Maverick Philosopher

Wittgenstein's Tractatus at 100

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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 . . .

Musing and Using

"Your problems are artifacts of musing about language. Stop musing and stick to using."

Could be, Ludwig, but I doubt it.

Problemverlust

The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit certain ostriches of my acquaintance.

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems." (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no final reckoning, no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One will especially feel this to be  so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford,  1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

More on the Question: Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Just over the transom from Jacques:

Enjoying your posts as always!  Thanks for writing so regularly, at such a high level.  Reading your posts on Wittgenstein on religion I have a few quick thoughts about religion (or Christianity specifically).  When I first started reading Wittgenstein, I initially thought that he had in mind some very different reason for thinking that historical evidence or facts were irrelevant to religion.  Then I realized this was just what I wanted to think, for my own reasons; I think you've done a good job here of explaining what he and his followers probably have in mind, and why it seems so absurd.

Still, I have sympathy for his claim that it just wouldn't matter if it turned out that all the Gospels were fabrications (for example).  I'm not a Christian--at least, I don't think I am one?  But I have the strong intuition that the story of Christ is just true, in some ultimate sense, so that if it's not historically true that would only show that history is a superficial or irrelevant kind of truth--that it just doesn't matter what happened historically if we want to know about ultimate things like God, the soul, the afterlife.

If I learned that Christ never existed, for example, then I'd be inclined to interpret this "fiction" as some kind of intrusion of a higher reality into our lame little empirical world.  God might well pierce the Veil of Maya in a "fictional" story, right?  If this world is illusory or second-rate somehow, it wouldn't be that surprising if that's the way it works.  The prisoners in the Cave might first intuit the real world outside by seeing (similarly) "fictional" representations of the real world produced by the figures in front of the fire.

So I think Wittgenstein overlooks an important third possibility:  the truth of Christianity might be neither "historical" nor some set of "truths of reason" but instead some other truth that is just as "objective" (i.e., independent of any language games) but which is only grasped by means of a historically false narrative (or by means of participating in a certain language game for which questions of truth and falsity with respect to the empirical or historical world are irrelevant).  I realize this is kind of sketchy and vague!  Do you know what I mean? 

This is fascinating and I encourage Jacques to work out his ideas in detail and in depth.  

A comparison of Christianity with Buddhism suggests itself. As I understand Buddhism, its truth does not require the actual existence of a prince Siddartha who long ago attained Enlightenment by intense seated meditation under the Bodhi Tree and in so doing became Buddha. This is because one's own enlightenment does not depend on what some other person accomplished or failed to accomplish.  There is no Savior in Buddhism; or, if you will, one is one's own savior. Salvation is not vicarious, but individual. Buddhism is a religion of self-help, or 'own power': if one attains the salvific state one does so by one's own power and doing and not by the mediation or help of someone else. History, then, doesn't matter: there needn't have been someone in the past who did the work for us. The sutras might just be stories whose truth does not depend on past events, but is a function of their efficacy here and now in leading present persons to the salvific state (nibbana, nirvana).  Verification in the here and now is all that is needed.

What Jacques is saying sounds similar to this. The Christian story is true, but not because it records historical facts such as the crucifixion, death, and Resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth, who took the sins of the world upon himself, the sacrificial lamb of God who, by  taking the sins of mankind upon himself and expiating them on the cross, took away the sins: agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. Jacques is telling us that the Christian story is true whether or not it is historically true, and that its truth is therefore not the truth of an historical account.  And he agrees with Wittgenstein that the truths of Christianity are not propositions discernible by reason. I think Jacques is open to the idea that the truth of Christianity is revealed truth, a sort of revealed 'fiction' or 'myth' that illuminates our predicament.  But Jacques disagrees with Wittgenstein, and agrees with me, by denying that Christianity is a mere language game (Sprachspiel) and form of life (Lebensform).  That would subjectivize it, in contradiction to its being revealed truth. 

Jacques is proposing a fourth way: Christianity is the revelation by God of a sort of 'fictional' or 'mythical' truth that does not depend on what goes on "in our lame little empirical world."  To evaluate this one would have to know more about the sense in which Christianity is true on his reading. Buddhism doesn't need historical facts because its truth is a matter of the efficacy of its prescriptions and proscriptions in inducing in an individual an ever-deepening detachment from the samsaric world in the direction of an ultimate extinguishing of desire and the ego that feeds on it.  

I seem to recall Max Scheler saying somewhere that the Buddhist project is one of de-realizing the sensible world.  That is a good way of putting it. The Buddhist meditator aims to see through the world by penetrating its radical impermanence (anicca) which goes together with its total lack of self-nature or substantiality (anatta), the two together making it wholly 'ill' or 'unsatisfactory' (dukkha).

Christianity, however, is not life-denying in this sense. Christ says that he came so that we may have life and have it more abundantly.  This life is a transfigured life in which the self is not dissolved but transformed.  Christianity does not seek the eradication of desire, as does Buddhism, but its re-direction upon a worthy object.  

Orthodox -- not majuscule but miniscule 'o' -- Christianity is not susceptible to Jacques' reading. Christianity is a very strange religion blending as it does Platonic and Gnostic elements with Hebraic materialism and particularism.  (How odd of God to choose the Jews.) Although Gnosticism was rejected as heresy early on, Platonism is essential to Christianity as Joseph Ratzinger rightly argues in his Introduction to Christianity.  (Ratzinger was Pope before Bergoglio the Benighted. The German has a very good theological-philosophical head on his shoulders.) But Jewish materialism and particularism are also essential to Christianity.  No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV)

How the mystical-Platonic-spiritual-universal  elements (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, et al.) can be made to fit with the material-historical- particularist elements is not easy to say.  There are a number of tensions.

But the main thing that speaks against Jacques' interpretation is that Christianity does not propose an escape from this material world of space, time, flux, and history.  This world is not illusory or the veil of Maya as on such Indian systems as Advaita Vedanta, nor is it anicca, anatta, and dukkha in the precise senses that those terms have in original, Pali Buddhism.  This world is not a product of ignorance or avidya, and the task is not to see through it.  The goal is not to pierce the veil of Original Ignorance, but to accept Jesus Christ as one's savior from Original Sin. The material world is real, albeit derivatively real, as a created world. 

Is this world "second-rate"? Well, it does not possess the plenary reality of its Source, God.  It has a different and lesser mode of Being than God's mode of Being. And it is a fallen world.  On Christianity, it is not just mankind that is fallen, but the whole of creation.  What Christianity proposes is not an escape from this world into a purely spiritual world, but a redemption of this world that somehow spiritualizes the gross matter with which we are all too familiar.

So on my understanding of Christianity, the problem with the material world is not that it is material, but that it has been corrupted by some Event far in the past the negative effects of which can only be undone by subsequent historical events such as the birth of Christ, his atonement, and the Second Coming. History is essential to Christianity.

Like Jacques, I too have Platonic tendencies. That may come with being a philosopher.  Hence I sympathize with his sketch.  Maybe the truth lies in that direction.  But if we are trying to understand orthodox Christianity, then Jacques' approach is as unacceptable as Wittgenstein's. 

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1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Peter Winch, p. 32e, entry from 1937:

Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however because it concerns 'universal truths of reason'! Rather because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief.  This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else.

A believer's relation to these narratives is neither the relation to historical truth (probability), nor yet that to a theory consisting of 'truths of reason'. [ . . .] 

Central to the Gospel accounts is that Christ was seen alive by numerous witnesses after his crucifixion and death. Assuming that 'faith' and 'belief' are interchangeable in this context, Paul is saying that belief in Christ as savior is vain (empty, without substance) if the Gospel accounts are false.  Wittgenstein, however, is maintaining the exact opposite: Christian belief loses nothing of its substance even if the Gospel accounts could be proven to be false.

How can Wittgenstein maintain something so seemingly preposterous?

Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

This is why the "historical proof-game" is irrelevant to Christian belief.  The two language games are not in competition.

But is the Christian belief system true? Evasion of this question strikes me as impossible.

