Obligation and Impersonality

1. Introduction

In the main, sociologists and philosophers do not share the same understanding of the common concepts they make use of. This is certainly the case with the notion of obligation. Sociologists take it to refer to an external force that compels individuals to act and think according to appropriate norms of conduct and reasoning. Emile Durkheim ([1895] 1982) gave a name to this force, “the social,” and he turned it into the subject matter of a new scientific discipline: sociology. Philosophers, however, conceive obligation under the species of duties (or moral obligations) that individuals have to comply with or refuse to abide by. ¹ In other words, sociologists tend to think that obligation is an “objective” force whereas philosophers view it as an imperative that is met through the agent’s deliberation. ² This difference in outlook can be summarized in an opposition between social normativity and moral normativity. Whereas moral normativity names a set of requirements ideally deduced from what ought be (in the Kantian sense), social normativity is an empirical phenomenon referring to the material and logical constraints that actually compel people to do something they know they have do to avoid sanction. To prevent any misunderstanding then, let me state that my aim is to undermine the standard dichotomy between the deterministically sociological and the moral–philosophical views of obligation by way of presenting a Wittgensteinian conception of the social.

This introductory point made, here is the gist of the arguments I will expound in this article to vindicate the possibility of a rapprochement between sociology and Wittgensteinian philosophy:

Let me flesh out this set of arguments.

2. Normative Similarity and the Social

Most philosophical accounts of sociality raise a prefatory question: what is the concept of “the social” that they refer to when they make use of the notion of sociality? One answer to this question has been submitted by John Searle (1995). However, it seems to beg the question as well because the solution he offers (a combination of self-referentiality and evolution) appears to conflate normativity in a unique mechanism featuring in the Background without considering either the variety of practical contexts in which this Background (or a fragment of it) is made use of or the nature of the many constraints on individual action that operate from within the innumerable practices in which people are embroiled.

The closest philosophy can get to the sociological notion of the social is Wittgenstein’s conception of blind obedience ³ according to which individuals act on certainties they have been trained since early childhood to immediately rely on in the most minute of their everyday interactions. The notion of blind obedience has been put to the fore by Meredith Williams (2010), and the many questions it raises have been discussed by Crispin Wright (2007). I will not dwell on this conception but take for granted that it is an accepted though controversial aspect of Wittgenstein’s work.

As Richard Brandt (1964) wrote, if the notion of duty is part of philosophers’ current vocabulary, it is far less the case for the notion of obligation (in its sociological sense) ⁴ because it seemingly robs individuals of their volition, uniqueness, or inner voice. Sociologists, on the contrary, take obligation to be a crucial phenomenon because it accounts for the collective dimension of human life and justifies their core claim: the social has precedence over individual will. This precedence—which is currently subsumed under the notion of “social normativity”—has led some (but not all) sociologists to develop what Denis Wrong (1961) named an “oversocialized conception of man” totally stripping individuals of their free will. Yet, very few sociologists would still adhere to such a stance which brought their discipline into disrepute. Note that even methodological individualism—which gives primacy to the individual over the social—came to admit the major role that social institutions play in the organization of personal experience (Bourricaud 1977).

The notion of obligation draws a subtle dividing line between philosophy and sociology. However, more than determinism itself, it is the precedence sociology grants to the collective over the individual that most philosophers find hard to acknowledge. Wittgenstein’s social philosophy helps relieve this predicament. Meredith Williams (2010, 314) suggested that

the Wittgensteinian picture provides a way of combining a naturalist outlook with the ineliminable role of normativity in our practices and in our learning. Initiate learning is a time of calibration, in which we acquire the skills and techniques to make judgments of normative similarity that constitute the bedrock we share with our fellows.

On this account, the first question I would like to address is as follows: what is the difference—if any—between Wittgenstein’s supposedly endorsed notion of normative similarity and the one Durkheim has named “the social”?

I will argue that both these notions refer to the same encompassing phenomenon: obligation. And I will claim that it should be re-specified in terms of impersonality, ⁵ that is, devising an open and dynamic conception of obligation admitting that a plurality of contextual normative orders monitor collective action in the numerous circumstances of ordinary life.

