to do so. Anthropological enquiry hasother cultural resources to draw upon on its home ground than the


11. For more on this see ‘Language, Belief and Relativism’ in P. Winch, Trying toMake Sense (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987).12. In his Hard Times.


narrowly ‘scientific’ and its most interesting practitioners – CliffordGeertz for instance – do so freely.

I have argued that an important part of what we mean by ‘under-standing’ in relation to a culture depends on having a context – aLebenswelt, if you prefer that idiom – within which we can act appro-priately. But the word ‘appropriately’ in some ways remains obscurein this context. Philosophers of various persuasions have argued thatthere is in principle no way of saying definitely and for certain what‘appropriate’ action consists of in a given situation. Wittgensteinexpressed this argument in the following way13:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined bya rule, because every course of action can be made out to accordwith the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made toaccord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict withit. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

This passage is often referred to: less often is its continuation, whichcontains an emphatic rebuttal of the argument:

Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to arule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term ‘inter-pretation’ to the substitution of one expression for another.

Wittgenstein’s emphasis here on how we act in a given context is, inmy view, enormously important and I shall be returning to it.However, the way he expresses the matter in this passage can easilylead to another misunderstanding, suggesting as it does that ‘practi-cal’ understanding consists in being able to give what counts as

the ‘correct’ response. Wittgenstein’s use of the ‘language game’image (at least in its earlier stages) does indeed emphasize this. It is ofcourse extremely important, but I have already in the course of thislecture given a number of examples which show that its applicabilityis limited.

Wittgenstein himself came increasingly to realize this and I thinkthe following remark from his notebooks in 1948 is important here.

It is important for our argument that there are people of whom itis possible for someone to feel he will never know what is goingon inside them; that he will never understand them. (Englishwomen for Europeans.)14

Peter Winch 201

13. Philosophical Investigations, I, 201. But a similar argument is often involved in dis-cussions of the so-called ‘hermeneutic circle’.14. Culture and Value, p. 74e.


He frequently described this type of phenomenon with the graphicGerman phrase: ‘Ich kann mich in sie nicht finden’ (a nightmare forthe translator into English!: perhaps, ‘I cannot get the hang ofthem’).

[1] Some of the difficulties most of us feel with an institution likethe Zande poison oracle provide one sort of example of this. Hereare some more.

[2] The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood described in hisAutobiography his alienation from the sort of philosophy practised byhis Oxford colleagues. He did not really understand the point ofwhat they were discussing, though he was perfectly well able in asense to ‘follow’ their discussions and even make remarks whichwere recognized as contributions to the debates! [I have foundmyself in a similar position in some kinds of company.]

[3] An apparently very important part of European popular cul-ture is a consuming interest in professional football. I do not merelynot share this popular passion; it is so alien to me that I do not feel Iunderstand what most of my fellows feel for it. It is not that I do notknow what to expect of them, or that I am unaware of the back-ground to the sport or even totally blind to the beauties of genuineskill in it. Nevertheless – ich kann mich in sie nicht finden. Do notsay this has nothing to do with understanding. It is a quite central andimportant use of the verb ‘to understand’. If you feel that you do notunderstand me (because I realize, of course, that this is a reciprocalphenomenon) then, first, I would say this is another example ofwhat I am drawing attention to; and, second, I would ask you if youfeel you understand the kind of attitude to World Cup football thatled to the murder of Escobar in Medellín for having scored an owngoal against the Colombian side.

These examples are in line with my contention that the difficul-ties with which we are concerned do not pertain exclusively toso-called ‘alien’ cultures. Indeed, they show that the line betweenwhat is and what is not ‘alien’ is quite indeterminate; and thisreally reinforces my point. The problems spring in large part fromcertain peculiarities of our notion of understanding, rather thanfrom peculiarities about the relation between one culture andanother.

I remarked earlier that some might think that what Wittgensteincalls ‘sich in andere finden’ is of only marginal significance, having todo with ease in dealing with others in practical life, rather than with



understanding strictly so called. I want to conclude by arguing, neces-sarily sketchily, that, on the contrary, this practical ‘being in tune’with others lies right at the very centre of our understanding of otherhuman beings.15

In an important passage Wittgenstein considers what is involved intreating another human being as a sentient, thinking person. I shouldlike to quote this in full.

‘I believe that he is suffering’ – Do I also believe that he isn’t anautomaton? ‘I believe that he is not an automaton’, just like that,so far makes no sense. My attitude to him is an attitude towardsthe soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.16

The general point made here is explored in fine detail in variousplaces in Wittgenstein’s work. Consider for instance his treatment ofthe concept of pain. He asks how this might be learned by a childand says:

Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive,the natural expressions of the sensation and used in their place. Achild has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him andteach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the childnew pain-behaviour. ‘So you are saying that the word “pain”really means crying?’ – On the contrary: the verbal expression ofpain replaces crying and does not describe it.17

His treatment of our ascription of pain to someone else, though nec-essarily sharply different in its detail, comes from a similar direction.He suggests we think of the forms of behaviour in which we, forinstance, show pity for another human being who has been injuredas forms of conviction that the other is in pain.18

In both cases, then, Wittgenstein turns away from the traditionalaccount of the concept of pain as the concept of a peculiar internalobject, process or state and instead asks us to examine in detail howpain language is actually used in practice. In this way he is able toshow how first and third person ascriptions of pain belong togetheras complementary moves in a single language game. Thus, ironically,by stressing the enormous differences between speaking in the first andin the third persons he is able to retain the unity of the concept of

Peter Winch 203

15. I have treated this topic much more fully in ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’ (inWinch, Trying to Make Sense, pp. 140–53).16. Op. cit. II, Section iv.17. Ibid. I, § 244.18. Ibid. I, § 287.


pain in a way which was beyond the traditional accounts, which allran aground on the ‘problem of other minds’, a subject which I saida little about earlier in this lecture.

Wittgenstein uses a parallel strategy in many other contexts, suchas his various treatments of what is involved in understanding thethoughts of another human being – to which of course necessarilybelongs an account of the various forms that misunderstanding andfailing to understand may take. ‘Practice gives the words their sense’,as he says, for instance, in discussing the question: ‘How do I knowthat two people mean the same when each says he believes inGod?’.19 Success and failure in ‘sich in andere zu finden’ is, I havesuggested, a central element in most kinds of relationship humanbeings may have with each other. A central task for anyone wantingto understand a culture will be to clarify the concepts which shapesuch human relationships. Putting these two points together, we cansee perhaps that if we are confronted with any cultural phenomenon,‘alien’ or otherwise, then, as long as ‘wir können uns in diese Leutenicht finden’, there will indeed be a sort of failure of understanding.This may be curable in particular cases; and in others it may not.

Dept. of Philosophy

University of Illinois

In April we received the news of Peter Winch’s death. An obituarynotice will appear in the October number of the Journal.


19. Culture and Value, p. 85e.


can we understand ourselves?

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