Here is where  the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me.  No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life? When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the skeptical, "What is truth?"  I for one  cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity in Pilate's world-weary way.  (Pilate comes across to me like a Pyrrhonian skeptic who is tired of these deep questions and just doesn't care any more.) If Christianity is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs  that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself. 

And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games.  But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel.  What then is the difference between Christianity and chess?  Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself.  Christianity does so purport.  This is why it is absurd when L. W claims, in other places, that Christianity is not a doctrine. Of course it is a doctrine. Its being much more than a doctrine does not show otherwise.  

So I say the following. If it is demonstrable that the Resurrection did not occur, then Christian faith is in vain. Paul is right and Ludwig is wrong. Historical investigation cannot be wholly irrelevant to Christian belief. On the other hand, at some point one has to make a faith commitment. This involves a doxastic leap since one cannot prove that the Resurrection did occur.  Will is superadded to intellect and one decides to believe.  It may help to reflect that unbelief is also a decision and also involves a leap. Given the infirmity of reason, and the welter of conflicting considerations, it is impossible to know which leap is more likely to be a leap onto solid ground. 

"Go on, believe! It does no harm." (CV, 45e)

Existentially, this may well be the decisive consideration. What, after all, does the believer lose if Christianity turns out to be false? Where is the harm in believing?  On the other hand, should it prove to be true . . . .

So while Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, takes an extreme, and ultimately untenable view, he has existential insights that need accommodation.

Here is an extended post on Wittgensteinian fideism.

On the Expressibility of 'Something Exists'

I am trying to soften up the Opponent for the Inexpressible.  Here is another attempt.

..........................

Surely this is a valid and sound argument:

1. Stromboli exists.
Ergo
2. Something exists.

Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as

1*.  For some x, x = Stromboli. In English:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.

But how do we render (2)?  Surely not as 'For some x, x exists' since there is no first-level predicate of existence in standard logic.  And surely no ordinary predicate will do.  Not horse, mammal, animal, living thing, material thing, or any other predicate reachable by climbing the tree of Porphyry.  Existence is not a summum genus.  (Aristotle, Met. 998b22, AnPr. 92b14) What is left but self-identity?  Cf. Frege's dialog with Puenjer.

So we try,

2*. For some x, x = x.  In plain English:

2**. Something is self-identical.

So our original argument becomes:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.
Ergo
2**. Something is self-identical.

But what (2**) says is not what (2) says.   The result is a murky travesty of the original luminous argument.

What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions.  It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no nonexistent objects) and that something exists.  But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions.  The attempt to state them results either in  nonsense -- e.g. 'for some x, x' -- or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing. 

It is true that something exists, and I am certain that it is true: it follows immediately from the fact that I exist.  But it cannot be said in standard predicate logic.

What should we conclude?  That standard logic is defective in its treatment of existence or that there are things that can be SHOWN but not SAID?  In April 1914. G.E. Moore travelled to Norway and paid a visit to Wittgenstein where the  latter dictated some notes to him.  Here is one:

In order that you should have a language which can express or say everything that can be said, this language must have certain properties; and when this is the case, that it has them can no longer be said in that language or any language. (Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 107)

Applied to the present example:  A language that can SAY that e.g. island volcanos exist by saying that some islands are volcanos or that Stromboli exists by saying that Stromboli is identical to something must have certain properties.  One of these is that the domain of quantification contains only existents and no Meinongian nonexistents.  But THAT the language has this property cannot be said in it or in any language.  Hence it cannot be said in the language of standard logic that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents or that something exists or that everything exists or that it is not the case that something does not exist.

Well then, so much the worse for the language of standard logic!  That's one response.  But can some other logic do better?  Or should we say, with the early Wittgenstein, that there is indeed the Inexpressible, the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Mystical?  And that it shows itself?

Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches.  Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische. (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 6.522)

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Wittgenstein and Butchvarov on the Self

This entry supplements the earlier entry on what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus calls the metaphysical subject. (5.633) 

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."  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?  Because it doesn't exist, or 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. His thesis is not eliminativist, but identitarian.

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, a point on which I 'dilate' in detail in the earlier entry.

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.

Butchvarov

Now to Butchvarov.  He writes that his picture and Wittgenstein's share "the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus of subjectivism in all its forms." (Anthropocentrism in Philosophy, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 235)  A few pages earlier we read, "Hume in effect denied that there is what Wittgenstein was to call 'the philosophical self' or 'the metaphysical subject'." (226)

Here is where I disagree.    While it is certainly true that both Hume and Wittgenstein reject the substantial self of Descartes and of the pre-Critical rational psychologists,  Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject.  Nor should he, even if he accepts Hume's argument from the non-appearance of the self.  For the metaphysical self, as the limit of the world, is not an object in the world and so cannot be expected to appear in the world.  Its non-appearance is no argument against it.

That Wittgenstein does not reject the metaphysical/transcendental subject is also clear from Wittgenstein's claim at 5.641 that "there is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way" without, I may add, lapsing into a physiological or naturalistic way of talking about it.  He goes on to reiterate that the "philosophical self" is not the human body or the human soul, and therefore no part of the world.  It is the "metaphysical subject," the limit of the world.  

What I am maintaining, then, in apparent  contradiction to Butchvarov, is that, while Wittgenstein rejects the substantial ego of Descartes, he does not reject "the metaphysical subject" or "the philosophical self." 

A Dilemma?

There is a  serious substantive issue here, however, one that may tell against Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism. (See article referenced below.)

Why call this philosophical self or metaphysical subject a self if it only a limit?  Can a limit be conscious of anything?  Why should the self be a philosophical as opposed to a psychological or neurophysiological topic?  How does the self get into philosophy? Must the self get into philosophy for antirealism to get off the ground?     "What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'." (5.641)  This harks back to the opening antirealist sentence of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation: "The world is my representation."  Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.  The world is my world because, tautologically, the only world for me is my world.  The only world for me as subject is the world as object.  As Butchvarov puts it, though without reference to Schopenhauer, "The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us." (231)  This is the gist of what the great pessimist says on the first page of WWR.  (Whether it is indeed a tautology needs to be carefully thought through.  Or rather, whether it can be both a tautology and a statement of antirealism needs to be thought through.  I don't think it can be both as I will argue in a moment.) 

Now the possessive pronoun 'my' is parasitic upon the the first-person pronoun 'I' which refers to the self. So my world is the the world thinkable and cognizable by me, by the I which is no more in the 'consciousness field,' the world of objects, than the seeing eye is in the visual field.  How can my world be mine without this transcendental I?  And if you send the transcendental I packing, what is left of antirealism?

Are we headed for a dilemma?  It seems we are.  

1. Either (a) antirealism boils down to the tautological thesis that "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) or (b) it does not.  Please note that the quoted thesis is indeed a tautology.  But it is a further question whether it can be identified with a nonvacuous thesis of antirealism. (And surely antirealism must be nonvacuous to be worthy of discussion.)  While it is a tautology that the only cats I see are the cats I see, this is consistent with both the realist thesis that cats exist independently of anyone's seeing and the antirealist thesis that their existence is just the indefinite identifiability of cat-noemata by a perceiver.

2. If (a), then antirealism 'says nothing' and does not exclude realism.  It is a vacuous thesis.  For example, it does not exclude a representational realism according to which there is a world that exists in itself, a world that includes beings like us who represent the world in various ways more or less adequately and whose representations are representations of what, in itself, is not a representation.

3. If (b), and  antirealism is to have any non-tautological 'bite,' it must imply that the world is in some respect dependent on a self or selves other than it.  But then the "philosophical self" or "metaphysical subject" cannot be either a mere limit of the world as Wittgenstein says or nonexistent as Butchvarov implies.  It must be a part of the world.  But this leaves us with the Paradox of Antirealism.  For it conflicts with what Butchvarov considers "self-evident," namely, that in the context of the realism-antirealism debate, "we cannot coherently regard ourselves as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection of brains), of that world." (231)

Therefore

4. Antirealism is either vacuous or incoherent.  It is vacuous if a tautology.  For then it cannot exclude realism.  It is incoherent if not a tautology. For then it succumbs to the Paradox of Antirealism.