However, a preliminary objection has first to be challenged: can one seriously derive a conception of the social from Wittgenstein’s proposition about obeying rules blindly? My answer will rely on contrasting Durkheim’s definition of the social with Wittgenstein’s views on certainty.

3. The Duality of the Social

Durkheim did manage to turn sociology into a science that studies an object that has long escaped rational investigation: the social. This notion refers to regular and external constraining forces—which are subsumed under the term obligation—which compel individuals to behave in line with pre-given ways of behaving and thinking. This force is sui generis: it emerges from association, that is, from the sheer fact that humans are a species that lives in groups that have naturally developed an organized set of relationships to cooperate in a peaceful manner. For Durkheim ([1893] 1964), association predates the ideas that individuals may have about the group they live in and is the source of all subsequent obligations. He adds that association transmutes the mere gathering of human beings into a sense of belonging to a community and that it is in the process of this transmutation that individual minds merge into a collective consciousness which, in his view, allows for the reproduction of the cohesion and permanence of a society.

One may notice though that, in Durkheim’s work, the social has been conceived in two different ways: as the determining structure of a global society and as a property inhering in the knowledge people make use of when they come to act together. Society, on one hand, action in common, on the other hand. In technical terms, this is the distinction that is currently made between functionalist and interactionist sociologies. I have reframed this usual distinction in broader terms as morphological and analytical (Ogien 2016). I would like to briefly spell out the content of this reframing.

Morphological sociology locates the social in society and dedicates itself to the study of the distribution of individuals into groups or classes, their stratification on unequal terms, and the resulting hierarchy of powers in a given polity; the values and attitudes supposed to be shared by members of a society; and the nature and function of the institutions set up to reproduce its coherence. Morphological sociology usually admits that a society unifies all the people who live within the existing boundaries of a Nation-State and describes its essentials through quantified data using a given set of objective variables such as age, sex, profession, upbringing, status, revenues, wealth, social capital, ethnicity, religion, and so on. Hence, it claims to be an explanatory science founded on methods that are aligned with the hypothetico-deductive model of science. This is the perspective in which social facts can be “treated as things”—to quote Durkheim’s famous motto (Durkheim [1895] 1982, 60).

Analytical sociology locates the social in action in common. Accordingly, it is committed to the empirical study of action in situ and in the making (i.e., its practical accomplishment in situated interactions that unfold sequentially). In this perspective, social facts are treated as if they were intentional; that is, as facts, the consistency of which must be discovered in the course of action in common by the individuals themselves according to their own conceptions about what should and might happen. This perspective has often been accused of being subjectivist thus unscientific. This charge is simply wrong because intentionality does not refer here either to the will or to the conscience of a subject, but to the practical agreements about “what is going on” that make up coordination of action. In other words, intentionality is seen as publicly demonstrated by the doings of the participants to the same action in common. ⁶ This is why analytical sociology relies on qualitative data to account for how individuals act together from the perspective of the practices themselves rather than from a theoretical standpoint. Of course, it is in the framework of analytical sociology that Wittgenstein’s import for the social sciences may usefully be considered.

One key difference between these two ways of practicing sociology has to be underlined. It has to do with coordination. For morphological sociology, coordination is given as it is assumed that social institutions mechanically impose their regulative and combining forces on all members of society. For analytical sociology, coordination is problematic as it has to be accomplished step by step at each stage of an action in common. It is also important to recall that—as Durkheim outlined in The Rules of the Sociological Method—obligation has two dimensions: duty and desire. This means that individuals have to conform to the norms they are required to abide by (duty dimension), but, at the same time, are willing to conform to them (desire dimension). This duality raises an issue: does obligation (as social phenomenon) boil down to sheer physical and symbolic violence? Sociology offers two answers to this question. The first is prescriptive: it claims that each society institutes a regulatory system that sets a series of mandatory forms of behavior that members have to comply with. These external constraints operate through a host of norms that are embodied through socialization, generating the motivation to act conformingly. The second answer is evaluative. It considers social norms as impersonal instructions that individuals know they are required to follow but are able to abide by or not. These instructions operate as internal constraints and are sometimes related to what can be called an “ordinary knowledge of the world” ⁷ that individuals are “naturally” acquainted with. My tentative comparison between Durkheim and Wittgenstein will revolve around the conception of internal (or logical) constraints.

