Analytical-Ethical Aspectssize=2>
We also find yet another crucial reliance on play and games in the work of ordinary language philosophy, especially as delivered in the later work of its key progenitor, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
As Wittgenstein very famously professes, we are now in the realm, not of being and beings, of sociological facts and psychic realities, of confused actions able to be recomposed as logical descriptions, and so forth, but of many different kinds of games and many different ways of playing them. As he puts it very early in Philosophical Investigations:this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten.. . 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.[30]
‘Language’ is not a single or simple thing, but a sprawling and shifting complex, linked to certain sets of activities, situations and ambitions. Moreover, it is not just that ‘games’ provide the key metaphor - if that is indeed what it is - to help Wittgenstein investigate the multifarious peculiarities of language-use. Certain games, or certain kinds of games, also provide him with a method or, rather, a variety of means for approaching the varieties of linguistic experience.
As even the most cursory acquaintance with Philosophical Investigations reveals - and which constitutes one of the most evident ruptures with his own earlier work - Wittgenstein is constantly asking his reader to ‘imagine a language for which’ or asserting that ‘it is like looking at.. .’, which inter alia suggests that philosophy itself has to be expressly played as a kind of game of experimental make-believe if it is to evade the metaphysical traps that it is ceaselessly and secretively setting for itself. For Wittgenstein, then, the very nomination ‘language games’ serves to indicate the differences and multiplicities of ways in which so-called ‘language’ is part of different and multiple forms-of-life; that there are indeed only such ‘games’, that is, that ‘language’ as a whole or a reality does not exist except as a confused abstraction; that there is an important distinction between games and rules, such that many games do indeed have rules but those rules never entirely exhaust or define the playing of such games, and rules themselves are often ambiguous or multiple, suggestive or indicative rather than determining; that it is their use, at once linguistic and embodied, that is of most interest; that there is no ultimate game which subsumes, surveys or models all other games; that games do not require any particularly deep foundation to be sustained; and so on.