What Butchvarov wants is a "metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric." (231)  It is not clear to me that he can have both antirealism and non-anthropocentrism.  Antirealism cannot get off the ground as a substantive, non-tautological thesis in metaphysics without a self or selves on which the world depends (in some respects, not necessarily all).  But the price for that is anthropocentrism in Butchvarov's broad use of that term.  He opposes (rightly!) making the world dependent on physical proper parts thereof, but also making it dependent on purely mental/spiritual proper parts and presumably also a divine proper part  

One can of course attenuate the subject, retreating from brain to psyche, to transcendental ego, to limit of the world, to a self that shrinks to a point without extension (5.64), to a Sartrean wind blowing towards objects which is, as Sartre says, nothing -- but at the limit of this attenuation one arrives at something so thin  and next-to-nothing as to be incapable of supporting a robust antirealism. 

Questions for Professor Butchvarov

1. Do you agree with me that, while Wittgenstein rejects the Cartesian-type ego that Hume rejects, he does not reject what he calls "the metaphysical subject" and "the philosophical self"?

2. Do you agree with me that, for Wittgenstein, the metaphysical subject construed as limit of the world, exists, is not nothing?

3. Do you agree with me that, while "the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us" (231) is plainly a tautology, it is a further question whether this tautology is the thesis of antirealism that is debated by philosophers?  (As opposed to a thesis of antirealism that you have arbitrarily stipulated.)

4.  Do you agree with me that the above quoted tautology is logically consistent with both realism and antirealism?

5.  Do you agree that rather than solving the Paradox of Antirealism, you dissolve it by eliminating the subject of consciousness entirely? 

6.  Suppose I grant you that there are no egos, no acts, and that consciousness-of is non-relational along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness.  Will you grant me that the distinction -- the 'Transcendental Difference' if you will -- between subjectless consciousness-of and objects is ineliminable and undeniable?

7.  If you grant me that, will you grant me that the non-relational appearing of objects does not itself appear?

8.  If you grant what I want you to grant in (7) will you grant that something can be real without appearing, without 'showing up' phenomenologically?

9.  If you grant me what I want you to grant in (8) will you grant that, if something can be real without appearing, that the transcendental ego and acts can also be real without appearing?

To put it another way, if you hold that there are no egos and acts on the ground that they do not appear, must you not also maintain that there is no nonrelational consciousness-of on the ground that it does not appear?

Related articles

A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong

Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead

The Paradox of Antirealism and Butchvarov's Solution

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

The Unlimited Obfuscation of Some Continental Writers

The Metaphysical Subject :<i>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus</i> 5.63

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

The Proctology of a Pessimist

Kant, Supererogation, and Imperfect Duties

The Metaphysical Subject :Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.63

 

I take Wittgenstein to be saying at 5.63 that the seeing eye is not in the visual field.  I can of course see my eyes via a mirror.  But these are seen eyes, not 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?  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 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)

I take it that Tractatus 5.63  is the central inspiration behind Butchvarov's solution to the Paradox of Antirealism which, in an earlier entry, I formulated as follows:

PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)

The world cannot depend on me if I am a (proper) part of the world.  But if "I am my world," then the problem would seem to dissolve.  That, very roughly, is Butchvarov's solution.

The solution implies that the philosophical as opposed to the ordinary indexical uses of  the first-person singular pronoun, those uses that figure into the Augustinian Si fallor sum, the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, the Kantian Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vortsellungen begleiten koennen, the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, and the debate about realism and antirealism are really impersonal, despite what Augustine, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl think.  For then the philosophical uses of 'I' refer to the world-as-totality and not to a person or to something at the metaphysical core of a person such as a noumenal self.

This notion that the philosophical uses of the personal pronoun 'I' are really impersonal is highly problematic, a point I will come back to.

_____________________

*People do say things like: "My brain said, 'Stay away from her,' but my little head said, 'Go for it, man!'"  Such talk is of course nonsense if taken literally. 

Related articles

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness

Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity

Just Say 'No' to 'No Self'

Patricia Churchland versus Colin McGinn on Mysterianism

John Searle Interviewed

Posits or Inventions? Butchvarov and Geach on Intentionality

Sartrean Consciousness as Nothing and as Something: Contradiction?

"He Who Hesitates is Lost"

As you know,  Yogi Berra, master of the malapropism, died in September.  In the Berra spirit, I cooked up the following during last night's troubled sleep:

Said by me to Berra in the presence of Peter:  He who hesitates is lost.

Berra:  You mean Peter?

What is Berra failing to understand?

(I would continue with this, but I am presently under assault by some nasty flu bug.  And last night's whisky cure did no good at all.

If I said to Wittgenstein, "I feel like shit warmed-over," he would shoot back: "You have no idea what shit feels like, fresh-cooked or warmed-over."

He was one serious dude.  

Happy Super π Day!

π day is 3/14.  But today is super π day: 3/14/15.  To celebrate it properly you must do so at 9:26 A.M. or P. M. Years ago, as a student of electrical engineering, I memorized π this far out: 3.14159.

The decimal expansion is non-terminating.  But that is not what makes it an irrational  number.  What makes it irrational is that it cannot be expressed as a fraction the numerator and denominator of which are integers.  Compare 1/3.  Its decimal expansion is also non-terminating: .3333333 . . . .  But it is a rational number because it can be expressed as a fraction the numerator and denominator of which are integers (whole numbers).

An irrational (rational) number is so-called because it cannot (can) be expressed as a ratio of two integers. Thus any puzzlement as to how a number, as opposed to a person, could be rational or irrational calls for therapeutic dissolution, not solution (he said with a sidelong glance in the direction of Wittgenstein).

Yes, there are pseudo-questions.  Sometimes we succumb to the bewitchment of our understanding by language.  But, pace Wittgestein, it is not the case that all the questions of philosophy are pseudo-questions sired by linguistic bewitchment.  I say almost none of them are.  So it cannot be the case that philosophy just is the struggle against such bewitchment. (PU #109: Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.)  What a miserable conception of philosophy! As bad as that of a benighted logical positivist.

Many people don't understand that certain words and phrases are terms of art, technical terms, whose meanings are, or are determined by, their uses in specialized contexts.    I once foolishly allowed myself to be suckered into a conversation with an old man.  I had occasion to bring up imaginary (complex) numbers in support of some point I was making.  He snorted derisively, "How can a number be imaginary?!"  The same old fool -- and I was a fool too for talking to him twice -- once balked incredulously at the imago dei.  "You mean to tell me that God has an intestinal tract!"

Finally a quick question about infinity.  The decimal expansion of π is non-terminating.  It thus continues infinitely.  The number of digits is infinite.  Potentially or actually?  I wonder: can the definiteness of π -- its being the ratio of diameter to circumference in a circle -- be taken to show that the number of digits in the decimal expansion is actually infinite?  

I'm just asking.

Now go ye forth and celebrate π day in some appropriate and inoffensive way.  Eat some pie.  Calculate the area of some circle.  A = πr^2.  

Dream about π in the sky.  Mock a leftist for wanting π in the future.  'The philosophers have variously interpreted π; the point is to change it!'

UPDATE:  Ingvar writes,

Of course the ne plus ultra pi day was 3-14-1592 and whatever happened that day
at 6:53 in the morning.

So we have one yearly, one every millennium, and one
once.

 Related articles

To Pi and Beyond

Don't Recite Digits to Celebrate Pi. Recite Its Continued Fraction Instead.

Pi Day Of The Century

Is Gardeners' Question Time Racist?

"An academic claims the Radio 4 programme’s regular discussions on soil purity and non-native species promote racial stereotypes."  More proof of the willful stupidity of liberals and the alacrity with which they play the race card.  (HT: London Karl)

Gardening puts me in mind of spades, as in Wittgenstein's remark, "My spade is turned."  Did old Ludwig have a black servant who executed a turn?  A linguistic turn perhaps, or perhaps a transcendental one? 