4. From Understanding to Mutual Intelligibility Elicitation Practices

As perplexing as it may seem, Durkheim’s and Wittgenstein’s approaches display some degree of similarity. First, both are philosophers who have written, at about the same time and through an internal critique of philosophy itself, the death certificate of philosophy (or a given way to practice it) on behalf of the same demand: any analysis of human behavior has to be anchored in the social environment that gives it shape and meaning. The second thing they hold in common is the adoption of a type of naturalism that allows them to account for the unavoidable grip of sociality on human action (Ogien 2013). For Durkheim, if this is so, it is because human beings are a species that live in groups and that experience the world through collective practices that set ways of doing and thinking with which individuals become acquainted by living with others. For Wittgenstein, sociality inheres in what he calls the “natural history of mankind” (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958, §415), which lays down ways to behave and speak that individuals assimilate through early learning and familiarity with usual ways of behaving. From this point of view, explaining how this process is sustained seems useless (if not impossible) because no one is able exhaustively and accurately to account for what this “natural history” is made of and to what extent it leads individuals to make proper use of their common sense knowledge in ordinary social life.

Two conceptions of the social are on display here, both revolving around the question of the relationship between individuals and society. While Durkheim (1962) wondered how it is that while becoming more independent from each other, individuals became more closely dependent on society, Wittgenstein held that the relationship between individual and society manifests itself directly in the way people act together and use the words of a natural language. According to him, the fact that action in common generally runs smoothly is simply a criterion of one’s belonging to a community. Thus, whereas Durkheim strove to theorize the social to solve the riddle of the coordination of action, Wittgenstein asserted that such a riddle has no foothold because the social is merely intrinsic to human action. It is this stance that Winch ([1958] 1990) elaborated in The Idea of a Social Science. His demonstration is based on a commanding statement:

the central problem of sociology, that of giving an account of the nature of social phenomena in general, itself belongs to philosophy. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, this part of sociology is really misbegotten epistemology. I say “misbegotten” because its problems have been largely misconstrued, and therefore mishandled, as a species of scientific problem. (Winch [1958] 1990, 43)

Winch’s argument is plain: (a) what sociologists call “the social” is a phenomenon the essence of which is understanding, and (b) as understanding is conceptual through and through, it is irreducible to objective facts that could be subjected to scientific investigation; thus, (c) sociology is constitutively unable to explain social phenomena. That is why he claims that both Durkheim ([1912] 1965), in the tentative “sociological theory of knowledge” he sketched in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and Weber ([1920] 1978), with his construction of comprehensive sociology, have developed a “misbegotten epistemology.” The least one may say is that Winch only retains the positivist side of Durkheim’s and Weber’s works to vindicate his dismissal of sociology (Ogien 2009).

The importance Winch confers on understanding is evident in his famous dictum: “All behaviour which is meaningful (therefore all specifically human behaviour) is ipso facto rule-governed” (Winch [1958] 1990, 51-52). Accordingly, the Idea of a Social Science offers an elucidation of the conditions of possibility that frame the uses of the sentence “following a rule.” Three of the conditions he discloses are salient when pondering over the notion of the social. He states first that asserting that someone has followed a rule can only be done by an external observer who finds herself in a position to get at what someone is supposedly doing, which means that the very first requirement for asserting that a rule has been followed is the sheer existence of a domain of practical activity with which the observer as well as the observed are familiar. Winch ([1958] 1990, 30) writes,

One has to take account not only of the actions of the person whose behaviour is in question as a candidate for the category of rule-following, but also the reactions of other people to what he does. More specifically, it is only in a situation in which it makes sense to suppose that somebody else could in principle discover the rule which I am following that I can intelligibly be said to follow a rule at all.

In other words, when a rule is alluded to understand what is going on, its meaning can only be conferred on it from the vantage point of shared knowledge about regularities people can reasonably anticipate on the basis of common experience (that is to say the existence of a contextual normative order). ⁸

Second, Winch points out that a rule is a formula that operates as a criterion according to which a judgment on “doing the same thing on the same kind of occasion” (Winch [1958] 1990, 61) can be arrived at. Hence, his problem becomes, “How is the word ‘same’ to be given a sense?; or: In what circumstances does it make sense to say of somebody that he is following a rule in what he does?” (Winch [1958] 1990, 28). Winch insists that “it is extremely important to notice here that going on in one way rather than another as a matter of course must not be just a peculiarity of the person whose behaviour claims to be a case of rule-following” (Winch [1958] 1990, 31).

