The Concept of the Metaphysical Self in Wittgenstein as Limit Concept

I continue my investigation of limit concepts. So far I have discussed the concepts of God, prime matter, bare particulars, and particularity. We now turn to the Tractarian Wittgenstein.

As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world.  "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631)  The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book." (ibid.) The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.

But why not?  Is it because it doesn't exist, or is it because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience?  It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."  So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world.

From the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist.  If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.

As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field.  If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes. The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.

That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes.  They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc.  The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex -- the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing?  In the pupil?  In the retina?  In the optic nerve?  Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain?  In the visual cortex? Where exactly?  Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system?  But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye.  And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items? But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time?  And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything?  If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point:  the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able.  It is not an object of actual or possible experience.  It is not in the world.  It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye, or a relation in which the eye stands, or an activity of the eye.  The same goes for the whole visual system.  And yet there is seeing.  There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.  

Who or what does the seeing?  Who or what is the subject of visual consciousness?  Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye? No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something.  No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."*   We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."  

But then who or what is this I?  It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field.  Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness.  It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.

So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein.  There is a subject, but it is not in the world.  So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world.  'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being.  (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)

But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world.  This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world.  "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1)  It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world.  So all the self can be is the limit of the world.

We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts.  The world is a totality of things or of facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively.  So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension).  So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world  as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.  

This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63) 

The analogy is clear to me.  Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world.  Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)  

Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case."  There is nothing outside it.  And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world.  Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self  and that it is the limit of world.  He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.

What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego.  The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher.  He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them.  According to P. M. S. Hacker,

Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant.  It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)

Spot on.

So what sort of concept is the concept of the metaphysical self in Wittgenstein?  It is clearly a limit concept, and indeed a negative one inasmuch as it marks a limit without pointing beyond that limit. The upshot seems to be that the metaphysical or rather transcendental self just is a concept.  The neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert maintained something similar.  But how could the ultimate subject or self be a mere concept? And whose is it?  Concepts are in minds. There is pressure to move in the direction of a substantial self . . .

Comments

[Dave Bagwill]

You are on a roll, Bill, and the left side of my brain is happy.

[oz the ostrich]

It may surprise you that a significant part of my PhD thesis was on the subject of the visual field problem and related issues.

You may also want to revisit Being and Nothingess part Three chapter 2 “The Body”. “My body as it is for me does not appear to me in the midst of the world”. “I apprehend [my eye] as a sense organ constituted in the world in a particular way, but I can not ‘see the seeing’”. “..my hand reveals to me the resistance of objects, their hardness or softness, but not itself.” Etc etc.

[BV]

You know about B & N?? You must be a traitor to your race -- or your species.

Seriously, I will have to engage with your Intentionality chapter in your recent book. A quick eyeballing suggests that, if you are right, you have put paid to the entire phenomenological movement. Intentionality is the central theme.

[BV]

But you didn't tell whether you agree with my entry above. Is the concept of a limit concept now clear to you? And the distinction between positive and negative limit concepts? And that your original objection to Deinhammer has been successfully rebutted?

Alles klar?

[oz the ostrich]

>>You know about B & N?? You must be a traitor to your race -- or your species.

I wrote about it in the thesis (the final version of which is now lost, thanks to the University Library). I studied it in great detail, and the work of the other phenomenologists. Heidegger I did not find so congenial.

>>Is the concept of a limit concept now clear to you?

Not entirely.

>>A quick eyeballing suggests that, if you are right, you have put paid to the entire phenomenological movement.

Right. But the earlier parts of the book are a propaedeutic.

[David Gudeman]

Bill, are you familiar with Whitehead's writings on space? He defines a point as the limit of a sequence of ever smaller regions of space (the sequence has to meet certain conditions to have a point as a limit). He remarks that although the point is a limit of a sequence of spaces, the point is not itself a space; it is a different type of thing from a space.

I was thinking of this when reading your first examples, and it seemed to fit, so I assumed you had something like this in mind; now I'm not so sure. I could imagine, for example, a sequence of ever more refined concepts of God getting ever closer to the real concept of God but never actually reaching it. I could think of similar sequences for prime matter, bare particulars, and particularity.

However, I can't imagine what such a sequence would look like in the case of the self. Was I misinterpreting you, or do you have a sequence in mind?

[BV]

David,

You raise the interesting question of the relation of what I have been saying about limit concepts to limits of sequences in mathematics.

The limit of a (convergent) sequence is the value the sequence approaches as the number of terms goes to infinity. The limit in this case is a real number. In Whitehead, the limit is a point.

But what I have been talking about are the limits to conceptual understanding, or the limits of conceptualization. I am assuming that a concept is distinct from what it is of or about. I am also assuming that concepts are subjective in that they reside in our minds either dispositionally or occurrently. Thus the concept *triangle* is not a triangle. The latter is triangular, the former is not. But in a case like this my concept adequately captures the essence of a triangle. Or at least it can if I have some basic geometrical knowledge.

Now in the case of God, we have three (epistemic) possibilities. (1 )We can have an adequate concept of God, one that exhausts the essence of God, so that God is as transparent to our minds as Euclidean triangles. (2)We cannot have an adequate concept of God because God does not exist. The concept exists but not its referent. At best the concept marks a limit to our understanding. The God concept is then a limit concept in the negative sense. (3) We cannot have an adequate concept of God, not because God does not exist, but because he is wholly or partially unconceptualizable by us. In this case, the God concept is a limit concept in the positive sense.

[David Gudeman]

A point as defined by Whitehead is a concept that is a limit of a sequence. The importance of the sequence is that it uniquely identifies or "points at" the concept under discussion--namely the point that is being identified.

It seems that you need some sort of "pointing at" to identify one of your limit concepts as well, otherwise what confidence do I have that you and I have the same limit concept in mind? To use Whitehead's spaces as an analogy, suppose you try to define a point based on a collection of spaces that does not meet Whitehead's criteria of a sequence converging to a point. This collection is unlikely to pick out a single point that we can all agree on.

In the same way, I wonder if the set of concepts that you are using in order to pick out a limit concept are precise enough to do its job without some structure to pick out a unique limit concept.

Does it even matter that we all have the same limit concept in mind?