My erudite readers will of course know that to which I allude, namely, paragraph 217 of  Philosophical Investigations:

217. “How am I able to obey a rule?” – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

I am coming reluctantly to the view that the onus probandi rests on liberals.  If you self-identify as a liberal, then the burden is on you to show that you are not willfully stupid and morally obtuse.

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Fly Bottle Blues

Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI 309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.  I'm not saying it should be done.  On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.*

_____________

*Typo Man sez: 'Rene' is not a typographical error!

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Death Limits Our Immorality: Death as the Muse of Morality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily that of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One feels this to be especially so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

If Everyone Goes Straight to Heaven . . .

. . . then heaven is a joke, and so is this life, and there is no ultimate justice, hence no God.

Mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. has died in prison.  Good riddance.  I read the book by his son, Frank Jr. and came away impressed by him for courageously  'ratting out' his father: family loyalty is a value, but there are higher loyalties.

Unfortunately:

Frank Calabrese Jr. told the Sun-Times on Wednesday that that violent history made his father's death especially emotional.

"I believe he was taken on Christmas Day for a reason," he said. "I hope he made peace. I hope he's up above looking down on us. ... He's not suffering anymore. The people on the street aren't suffering anymore."

With all due respect to Frank Jr., this is just morally obtuse.  For it implies that how we live here below makes no difference to the ultimate outcome.  It makes no difference whether one lives the life of a brutal murderer or the life of an Edith Stein or a Simone  Weil.  But then there is no justice, and this life is even more absurd than it would be were there no God or afterlife at all.  The reality of the moral point of view cannot have the divine underpinning it needs unless God is the guarantor of justice.  The following exchange between Drury and Wittgenstein is apropos:

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)

What I like about Wittgenstein is that he was one serious man.

A Wittgenstein Paradox

Ludwig Wittgenstein had no respect for academic philosophy and steered his students away from academic careers.  For example, he advised Norman Malcolm to become a rancher, a piece of advice Malcolm wisely ignored.  And yet it stung his vanity to find his ideas recycled and discussed in the philosophy journals.  Wittgenstein felt that when the academic hacks weren't plagiarizing his ideas they were misrepresenting them.

The paradox is that his writing can speak only to professional philosophers, the very people he despised.  Ordinary folk, even educated ordinary folk, find the stuff gibberish. When people ask me what of Wittgenstein they should read, I tell them to read first a good biography like that of Ray Monk, and then, if they are still interested, read the aphorisms and observations contained in Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen).

Only professional philosophers take seriously the puzzles that Wittgenstein was concerned to dissolve.  And only a professional philosopher will be exercised by the meta-problem of the origin and status of philosophical problems.  So we have the paradox of a man who wrote for an audience he despised.

"There is less of a paradox that you think.  Wittgenstein was writing mainly for himself; his was a therapeutic conception of philosophy.  His writing was a form of self-therapy.  He was tormented by the problems.  His writing was mainly in exorcism of his demons." 

This connects with the fly and fly bottle remark in the Philosophical Investigations.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out? Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy? He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . . He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it. You are free to go, the door is unlocked. This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view. But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy. Just do it, if that's what you want. It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit. (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.) For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy. You cannot have it both ways. You either walk away or stay.

On Translating 'Some Individual Exists' Fressellianly

An astute reader comments:

You write:

2. But can this presupposition be expressed (said) in this logic? Here is a little challenge for you Fressellians: translate 'Something exists' into standard logical notion. You will discover that it cannot be done. Briefly, if existence is instantiation, which property is it whose instantiation is the existence of something? Same problem with 'Nothing exists.' If existence is instantiation, which property is it whose non-instantiation is the nonexistence of anything? Similarly with 'Everthing exists' and 'Something does not exist.'

But couldn't we translate those expressions this way (assuming  we have only two properties: a, b)?
1. "something exists" -> "there is an x that instantiates either a or b or ab"
2. "everything exists" -> "there is an x that instantiates a and there is a y that instantiates b and there is a z that instantiates ab"
3. "nothing exists" -> 1 is false
4. "something doesn't exist" -> 2 is false

I am afraid that doesn't work.   We need focus only on on 'Some individual exists.'  The reader's proposal could be put as follows.  Given the properties F-ness and G-ness,

What 'Some individual exists' says is exactly what 'Either F-ness is instantiated or G-ness is instantiated' says.

I would insist however that they do not say the same thing, i.e., do not have the same meaning.  The expression on the left says that some individual or other, nature unspecified, exists.  The expression on the right, however, makes specific reference to the 'natures' F-ness and G-ness.  Surely, 'Some individual exists' could be true even if there are are no individuals that are either Fs or Gs. 

Note that it is not a matter of logic what properties there are.  This is an extralogical question.

On the Frege-Russell treatment of existence, 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts, properties, propositional functions and cognate items.  It is never an admissible  predicate of individuals.  Thus in this logic every affirmation of existence must say of some specified concept or property that it is instantiated, and every denial of existence must say of some specified concept or property that it fails of instantiation.

This approach runs into trouble when it comes to the perfectly meaningful and true 'Something exists' and 'Some individual exists.'  For in these instances  no concept or property can be specified whose instantiation is the existence of things or the existence of individuals.  To head off an objection: self-identity won't work.

That there are individuals is a necessary presupposition of the Frege-Russell logic in that without it one cannot validly move from 'F-ness is instantiated' to 'Fs exist.'  But it is a necessary presupposition that cannot be stated in the terms of the system.  This fact, I believe, is one of the motivations for Wittgenstein's distinction between the sayable and the showable.  What cannot be said, e.g., that there are individuals, is shown by the use of such individual variables as 'x.'

The paradox, I take it, is obvious.  One cannot say  that 'There are individuals' is inexpressible without saying 'There are individuals.'  When Wittgenstein assures us that there is the Inexpressible, das Unaussprechliche,  he leaves himself open to the retort: What is inexpressible? If he replies, 'That there are individuals,' then he is hoist by his own petard.

Surely it is true that there are individuals and therefore expressible, because just now expressed.

"The suicide of a thesis," says Peter Geach (Logic Matters, p. 265), "might be called Ludwig's self-mate . . . . "  Here we may have an instance of it.

Wittgenstein and Rejectionism

I characterized Rejectionism with respect to the question why there is anything at all as follows:  "The rejectionist rejects the question as ill-formed, as senseless."  London Ed suggests that Wittgenstein may be lumped in with the rejectionists.  He has a point, though I do insist on the distinction between taking 'Why is there anything at all?' as an explanation-seeking why-question and taking it as a mere expression of wonder at the sheer existence of things.  We know that Wittgenstein was struck with wonder at the sheer existence of things.  What is now to be discussed is whether Wittgenstein can be read as making a rejectionist response to the ultimate explanation-seeking why-question.

 Ed quotes from Anthony Kenny's book, Wittgenstein:

Logic depends on there being something in existence and there being facts; it is independent of what the facts are, of things being thus and so. That there are facts is not something which can be expressed in a proposition. If one wants to call there being facts a matter of experience, then one can say logic is empirical. But when we say something is empirical we mean that it can be imagined otherwise; in this sense every proposition with sense is a contingent proposition. And in this sense the existence of the world is not an empirical fact, because we cannot think it otherwise.

This passage cries out for commentary.

1. Does logic depend on there being something in existence?  Yes, if we are talking about the Frege-Russell logic that young Ludwig cut his teeth on.    In 'Fressellian' logic, existence is instantiation.  To say that cats exist is to say that something is a cat.  (The concept cat is instantiated.)  To say that dragons do not exist is to say that nothing is a dragon. (The concept dragon is not instantiated.)  This works nicely -- but only on the assumption that individuals exist.    So Kenny is surely right that (Frege-Russell) logic requires that something exists, in particular that individuals exist.

2. But can this presupposition be expressed (said) in this logic? Here is a little challenge for you Fressellians: translate 'Something exists' into standard logical notion.  You will discover that it cannot be done.  Briefly, if existence is instantiation, which property is it whose instantiation is the existence of something?  Same problem with 'Nothing exists.'  If existence is instantiation, which property is it whose non-instantiation is the nonexistence of anything?  Similarly with 'Everthing exists' and 'Something does not exist.'