In other words, passing judgment on whether someone has followed a rule or not depends first and foremost on the practical circumstances that ceaselessly redefine what is going on in an action in common and on the logical constraints these changes impose on each of its participants, not on their personal will. That is what Winch reiterates when he asserts that a crucial feature of understanding is “making a mistake”:

A mistake is a contravention of what is established as correct; as such, it must be recognisable as such a contravention. That is, if I make a mistake in, say, my use of a word, other people must be able to point it out to me. If this is not so, I can do what I like and there is no external check on what I do; that is, nothing is established. Establishing a standard is not an activity which it makes sense to ascribe to any individual in complete isolation from other individuals. For it is contact with other individuals which alone makes possible the external check on one’s actions which is inseparable from an established standard. (Winch [1958] 1990, 32)

This is crucial because the claim that “established standards” are a necessary condition for understanding amounts to acknowledging the inescapable grip of the social. The third condition Winch indicates is quite paradoxical. Taking Wittgenstein’s example of the pupil who is taught the series of natural numbers, Winch recalls that though all would now agree that following a rule can never be reduced to the mechanical application of an instruction, one may add that a prior requirement has to be met if one is to assert that a rule has been appropriately followed:

The point here is that it matters that the pupil should react to his teacher’s example in one way rather than another … That is to say he has to acquire the ability to apply a criterion; he has to learn not merely to do things in the same way as his teacher, but also what counts as the same way . . . In one sense, that is, it involves doing something different from what one was originally shown; but in relation to the rule that is being followed, this counts as “going on in the same way” as one was shown. (Winch [1958] 1990, 59)

To be seen as having followed a rule, one must demonstrate a capacity to make proper use of adequate criteria of judgment, says Winch. However, as this implies that one already knows what “going on doing the same thing on the same kind of occasion” requires, then one can claim that such a knowledge proceeds from the mere fact that individuals are able, in and through participation in a form of life, to directly apprehend the type of “internal relationship” that exists between concepts (the words one makes use of to apprehend and describe the social world one is engrossed in) and action in common. As he writes, “Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning to do something” (Winch [1958] 1990, 57).

To sum up, contending that someone understands (or has correctly applied) a rule does not amount to accounting for the very reasons that have led someone to act the way he did. About that, says Wittgenstein, there is definitely not much to say. ⁹ Understanding should be conceived of as demonstrating publicly, in words or in deeds, that one knows what counts as following a rule—whether in terms of explanation or justification. However, as such explanations and justifications can be couched in innumerable ways, it is reasonable to admit that most people most of the time are easily able to invoke a rule that can explain or justify their action. ¹⁰

Winch’s analysis may enable vindicating a claim: the criteria one has to make use of “to understand”—when its model is following a rule—are afforded by a series of logical constraints that organize practically as well as conceptually an action in common when it takes place in a given “form of life” (in Wittgenstein’s sense of the notion). This claim can be expanded as it hints at the fact that understanding—or knowing—is less a matter of literal content and objective meaning (i.e., What does a rule dictate in full?) than a practical activity (which most of the time passes unnoticed) directly carried out in the course of the sequential unfolding of an action in common. This activity consists in mutually eliciting the intelligibility of occurring events and enunciated propositions. What difference does such an expansion make?

It allows one first to construe forms of life as repositories of social normativity supplying the resources available for one to call on to understand what is going on. And these resources seem to display the properties conferred on impersonal requirements: they are public, regular, and compelling (which, by the way, are the properties Durkheim conferred on social facts). Second, and most important, it leads one to consider that because understanding is only made possible through taking into account the impersonal requirements that bear on it, it should be apprehended as mutual intelligibility elicitation practices. ¹¹ This is the point I would like to further substantiate now.

