The Philosophy of Cursing: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Being-in-the-World and the Language Game of Cursing
I’ve been told that I curse a lot. I guess I never trained myself out of it. I don’t intend to, but sometimes things in the world go so awry that one can’t help but curse at the things in the world that aren’t going according to plan. But what exactly is the philosophical importance of cursing? What role does it play for us as we relate to the world and to each other? Surely such a persistent phenomenon and such a ubiquitous part of the human cultural experience must have some philosophical function and not just a purely linguistic one!
While cursing is often taken to be a sign of vulgarity, cursing is also a signpost of an important switch between two modes of relating to the world, when things in the world jump between what 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his book Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), called being “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) to being merely “present-at-hand” (vorhanden). When something in the world is ready-to-hand, we are immersed with it meaningfully and fluidly, such as the way in which a baseball bat becomes an extension of the batter’s own arm, as if the object is a part of our very being. In contrast, when something is merely present-at-hand, it is a mere object, something inconvenient or in the way.
Think of a construction worker swinging his or her hammer while hammering a nail. When the construction worker is “in the zone,” the hammer becomes an extension of his or her own arm, so much so that the construction worker doesn’t even need to think about how the hammer is wielded; she just swings the hammer and hits the nail. Using the hammer becomes easy, effortless, and intuitive—even precognitive.
Now imagine that same construction worker accidentally dropping the hammer on his or her toe. At that moment, the intimate connection between the consciousness of the construction worker and the hammer is broken, and the hammer becomes a mere object—and a painfully encountered one at that. The hammer his no longer a tool to be used, but just a “thing.”
The very moment when the hammer is dropped, or (more likely) when the hammer strikes the construction worker’s toe, the shift from the hammer being ready-to-hand (a tool) to being merely present-at-hand (a mere “thing”), is the very moment one would naturally expect the construction worker to curse at the hammer (e.g., “Shit!”, “Damn!”, “Fuck!”—or some other similarly “colorful metaphor,” as Spock keenly put it in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).
While we might think whatever we want about the vulgarity or appropriateness of cursing in general, it’s an important part of our phenomenology—of the way the world presents itself to us and our consciousness—to recognize that we approach the world in (at least) their two different ways, as a being-in-the-world (in-der-Weld-Sein) who is seamlessly and fluidly connected with the world through meaningful projects and concerns, and as a person struggling through the parts of the world that are merely in the way.
We are included to curse at the world, or at people or things in the world, when things ini the world conflict with the way in which our consciousness wants them to be, often in a surprising or unpredictable manner. After all, if we can predict something, we can control it, manipulate it, and regulate our reactions toward it. But the unpredictable shifts from predictability and immersiveness to inconvenience and frustration at the world’s no longer bending itself to our whims, but vice versa with the mere objects—or even other people blocking our way, literally or metaphorically—controlling us and becoming mere objects in our way. So we curse—at objects we drop, traffic jams we can’t predict, at people who put themselves in the way of our own purposes and projects, and even at our own bodies when they can’t keep up with the demands of our consciousness and our will.
Just this week I cursed at myself for not being able to bend at an angle far enough to pick up a dropped object. In that case it wasn’t so much the object itself that frustrated me with its presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) but my own middle-aged body and its lack of flexibility. My own body was no longer ready-to-hand but merely present-at-hand for myself! (This also, perhaps, accounts for some of the male frustration with erectile dysfunction, when one’s sexual organs are no longer ready-to-hand, intuitive ready to use, but merely present-at-hand, not working as intended or desired—“Fuck!” indeed.)
While I’ve been giving a largely Heideggerian interpretation of cursing, it’s worth noting that cursing could be analyzed in terms of the theory of “language games” by Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to Wittgenstein, the meaning of our linguistic utterances, and by extension the various meaningful practices that make up our various modes of being, are context-dependent; the meaning of an utterance is how it is used in a specific meaningful context or practice.
Think, for example, of the exclamation “Water!”—one of Wittgenstein’s own examples in Section 27 of his Philosophical Investigations. The exclamation “Water!” could many any of the following:
I’m thirsty! (Description)
It’s raining! (Observation)
Here comes the flood! (Warning)
Someone spilled water on the floor! (Warning)
Let’s go swimming! (Suggestion)
Go fetch my drinking glass! (Command)
And so on….
Similarly, curse words have different meanings in different contexts. Think for example of some common uses of the word “fuck”:
I just dropped a hammer on my toe! (e.g., “Fuck!”)
We’re headed toward a disaster! (e.g., “Oh, fuck!”)
To cause damage to something (e.g., to “fuck over”)
I want to get laid! (e.g. “to get fucked”)
I can’t find my keys! (e.g., “Where are my fucking keys?”
I’m angry with you! (e.g., “Fuck you!”)
And so on….
The fact that some people find cursing acceptable (or at least forgivable) while others find it unacceptable, inappropriate, or vulgar makes Wittgenstein’s point that the meaning of an utterance is context-dependent. For a construction worker, cursing is normal, even expected. For a conservative Christian, cursing borders on sacrilege, akin to “taking the Lord’s name in vain” (e.g., “God damn it!” or “Jesus H. Christ!”).
Another way to put this is that cursing is an acceptable part of the “construction worker” language game, while it’s not an acceptable part of the “Conservative Christian” language game. (Strictly speaking, its a part of both language games, but curse words are used very differently in these very different contexts—as an exclamation of frustration in the first case and the avoidance of which could be considered a type of linguistic negative virtue signaling in the latter case).
Whenever you find yourself cursing at something or someone, that’s probably a sign that it’s time to stop and reflect on the ways in which you are relating to the world inauthentically, when you’ve shifted from being fluidly and seamlessly immersed in thew world or in a project to the things and people in the world presenting themselves to your mind and consciousness as mere objects in the way.
Rather than allowing yourself to get too frustrated by this shift from things being ready-to-hand to being merely present-at-hand, try to pause, collect, and reground yourself, in the same way that the construction worker from the example above eventually has to stop cursing at the hammer, pick it back up, and continue hammering nails—to once again get him- or herself back in the zone with the hammer ready-to-hand.