3. I surmise that this is one of the motivations for Wittgenstein's infamous and paradoxical saying/showing distinction. What can be said can be said clearly.  But not everything can be said.  It cannot be said that there are beings or that there are objects or that there are individuals.  For again, how does one express (say) that there are beings (existents) in Frege-Russell logic?  This system of logic rests on presuppositions that cannot be expressed within the system.  The presuppositions cannot be said but thay can be shown by the use of variables such as the individual variable 'x.'  That is the Tractarian line.

4. Kenny also says that logic depends on there being facts.  That's not clear.  Near the beginning of the Tractatus, LW affirms the existence of facts.  He tells us that the world is the totality of facts (Tatsachen) not of things (Dinge).  But does the Frege-Russell logic require that there be facts?  Not as far as I can see.  The mature Frege certainly did not posit facts.  Be that as it may.

5. Is Wittgenstein a rejectionist?  Does he reject the question 'Why is there anything at all?' as senseless or ill-formed? The case can be made that he does or at least could within his framework.

When I raise the question why anything at all exists, I begin with the seemingly empirical fact that things exist: me, my cat, mountains, clouds . . . .   I then entertain the thought that there might have been nothing at all.  I then demand an explanation as to why there is something given (a) that there is something and (b) that there might not have been anything.

A Wittgensteinian rejection of the question might take the following form. "First of all, your starting point is inexpressible: it cannot be said that things exist.  That is a nonsensical pseudo-proposition. You can say, sensibly, that cats exist, but not that things exist. That things exist is an unsayable presupposition of all thinking.  As such, we cannot think it away.  And so one cannot ask why anything exists."

6. This form of rejectionism is as dubious as what it rests upon, namely, the Frege-Russell theory of existence and the saying/showing distinction.

Good Friday Meditation: Wittgenstein on Christianity

From Culture and Value, p. 32e, tr. Peter Winch:

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief that is appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative!–don’t treat it as you would another historical narrative! Make a quite different place for it in your life.–  There is nothing paradoxical about that!

The "nothing paradoxical" may be an allusion to Kierkegaard who is discussed in nearby 1937 entries.  For Kierkegaard, it is is absurd that God should become man and die the death of a criminal, but this absurdity or paradox is precisely what  the Christian believer must embrace.  Wittgenstein appears to be rejecting this view, but also the view that S. K. also rejects, namely, that Christianity is grounded in verifiable historical facts such as that Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans, died, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. 

I interpret Wittgenstein to be saying that Christianity is neither an absurd belief nor an historically grounded one.  It is a groundless belief, but not groundless in the sense that it needs, but lacks, a ground, but in the sense that it is a framework belief that cannot, because it is a framework belief, have a ground and so cannot need one either.  Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

But is it true?

When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the cynical, "What is truth?"  Presumably, the Wittgensteinian fideist cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity.  If it is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs  that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself. 

Here is where  the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me.  No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life?  And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games.  But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel.  What then is the difference between Christianity and chess?  Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself.  Christianity does so purport.

Here is an extended post on Wittgensteinian fideism.

Saying and Showing

Again, show what?  'There are objects' is nonsense.  One cannot say that there are objects.  This is shown by the use of variables.  But what is shown if not that there are objects?  There, I've said it!

Ray Monk reports on a discussion between Wittgenstein and Russell.  L. W. balked at Russell's 'There are at least three things in the world.'  So Russell took a sheet of white paper and made three ink spots on it.  'There are three ink spots on this sheet.'  L. W. refused to budge.  He granted 'There are three ink spots on the sheet' but balked at the inference to 'There are at least three things in the world.'

W's perspective is broadly Kantian.  The transcendental conditions of possible experience are not themselves objects of possible experience.  They cannot be on pain of infinite regress.  But he goes Kant one better: it is not just that the transcendental conditions cannot be experienced or known; they cannot be sensibly talked about. Among them is the world as the ultimate context of all experiencing and naming and predicating and counting.  As transcendental, the world cannot be sensibly talked about as if it were just another thing in the world like the piece of paper with its three spots.  And so, given that what cannot be said clearly cannot be said at all but must be passed over in silence, one cannot say that the world is such that it has at least three things it it.  So W. balked and went silent when R. tried to get him to negotiate the above inference.

What goes for 'world' also goes for 'thing.'  You can't count things.  How many things on my desk?  The question has no clear sense.  It is not like asking how many pens are on my desk.  So Wittgenstein is on to something.  His nonsense is deep and important.

The Inexpressible

The Tractarian Wittgenstein says that there is the Inexpressible.   But what is inexpressible?  Presumably, if there is the Inexpressible then there must be a quid answering to the est.  Could there be truths that cannot be expressed? A truth is a true truth-bearer, a true sentence, proposition, judgment, statement, assertion, belief, asseveration, belief, claim, etc.  But these all -- different as they are among themselves -- involve expression, articulation, objectification.  An inexpressible truth amounts to an inexpressible expression.  More precisely: an inexpressible truth is something that is both expressible inasmuch as it is a truth but also inexpressible inasmuch as it is -- inexpressible.

And therein lies a problem for our mystical positivist.  In this connection Theodor Adorno speaks of Wittgenstein's indescribable spiritual vulgarity.

Wittgenstein on Darwin

One thing I definitely applaud in Wittgenstein is his opposition to scientism.   M. O'C. Drury in Conversations with Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford, 1984), pp. 160-161:

     One day, walking in the Zoological Gardens, we admired the immense
     variety of flowers, shrubs, trees, and the similar multiplicity of
     birds, reptiles, animals.

     WITTGENSTEIN: I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his
     theory does not account for all the variety of species. It hasn't
     the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying
     that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to
     understand the whole process which gave it birth. Now that you
     can't say.

     DRURY: You could say that now there has evolved a strange animal
     that collects other animals and puts them in gardens. But you can't
     bring the concepts of knowledge and understanding into this series.
     They are different categories entirely.

     WITTGENSTEIN: Yes, you could put it that way.

To imagine that evolutionary theory could cast light on the concepts of knowledge and understanding involves a massive metabasis eis allo genos, to use a a favorite Greek phrase of Kierkegaard.

On the Expressibility of 'Something Exists'

Surely this is a valid and sound argument:

1. Stromboli exists.
Ergo
2. Something exists.

Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as

1*.  For some x, x = Stromboli. In English:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.

But how do we render (2)?  Surely not as 'For some x, x exists' since there is no first-level predicate of existence in standard logic.  And surely no ordinary predicate will do.  Not horse, mammal, animal, living thing, material thing, or any other predicate reachable by climbing the tree of Porphyry.  Existence is not a summum genus.  (Aristotle, Met. 998b22, AnPr. 92b14) What is left but self-identity?  Cf. Frege's dialog with Puenjer.

So we try,

2*. For some x, x = x.  In plain English:

2**. Something is self-identical.

So our original argument becomes:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.
Ergo
2**. Something is self-identical.

But what (2**) says is not what (2) says.   The result is a murky travesty of the original luminous argument.

What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions.  It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no nonexistent objects) and that something exists.  But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions.  The attempt to state them results either in  nonsense -- e.g. 'for some x, x' -- or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing. 

It is true that something exists, and I am certain that it is true: it follows immediately from the fact that I exist.  But it cannot be said in standard predicate logic.

What should we conclude?  That standard logic is defective in its treatment of existence or that there are things that can be SHOWN but not SAID?  In April 1914. G.E. Moore travelled to Norway and paid a visit to Wittgenstein where the  latter dictated some notes to him.  Here is one:

In order that you should have a language which can express or say everything that can be said, this language must have certain properties; and when this is the case, that it has them can no longer be said in that language or any language. (Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 107)

Applied to the present example:  A language that can SAY that e.g. island volcanos exist by saying that some islands are volcanos or that Stromboli exists by saying that Stromboli is identical to something must have certain properties.  One of these is that the domain of quantification contains only existents and no Meinongian nonexistents.  But THAT the language has this property cannot be said in it or in any language.  Hence it cannot be said in the language of standard logic that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents or that something exists or that everything exists or that it is not the case that something does not exist.