5. Normativity: A Sequel

In his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Wittgenstein (1979) gave both a strong and a weak meaning to the verb “to understand.” The strong one refers to a kind of intuitive grasp of what is happening in a given circumstance. And as this intuitive grasp is immediate, people who are alien to the “form of life” in which a given action unfolds will inevitably fail to get it. Here, “understanding” is a matter of affects and emotions and requires an embodied familiarity with an environment. In this strong version, the observer is excluded from the very possibility of understanding. This position is magnificently summarized in Wittgenstein’s (1979, 139) maxim: “If fleas developed a rite, it would be based on the dog,” which arguably is the equivalent for sociologists and anthropologists of the one devised for philosophers and linguists, namely, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958, 223).

The strong version of “understanding” seems to be in contradiction with Wittgenstein’s denial of private language that appears to favor a weaker version. To explain the difference, I will extend Wittgenstein’s renowned example: although a toothache is not suffered by the person who observes it, she may get an idea of what it feels like through hearing a description (if the pain is not too impairing and if the sufferer is not unable to talk because of the pain) or by analogy with toothaches she has experienced. In other words, one can “understand” (in a weak or descriptive sense) a toothache even if one is not suffering the toothache under observation (strong version). In short, when one challenges the existence of private language, one may assume that all human experiences are intelligible and conveyable to anyone even if they do not live them through intimately. That is why Wittgenstein ultimately agrees that sociologists or anthropologists are well founded in the claim that they can attain valuable insights into the intelligibility of an action by acquiring a sensitivity to a “form of life” that is initially foreign to them.

The denial of private language logically leads to the admission that any human experience—such as having a toothache, having the belief of a Zande (Winch 1964), having a moral or political commitment, or being a prostitute, a factory worker, or a drug addict—is significantly conveyable to others, to the extent that they want to know what this experience is about. If nobody needs to be a woman, a mentally ill person, an activist, a junkie, a slave, or an illegal immigrant to “understand” the forms of life in which such experiences are intelligible, it is just because everyone is able to “know” what it feels like to be in one of these positions. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to assert that nothing deters understanding (in the descriptive sense) what human beings live through without having to get under their skin (or to be in their condition). Moreover, if this is the case, it is because every human might normally know what desire, humiliation, despair, suffering, generosity, injustice, deprivation, fear, joy, hunger, thirst, deference, and a range of emotions that she herself has experienced are. No question of empathy or feeling is implied here—just a matter of sharing current social expectations. And the possibility of such sharing is, according to Wittgenstein, but a consequence of being part of the “natural history of mankind.” On this account, sociologists can conclude that even the most ordinary practical judgment is framed by the use of criteria of intelligibility that everyone knows how to make use of. It is this idea that Wittgenstein summarizes, I surmise, in his formula, “The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958, §206). This system of reference is impersonal as it is made use of by any member of a social grouping, and these members expect relevant others to use it as well. This may be related to Durkheim’s contention that

there is something impersonal in us because there is something social in us and since social life embraces both representations and practices, that impersonality extends quite naturally to ideas as well as to actions. (Durkheim [1912] 1965, 447)

One may then claim that a kind of internal relationship exists between the social and the impersonal requirements with which people know that they should comply when they wish to act appropriately. Let us once again turn to Wittgenstein to find out how far this relationship reaches.

6. Acting on Certainties

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein introduces a distinction between certainty and knowledge. The former is something the objects of which one has no reason to doubt, while the latter refers to propositions that one could support with evidence, arguments, and proofs. Extending his investigation on the uses of “I know,” Wittgenstein differentiates between current empirical propositions and “pivotal” or “hinge” propositions. What are the latter? These are propositions that are immunized against doubt because they serve as first-rank “beliefs” on which second-rank “beliefs” can be supported. Pivotal propositions are seldom questioned for they come to fulfill a grounding function. Moreover, such an epistemic role may be played by any empirical proposition according to the circumstances in which language use occurs. Wittgenstein states,

That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.

. . . We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. (Wittgenstein 1969, §341, §343)

Wittgenstein further conceives of certainty “as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal” (Wittgenstein 1969, §359). Such “animality” (or “primitiveness” as Crispin Wright [2007, 489] would have it) is precisely what characterizes membership in a “form of life” (and the way it conjures up what Wittgenstein calls a “picture of the world . . . the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false” ¹² (Wittgenstein 1969, §94). Wittgenstein acknowledges that giving an exhaustive list of the elements that make up this inherited background would be a hopeless endeavor. Moreover, no one expresses the need to specify it in everyday life, for as he writes, in the main, “Grounds for doubt are lacking!” (Wittgenstein 1969, §4) However, it is important to notice that the distinction between true and false entirely relocates the problem of understanding: we are no longer in the realm of an intuitive grasp but have entered the realm of ordinary language use and situated interactions—that is, the realm of justifications the acceptability of which is under the control of language games and forms of life. The question is how does this control work? I will try to answer to this question by taking up Wittgenstein’s example about the sick man lying in a bed.

I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense! I am sitting at his bedside, I am looking attentively into his face.—So I don’t know, then, that there is a sick man lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion makes sense. Any more than the assertion “I am here,” which I might yet use at any moment, if suitable occasion presented itself . . . And “I know that there’s a sick man lying here” used in an unsuitable situation, seems not to be nonsense but rather seems matter-of-course, only because one can fairly easily imagine a situation to fit it, and one thinks that the words “I know that . . .” are always in place, where there is no doubt, and hence even where the expression of a doubt would be unintelligible. (Wittgenstein 1969, §10)

One does not need constantly to say aloud that one is at the bedside of a sick person to be seen as knowing what one is doing. According to Wittgenstein, understanding often equates to seeing that somebody’s behavior is appropriate to what is socially expected in that situation. A visitor cannot publicly express any doubt about the fact that she sits at the bedside of a sick person. Just imagine someone repeating ceaselessly “I know I’m at the bedside of a sick person” in a hospital room in front of other visitors. I am sure you would agree that the latter would have every reason to wonder about this person’s mental health. On this account, one may contend that “being at the bedside of a sick person” is a form of life in itself as it sets the series of impersonal requirements according to which judgment about what is going on are made. In that sense, forms of life work as a normative order. Moreover, because this fits exactly the analysis Goffman has made of the notion of “situation,” I would like to expand on the family resemblance between this notion and Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life.

7. Impersonal Requirements

According to Goffman, a situation is a “membrane” ¹³ that cuts off a fragment from the social world and operates as a filter that selects among the many obligations with which members of a society have to comply from those that have a specific relevance to the here and now of an ongoing action in common. He contends that a “loose coupling” (Goffman 1983b, 11) exists between interactional practices and social structures, the resilience of which is constantly put to test within the ceaseless flow of action in common in everyday life. Observation shows that individuals demonstrate their epistemic aptitude to handle this loose coupling satisfactorily in most occasions of social life because,

The elements and processes [they] assume in [their] reading of the activity often are ones that the activity itself manifests—and why not, since social life itself is often organized as something that individuals will be able to understand and deal with. (Goffman 1974, 26)

Admittedly, each situation supplies an approximately similar set of criteria of judgment to the individuals who get involved in it (a phenomenon Garfinkel [1967, 76] has named “common sense knowledge of social structures”). These criteria are impersonal (they appear as legitimate to everyone) and binding (their use is compelling, if one wants to make one’s action intelligible to others). Moreover, these criteria are publicly available because most of them inhere in the ordinary language (Wittgenstein’s language games) and the normative order (Wittgenstein’s form of life) it is attuned to. Hence, Goffman (1983a, 51) surmised that

whenever we come into contact with another through the mails, over the telephone, in face-to-face talk, or even merely through immediate co-presence, we find ourselves with one central obligation: to render our behaviour understandably relevant to what the other can come to perceive is going on. Whatever else, our activity must be addressed to the other’s mind, that is, to the other’s capacity to read our words and actions for evidence of our feelings, thoughts and intent. This confines what we say and do, but it also allows us to bring to bear all of the world to which the other can catch allusions.

To sum up, a situation operates as a regulative set of connected frames that indicates what seems to be the most appropriate thing to do in each sequence of an interaction. Of course, rules of correctness are never totally and fully codified: behaving properly at the bedside of a sick person is by and large a settled matter, yet it has to take its actual shape in the course of its practical accomplishment. Nevertheless, the situation (“to sit at the bedside of a sick person”) serves as a touchstone on which the gestures made and the words said are “understood” (in the descriptive sense of the verb).