Well then, so much the worse for the language of standard logic!  That's one response.  But can some other logic do better?  Or should we say, with the early Wittgenstein, that there is indeed the Inexpressible, the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Mystical?  And that it shows itself?

Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches.  Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische. (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 6.522)

What I Like About Wittgenstein

He was one serious man.  I have always had contempt for unserious people, unserious people in philosophy being the very worst. You know the type: the bland and blasé  whose civility is not born of wisdom and detachment but is a mere urbanity sired by a jocose superficiality.  I have always had the sense that something is stake in life, that it matters what we believe and how we live. What exactly is at stake, why our lives matter, and how best to respond to nihilists and Nietzsche's Last Men are profoundly baffling problems.  But that life is serious is a given.

Perhaps unfortunately, Wittgenstein seemed unable to 'punch the clock' and play the regular guy among regular guys for even a short time.  Wittgenstein died in the house of Dr and Mrs Bevan, a house that bore the auspicious name, 'Storeys End.'  Ray Monk relates the following anecdote:

Before Wittgenstein moved into their house, Dr Bevan had invited him for supper to introduce him to his wife.  She had been warned that Wittgenstein was not one for small talk and that she should be careful not to say anything thoughtless.  Playing it safe, she remained silent throughout the evening.  But when Wittgenstein mentioned his visit to Ithaca, she chipped in cheerfully,  'How lucky for you to go to America!' She realized at once that she had said the the wrong thing.  Wittgenstein fixed her with an intent stare: 'What do you mean, lucky?'  (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 576.)

Poor Mrs Bevan!  The first shot depicts LW in 1925, the second on his death bed in 1951.

Wittgenstein on Religious Faith and Superstition

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72:

Religious faith and superstition are quite different.  One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

Although Winch's translation is correct, I would translate ganz verschieden as 'entirely different.'  For in American English at least, 'quite' can mean either 'very' or 'entirely.'  Glaube (faith) and Aberglaube (superstition) are, says Wittgenstein, entirely different.  I agree.  It follows that religion cannot be a species of superstition.  It is not as if the genus superstition divides into religious and nonreligious species.  And as Aberglaube suggests, superstition is a degenerate form of faith, which is what I have been maintaining.

But is it true that superstition arises from fear while religious faith does not arise from fear but is a kind of trust?  I don't think so.  "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  So arising out of fear cannot be what distinguishes religious faith from superstition.  It is worth noting that Wittgenstein himself believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (CV, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

Perhaps we could say that superstition arises from mundane fear, fear concerning the body and the things of the body, while religious faith does not arise from such fear, but from fear concerning the soul and its welfare.  But this is not what Wittgenstein says.  Religious faith is a trusting.

A trusting in God, but to do what?  Presumably not to supply us with the material necessities of life or to save us physically from life's trials and tribulations.  Perhaps one can makes sense of Wittgenstein's notion of trust in terms of his early experience of  "feeling absolutely safe" recounted in a lecture on ethics from 1929.  "I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'" (LE 8)

The feeling of being absolutely safe is the mystical sense that deep down, and despite appearances, everything is perfect and that one is ultimately safe and secure.  But surely as indigent bodies in a world of bodies we are not safe and secure. So who is the ME that nothing can injure no matter what happens?  Me as individual soul?  Me as eternal Atman?   If I am at bottom an individual soul confronting God my Judge, then the mystical feeling of being absolutely  safe is illusory, is it not?  How can I be absolutely safe as individual soul if I am to be judged and perhaps found unworthy of entering the divine presence and then either annihilated or sent to hell?  If I am at ontological bottom the eternal Atman, then I am absolutely safe and nothing can touch me -- but this does not comport well with the notion of God as Judge.

Wittgenstein says that superstition is a sort of false science.  That is essentially what I said when I said that a necessary condition of a superstitious  belief is that it be or entail erroneous beliefs  about the  causal structure of the natural order.  But I think we are both wrong.

Suppose a soldier is pinned down behind some rocks under withering fire.  There is nothing he can do.  So he prays.  Supposes he prays that his  life be spared by divine intervention.  There needn't be any "false science" involved here in the way false science is involved in the childish belief that stepping on a sidewalk crack will break your mother's back.  And yet the soldier's prayer is superstitious in the way that the prayer, "Thy will be done,"  is not.

Why Wittgenstein was a Better Man than Russell

Russell worried about logic.  Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

Wittgenstein and Dreaming: *On Certainty* #383

On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well  and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

What is senseless (sinnlos) here is not the dream argument, but what Wittgenstein says about it. It is a plain fact that people have dreams in which they know that they are dreaming, and in which they think to themselves, 'I am dreaming.' In those dreams they are not dreaming that they are dreaming, if dreaming that p entails that one does not know that p.

I once had an extremely vivid dream about my dead cat, Maya. There she was: as (apparently) real as can be. I saw her, I touched and petted her, I heard her. It was all astonishingly vivid and coherent. There was an ongoing perceiving in which visual, tactile, and auditory data were well-integrated. And yet I knew within the dream that she was dead, and I knew that I had buried her in April 2001 in the desert behind the house.

And so I began to philosophize within the dream: I know that Maya is dead and that I am dreaming, and so these perceptions, as vivid and coherent as they are, cannot be veridical. Coherence is no guarantee of veridicality. I did not dream that I was dreaming, I knew that I was dreaming; and I did not dream the reasoning in the second-to-last sentence, I validly executed that reasoning. And the meanings of the terms in the reasoning was in no way affected by their being grasped within a dream.

Wittgenstein seems to be assuming that, for any proposition p, if one becomes aware that p while dreaming, then one has dreamt that p in a sense that entails that one does not know that p. But this assumption is false, as Descartes appreciated. Becoming aware that 2 + 3 = 5 while dreaming is consistent with knowing its truth in the way that dreaming that one is sitting before a fire is not consistent with knowing its truth. So there is no reason to deny that one can become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. To become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is not to dream that one is dreaming in a sense that implies that one is not in reality dreaming. And to use words within a dream is not to dream the meanings of those words in a sense that implies that they do not in reality have those meanings.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein: 17 Syllables

One went off the deep end
The other off the shallow
Strange century.

Cottingham, Wittgenstein, and the Religious Impulse

John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52:

     . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound
     sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to
     be . . . .

This is not quite right, as it seems to me, even if '"would wish to be" is read as "ought to be."   The sense of the gap  between 'is' and 'ought' is undoubtedly part of the religious impulse,  but there is more to it than this. It must be accompanied by the sense that the gaping chasm between the miserable wretches we are and what  we know we ought to be cannot be bridged by human effort, whether  individual or collective, but requires help from beyond the human-all-too-human.   Otherwise, the religious sensibility would  collapse into the ethical sensibility. There is more to religion than ethics. The irreligious can be aware of the discrepancy between what  we are and what we should be. The religious are convinced of the need for moral improvement together with a realization of their impotence in bringing it about by their own efforts.

I had an undergraduate professor whose symbol for religion was:

 

I like that because it conveys that religion is for the sick.  And sick we are.  An awareness of our root sickness is an element in the religious sensibility.  Dubious as Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion is, he is absolutely on target in the following observation:

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect (unvollkommen), as ill (krank).  Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched (elend). (Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Winch, p. 45e, emphasis in original)

A Kierkegaardian Passage in Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), ed  von Wright, tr. Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 53e:

     I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound
     doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or
     the direction of your life.)

     It says that all wisdom is cold; and that you can no more use it
     for setting your life to rights that you can forge iron when it is
     cold.

     The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you
     can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription. -- But here you
     need something to move you and turn you in a new direction. --
     (I.e. this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned
     around, you must stay turned around.

     Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard
     calls a passion.

Sound doctrines are useless? It would be truer to say that faith as a mere subjective passion is useless. The fideisms of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein fall far below the balanced positions of Augustine and Aquinas. The latter thinkers understood that sound doctrine, though insufficient, was an indispensable guide. They neither denigrated reason nor overestimated its reach. Reason without faith may be existentially empty and passionless, but faith without reason is blind and runs the risk of fanaticism.

The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell

Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes shot his mouth off in summary judgment of men of very high caliber. He once remarked to M. O'C. Drury, "Russell's books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red -- and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue -- and no one should be allowed to read them." (Recollections of Wittgenstein,* ed. R. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 112.)

Here is a passage from Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (Liveright 1930, p. 24) whose urbanity, wit, and superficiality might well have irritated the self-tormenting Wittgenstein:

I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.

This observation ties in nicely with my remarks on short views and long views.  If middle-sized happiness is your object, then short views are probably best.  But some of us want more.

 __________

*This title is delightfully ambiguous. Read as an objective genitive, it refers to recollections about Wittgenstein, while read as a subjective genitive, it denotes Wittgenstein's recollections. The book, consisting as it does of both, is well-titled.

Ernest Gellner on Ordinary Language Philosophy: Moore as Wittgensteinian Man

The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things  are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.

It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [. . .] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words. . . .

Absolutely brilliant!  When I first read Moore and his remark to the effect that he would never have done philosophy if it hadn't been for the puzzling things he found in books by men like Bradley, I took that as almost the definition of an inauthentic philosopher: one who gets his problems, not from life, but from books.  I should say, though, that over the years I have come to appreciate Moore as a master of analysis.  But I can't shake the thought that there is something deeply perverse about finding the impetus to philosophizing in philosophical claims and theories rather than in the realities attendance to which gave rise to the claims and theories in the first place.  Imagine a scientist or an historian or even a theologian  who proceeded in that way.

In this passage Gellner explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:

The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our  thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal  whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the     transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.

I take the Gellnerian ball and run with it in What is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?  and How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism.
  

Dale Tuggy Avoids D. Z. Phillips

In the fourth of a series posts on the evolution of his views on the Trinity, Dale Tuggy reports on his time at the Claremont Graduate School.  About D. Z. Phillips, he says the following:

D.Z. Phillips I avoided. I’d read real epistemology (Chisholm, Plantinga, etc.) and was always unimpressed with the later-Wittgenstein approach, especially to the epistemology of religion. Anyway, I heard it all repeatedly from some of my fellow students, who also said that every Phillips class was basically the same line over and over. I never could identify with the quasi-conversion stories some of them related about reading Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.

It looks as if Dale and I are in agreement when it comes to the philosophy of religion of the late Wittgenstein. See my The Question of the Reality of God:  Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer.

I hope Dale comes to Tucson again this summer to visit his in-laws.  Peter, Mike and I met him in Florence where we visited a Greek orthodox monastery.  An excellent discussion ensued.  We hope to see him again. 

The Fly and the Fly Bottle

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce & willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

(Exercise for the reader: Cite chapter and verse of the Epictetus and Wittgenstein passages to which I allude above.)

Wittgenstein on Time and Flux

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trs. Hargreaves and White, Chicago 1975, p. 83:

52. It's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophize. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language. 

This indicates to me that Wittgenstein lacked a metaphysical sensibility. It is precisely in ordinary life, and prior to his occupation with technical metaphysics, that the metaphysician feels and is saddened by the transitoriness of things, the flux of phenomena, the passage of time. That feeling is part of what sets him on the path of technical metaphysics in the first place. It is the fundamental sense of the transience and unreality of this world that disposes him to take seriously metaphysical writings when he first encounters them. And it is the lack of this sense in G. E. Moore and in Wittgenstein which disposes them to be puzzled by the writings of metaphysicians like Bradley and McTaggart and to set out to debunk them either by defending common sense (as if the metaphysician were simply denying it) or by bringing us back to ordinary language used in ordinary ways.

Wittgenstein says that "only when we philosophize" are we troubled by the flux of phenomena. Not only is this plainly false, it suggests that there is something aberrant rather than natural about philosophizing, as if philosophy were a disease of cognition needing treatment rather than refutation. I simply deny this.  If there is a cognitive defect, it is in those who fail to perceive the relative unreality of the transient.

Philosophy arises quite naturally in people of a reflective disposition who have a sense of the relative unreality, the ontological non-ultimacy, of the world of time and change. Philosophy is not a disease, but a response to the inherent questionableness of the world and our lives in it.   In the Theaetetus, Plato speaks of wonder as the "feeling of the philosopher." This wonder is not mere puzzlement induced by linguistic confusion but a questioning elicited by the nature of things, a questioning that is a transcending of this world, a transcending that issues in attempts to put into language the essence of the world.

It is the possibility of this transcending that Wittgenstein questions. He questions it by questioning the meaningfulness of the sorts of extended uses of ordinary words that the metaphysician employs. The metaphysician takes a word like 'present' from ordinary usage and then says something extraordinary like, 'The present alone is real,' or 'Only the present experience has reality.' Wittgenstein objects to this with a sort of Contrast Argument:

We are tempted to say: only the experience of the present moment has reality. And then the first reply must be: As opposed to what? Does it imply that I didn't get up this morning? (For if so, it would be dubious.) But this is not what we mean. Does it mean that an event that I'm not remembering at this instant didn't occur? Not that either. (85)

Wittgenstein's point is that when one says that the present alone is real, one is using 'present' in an extended sense, one in which it no longer contrasts with 'past' and 'future.' He seems to think that the presentist metaphysician is saying something that conflicts with such obvious facts as that one got up in the morning. But here is where Wittgenstein's Contrast Argument becomes hard to credit. Wittgenstein's mistake is to think that when the presentist, saying that the present alone is real, implies that the past is unreal, he is implying that the past is nothing at all in a way that would render it false that we got up this morning. But of course the presentist does not deny the gross facts; what he does is reinterpret them. His point is something like this: the reality of the past is relative to, or derivative from, the (absolute) reality of the present.

The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer

Taking a Wittgensteinian line, D. Z. Phillips construes the question of the reality of God as like the question of the reality of physical objects in general, and unlike the question of the reality of any particular physical object such as a unicorn.   Phillips would therefore have a bone to pick with Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey who writes,

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Abbey's meaning is clear: It is as idle to suppose that there is a God as to suppose that there is an irate unicorn on the far side of the moon. Of course, there could be such a unicorn. It is logically possible in that there is no contradiction in the idea. It is also epistemically possible in that the supposition is consistent with what we know. (Perhaps a clever extraterrestrial scientist synthesized a unicorn, put him in a space suit, and deposited the unfortunate critter on the moon.) But there is no positive reason to believe in something so outlandish. The same goes for God according to Abbey, Russell, and plenty of others.  Such theists think of God as just one more being among beings, as something in addition to all the other things that exist.

How might a theist respond to this puerile conception? (And to such cognate 'objections'  as Russell's Teapot?  ) One way to respond is that of the Wittgensteinian fideist. A fideist like Phillips would take Abbey to have misconstrued the very sense of the theist's affirmation. Abbey takes the theist to be adding a weird object to the ontological inventory: hence the comparison of God to an irate lunar unicorn. Phillips, however, clearly sees that this is a mistake.  His positive theory, however, is just as bad.   Phillips thinks that the claim that God exists is more like the claim that there are physical objects in general. That there are physical objects in general is presupposed by any inquiry into whether a particular physical object exists. It is a presupposition without which such an inquiry would make no sense. As Phillips puts it:

Similarly, the question of the reality of God is a question of the possibility of sense and nonsense, truth and falsity, in religion. When God's existence is construed as a matter of fact, it is taken for granted that the concept of God is at home within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. . . . to ask a question about the reality of God is to ask a question about a kind of reality, not about the reality of this or that, in much the same way as asking a question about the reality of physical objects is not to ask about the reality of this or that physical object. ("Philosophy, Theology, and the Reality of God," Phil. Quart., 1963, reprinted in Rowe and Wainwright, p. 281)

Phillips blunders badly in this passage when he says that construing the divine existence as a matter of fact takes it for granted that the concept of God belongs within the conceptual framework of the reality of the physical world. For if anything is clear, it is that God for the theist is not a physical object. Surely, in claiming that God exists as a matter of fact, the theist who understands his doctrine is not claiming that God exists as a physical object. What Phillips should have said is that construing God's existence as a matter of fact presupposes, not that God is a physical object, but that God is a being or an  existent.