I claim that the notion of situation compares with that of form of life when both are considered from the perspective of impersonality. How so, you may ask? Let us come back to Wittgenstein and his proposition to the effect that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958, §43). Now, this raises a question: how could one account for mutual understanding since each use is particular (or subjective)? In other words, on which common grounds can a use be intelligible to others? Wittgenstein’s answer is that each use necessarily occurs within a “language game” that is itself incorporated in a “form of life.” Hence, his proposition to the effect that agreement in the language “is not agreement in opinions but in form of life” (Wittgenstein [1953] 1958, §241). The epistemological compound Wittgenstein has put up (the encapsulation of natural history/language games/forms of life/agreement in language ¹⁴ ) constitutes the institutional bedrock on which mutual intelligibility can be elicited and sustained during interactions. I contend that this is the bedrock “situations” as well as “forms of life” afford to individuals when they get engrossed in any action in common.

Thus, my claim is that both situations and forms of life work as contextual normative orders within which practical activities unfold in a coordinated way. In other words, they both contain an “ordinary logic of intelligibility” that supplies common guidelines for the mutual accomplishment of an action in common. Moreover, as this logic inheres in the practices and is not forged in individual minds, it can be viewed as impersonal through and through.

8. Conclusion

I have tried to demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s views on blind obedience incorporate a compelling conception of social constraints that speak in favor of the impersonal (i.e., social) nature of what he has called “agreement in language.” What then is impersonality?

On account of what has been worked out in this article, I would say that impersonality names the broad realm of binding necessities of coordination and reciprocity emerging in the course of any action in common. This realm includes logical reasoning principles, civility commandments, instructions stemming from the social organization of practical activities, and an approximate set of universal expectations about the current forms of human conduct. In short, everything one has to take into account whenever one intends her action to appear acceptable to others. Impersonality displays all the properties of an institution: its requirements lie outside the reach of individuals, pre-exist and outlive them, and constantly inform the way they act with others. However, unlike the prescriptions attached to obligation, those attached to impersonality are not thought of as internalized or incorporated. They refer, rather, to a series of checks and limitations with which individuals are well acquainted as they are part and parcel of the ordinary knowledge they have about what should happen in each situation or form of life they happen to find themselves in.

Impersonality offers a kind of midway between determinism (according to which individuals are mere puppets guided by structural forces they are not aware of and which are out of their control) and the regulative conception of social normativity endorsed by Goffman’s and Garfinkel’s realist interactionism. Switching from obligation to impersonality allows—or so I contend—the consideration on an equal footing of the singularity of individual action and the fact that it is first and foremost oriented by commitments and assignments that emerge when people are involved in mutually accomplishing coordination. Such a switch would give some credit to the hypothesis that the social inheres in this ceaseless game that consists in making a personal use of impersonality. This use is personal in that it leaves room for the most complete singularity of individual behavior; but it is impersonal because this singularity expresses itself within bounds that are fixed by situations or forms of life. Here is how the social can be conceived of as immanent to the practices. It is also how the impersonality of ways of behaving and thinking provides the common basis of intelligibility that individuals use to carry out the joint activity in which they are engaged in a mutually satisfactory manner.

The notion of personal use of impersonality has two advantages. On one hand, it offers an ingenious solution to one of the questions raised by the fact of coordination: how is one to account both for the incredible speed at which individuals react to unpredictable events and to the fact that these reactions are most of the time appropriate to the circumstances and directly understood by others? On the other hand, it might help by blurring the separation between the social of philosophy and the social of sociology because they may both apprehend impersonality as a reservoir of clues and tricks inherent to the social organization of practical activities from which individuals draw to overcome the uncertainty that invariably arises in any action in common (Livet 2001) and secure its continuity. These advantages have been deduced from Wittgenstein’s work, and this is what I take to be his unintended contribution to the social sciences—a vision confirmed by a proposition formulated by Donald Davidson:

Belief, intention, and the other propositional attitudes are all social in that they are states a creature cannot be in without having the concept of intersubjective truth, and this is a concept one cannot have without sharing, and knowing that one shares, a world and a way of thinking about the world with someone else. (Davidson 1992, 265)