Phillips would want to deny that too. His view is that the reality of God is not the reality of a special being, but the reality of a presupposition that is not and cannot be questioned from within a religious language-game (or at least from within a theistic religious language-game). The reality of God has to do with what a religious believer is prepared to say: ". . . the religious believer is not prepared to say that God might not exist. It is not that as a matter of fact God will always exist, but that it makes no sense to say that God might not exist." (280)

Perhaps the following analogy will clarify what Phillips is driving at. Consider the reality of checkmate in chess. The existence of checkmate is not a matter of fact in the way that it is a matter of fact that Karpov opened a certain game with 1. d4. For within the game of chess it makes no sense to say that checkmate might not exist. Checkmate and the rules governing it are defining features of the game. They cannot be questioned from within the game, and to question them from without the game is simply to reject the game. For that reason, it makes no sense to demand proof of these rules, nor can one raise the question whether they are reasonable. Is it reasonable that one cannot castle out of check, into check, or though check? It is neither reasonable nor unreasonable. The question of reasonableness cannot arise. Similarly, for Phillips, it is neither reasonable nor unreasonable that God exists. To play a theistic language-game is to presupposes the meaningfulness of God-talk just as to play chess is to presuppose the meaningfulness of talk of checkmate. And just as God exists in theistic language-games, checkmate exists in chess. But also: just as checkmate does not exist outside chess, God does not exist outself theistic language-games. For if God does exist apart from theistic language-games, then there would be a fact of that matter as to the existence of God.

At this point one can see what is wrong with Phillips' view. Every sane person is an anti-realist about checkmate, but to be an anti-realist about God, as Phillips' view seems to require, is to make a joke of theistic belief. Phillips' claim that "theology is the grammar of discourse" (282) is therefore as preposterous as the claim that botany is the grammar of discourse about plants. There is of course a sense in which for the theist the existence of God is necessary, but this is not the sense in which a rule is necessary for a language-game. Chess is not chess without checkmate, so checkmate is necessary within chess. God, however, is not a rule, nor a linguistic presupposition, nor concept, nor anything dependent on human talking and acting. So the necessity of God is not the necessity of a rule. God is a necessary being, which implies that he is a being, which implies that he exsts independently of human talk and speech if he exists at all. God cannot be reduced to God-talk and God-ritual. Chess just is chess-talk and chess-ritual: chess has no reality outside chess conventions and the chessic form of life. Not so with God.

These points are frightfully obvious, but one can understand why Phillips was driven to contravene them. Surely God is not a physical object, and it is arguable that he is not a being among beings. What then is God, and how understand his reality? His is not the reality of any sort of abstract object, nor that of any sort of collection; thus he is not the world-whole. So Phillips is driven to say something equally untenable, namely, that God is immanent to certain language-games, as a sort of framework truth of those language-games.

The question of the reality of God is a hard nut to crack, but surely it won't do to say that the reality of God is a matter of talk and practice, as if God were merely a feature of certain language games and forms of life.  If God exists, then he is a reality transcendent of any Sprachspiel or Lebensform.

Another Example of a Vicious Infinite Regress: Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 239

I am collecting examples of infinite regress arguments in philosophy. See the category Infinite Regress Arguments.  Here is one that is suggested by section 239 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. When I hear the word 'red,' how do I know which color is being referred to?  The following answer might be given:  'Red' refers to the color of the mental image that hearing the word elicits.  But then the question arises once again:  How do I know that the color of the mental image is the color to which 'red' refers?  Do I need a criterion for that as well?  If I do, then I am embarked upon an infinite regress, one that is vicious.

Why is it vicious?  Most of us know which color 'red' refers to.  But how do we know it?  To ask how we know this is to request an epistemological (and therefore a philosophical) explanation.  But if the explanation is that 'red' refers to the color of the mental image that hearing the word elicits, then, although we have answered the initial question, we have  answered it in a way that allows the posing of a second question of the same form as the first.  And so on.

How Philosophers Should Greet One Another

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80:

Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!"

This is how philosophers should greet each other: "Take your time!"

A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this:

Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft.

One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis.

Philosoblogging, I should think, is one way to avoid hurrying things into print: one tests one's ideas in the crucible of the 'sphere before submitting them to a journal.

Go For Broke and Die with Your Boots On

Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, pp. 56-57:

Moore's health was quite good in 1946-47, but before that he had suffered a stroke and his doctor had advised that he should not become greatly excited or fatigued. Mrs. Moore enforced that prescription by not allowing Moore to have a philosophical discussion with anyone for longer than one hour and a half. Wittgenstein was extremely vexed by this regulation. He believed that Moore should not be supervised by his wife. He should discuss as long as he liked. If he became excited or tired and had a stroke and died -- well, that would be a decent way to die: with his boots on. Wittgenstein felt that it was unseemly that Moore, with his great love for truth, should be forced to break off a discussion before it had reached its proper end. I think that Wittgenstein's reaction to this regulation was very characteristic of his outlook on life. A human being should do the thing for which he has a talent with all of his energy his life long, and should never relax this devotion to his job merely in order to prolong his existence. This platonistic attitude was manifested again two years later when Wittgenstein, feeling that he was losing his own talent, questioned whether he should continue to live. (Emphasis added)

Yes!  No wife, only fair Philosophia herself, should preside over and super-vise a philosophical discussion.  If an interlocutor should  expire in the heat of the dialectic, well then, that is a good way to quit the phenomenal sphere. 

Findlay Contra Wittgenstein

John Niemeyer Findlay, The Transcendence of the Cave  (Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 212: 

We must find a fulcrum outside of this world if we are to lift the heavy load of puzzles which weighs on us in this world, and no therapy can hope to heal us if we are unwilling to be transported, even hypothetically, to the world’s point of unity.

Wittgenstein's Level

There are philosophers whose ideas are worth  little, but whose lives were in many ways exceptional and pitched at a level of spiritual intensity that the rest of us reach only occasionally if at all.  Simone Weil is one example, Ludwig Wittgenstein another. This Wittgenstein fragment gives me shivers and goose bumps:

A beautiful garment that is transformed (coagulates as it were) into worms and serpents if its wearer looks smugly at himself in the mirror.

Ein schoenes Kleid, das sich in Wuermer und Schlangen verwandelt (gleichsam koaguliert), wenn der, welcher er traegt, sich darin selbstgefaellig in den Spiegel schaut. (Culture and Value, p. 22)

Morris Lazerowitz on Philosophy and Propositions

Immersed as I am these days in a metaphilosophical project, I once again pull Lazerowitz's Philosophy and Illusion (Humanities Press, 1968) from the shelf.  Morris Lazerowitz (1907-1987) may not be much read these days, but his ideas remain provocative and worth considering, despite the fact that they are now taken seriously by few, if any.  But if he is right in his metaphilosophy, then I am wrong in mine, and so intellectual honesty requires that I look into this in some detail.

What is Wrong and What is Right with Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Religion

One source of the appeal of ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is that it reinstates much of what was ruled out as cognitively meaningless by logical positivism (LP) but without rehabilitating the commitments of old-time metaphysics. In particular, OLP allows the reinstating of religious language. This post explains, with blogic brevity, how this works and what is wrong and what right with the resulting philosophy of religion. Since OLP can be understood only against the backdrop of LP, I begin with a brief review of LP.

Adorno on Wittgenstein's Indescribable Vulgarity

Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973). pp. 55-56:

Wittgenstein, On Certainty #348: 'I am Here'

Ludwig Wittgenstein writes:

. . . the words 'I am here' have a meaning only in certain contexts, and not when I say them to someone who is sitting in front of me and sees me clearly, -- and not because they are superfluous, but because their meaning is not determined by the situation, yet stands in need of such determination.

Part of what LW is saying in this entry is that the meaning of an expression is determined by its use in a given context. In a slogan: meaning is use.