Signs of Sense : Reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Signs of Sense

Signs of Sense Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Eli Friedlander

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2001

Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Friedlander, Eli Signs of sense : reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus / Eli Friedlander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00309-8 (alk. paper) 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. Tractatus logico-philosophicus. 2. Logic, Symbolic and mathematical. 3. Language and languages— Philosophy. I. Title. B3376.W563 T7333 2000 192—dc21 00-059804

To the memory of Burton Dreben

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the memory of Burton Dreben. He accompanied my attempts to read the Tractatus from the very first stumbling steps to make sense of what professes to be nonsense to the last formulations. We met countless times, and his sharp criticism, his inspiring insights, his kindness and unfailing encouragement fostered much of what is good in this book. Stanley Cavell taught me the terms in which to address the task of writing and reading philosophy. His generosity, his responsiveness, and the example he sets through his writings and teaching provided both inspiration and orientation. In this work I have found myself returning to his writings and discovering how indebted I am to his thinking. I hope that he recognizes in my reading of the Tractatus something of a response to his vision of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Burton Dreben and Stanley Cavell are for me exemplary teachers of philosophy, the one dedicated to reveal what drives you by demonstrating that you have failed to mean what you said, the other showing you that there is always more meaning to recognize in what you say. I think of the inner dialogue between their voices as generating the productive tension that drives this work forward. During my stay at Harvard, when this writing project began, I had the benefit of thought-provoking philosophical exchanges with Steven Affeldt, James Conant, Juliet Floyd, Paul Franks, and Arata Hamawaki. As I moved to Tel-Aviv, more friends joined the conversation, among them Hagi Kenaan, Yaron Senderowich, Michael Roubach, Ofra Rechter, and Dror Dolfin. I particularly want to thank Irad Kimhi for many inspiring conversations over the past few years, conversations which have had a great impact on my thinking. Dror Dolfin’s generous friendship and invaluable assistance helped me through many difficult moments. Lindsay Waters’s friendly support in the last stages of writing and rewrit-

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ing provided much needed encouragement. The readers to whom he sent the manuscript have provided many valuable comments and corrections. I thank them for their elaborate and thoughtful reports. The Rotschild foundation generously awarded me a grant to complete the process of writing, and Philippa Shimrat as well as Anita Safran did a wonderful job of editing the final version of the book. My parents, Hagith and Saul, my brother, David, and my sister, Michal, are fondly acknowledged here for the things that often go without saying. In writing about the voice and silence of philosophy, I often cross paths with the work of Michal Grover-Friedlander, as she thinks through those questions in opera. That such encounters take place in relation to our life together makes them all the more significant. Our twins, Omer and Elam, learned to pronounce “philosophy” as I was trying to spell out its difficulties. Their bursts of laughter in treating the world as a playground with plenty of ladders to climb upon and throw away snapped me out of many a moment of self-indulgence.

Contents

Abbreviations Preface Introduction: Figures of Writing

xi xiii 1

PART ONE 1

Logic Apart

21

2

The Form of Objects

34

3

“We Make to Ourselves Pictures of Facts”

47

4

Signs and Sense

61

5

The Symbolic Order

71

6

The Grammar of Analysis

88

7

Making Sense and Recognizing Meaning

103

8

Subject and World

112

9

Ethics in Language

123

A Demanding Silence

145

10

PART TWO 11

On Some Central Debates Concerning the Tractatus

161

12

On Wittgenstein’s Dissatisfaction with the Tractatus

210

Works Cited

219

Index

225

Abbreviations

Abbreviations refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings listed in alphabetical order. CV

Culture and Value, 2nd ed., G. H. von Wright, ed., P. Winch, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).

LE

“A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965).

LLW

Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir, P. Engelmann, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967).

LO

Letters to C. K. Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, G. H. von Wright, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell; London: Routledge, 1973).

LRKM

Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, G. H. von Wright and B. F. McGuinness, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).

NB

Notebooks, 1914–1916, G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, eds., G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961).

PI

Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees, eds., G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).

PT

Prototractatus, B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg, and G. H. von Wright, eds., D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, trans. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).

SRLF

“Some Remarks on Logical Form,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. IX (1929).

TLP

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, trans. (London: Routledge, 1961).

WVC

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, B. F. McGuinness, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).

xi

Preface

Preface

Preface

While working on this book I have often asked myself whether there is room for a reinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—for surely the significance of this classic work has long been exhausted. Moreover, if my main purpose is to dispute previous readings of specific topics, what is the point of writing yet another complete interpretation of the whole work? The answer I always gave myself in the wake of such doubts was that, despite all that has been written, a fundamental difficulty still remains in assimilating the Tractatus. Many significant philosophical works contain obscure, enigmatic, or difficult passages. Yet we mostly agree, for example, on what Kant’s fundamental framework, method, and aim are. The same cannot be said about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The fundamental interpretative disagreements that abound in the secondary literature are themselves indicative of the problematic nature of the text. It is the very nature and extent of such disagreements that justifies asking once more what Wittgenstein’s purpose was in the Tractatus. My book closely follows the movement of Wittgenstein’s text: it is a commentary of sorts, and as such is rather restricted in scope and aim. But at the same time it is ambitious in aiming at a different view of a work that has been the concern of so many interpreters. My sense that the movement of the Tractatus as a whole, its impetus, can be missed constitutes the immediate justification of my writing. The conviction that the different parts of the Tractatus should be read as constantly serving an overall aim, rather than merely as discrete sets of topics, determined the direction of my interpretation, as well as a certain task of writing and the form my writing took. It is the source of whatever merits and shortcomings the final product may have. This does not mean that I will not attempt a different reading of the various specific issues raised. Indeed, showing what I take to be the movement of the book as a whole rexiii

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quires rereading parts of it in detail and reconceiving the relation of those details to the whole. But I do not think that the ultimate difficulty experienced with this work is dispelled by a reinterpretation of this or that proposition. The work makes “no claim to novelty in detail,” as Wittgenstein states in the preface. Thus both its achievement and its difficulty have to do with the way in which all these details are put together or spaced. But how is it that the reader can fail to see what all the details are for? What precisely is the singular difficulty of that text? This sense of difficulty was an issue for Wittgenstein himself from the very beginning. He wrote to Russell in 1915: I’m extremely sorry that you weren’t able to understand Moore’s notes. I felt that they’re very hard to understand without further explanation, but I regard them essentially as definitive. And now I’m afraid that what I’ve written recently will be still more incomprehensible, and if I don’t live to see the end of this war I must be prepared for all my work to go for nothing.—In that case you must get my manuscript printed whether anyone understands it or not.1

As the writing progressed, Wittgenstein’s sense of this essential problem of understanding intensified: “I’ve got my manuscript here with me. I wish I could copy it out for you; but it’s pretty long and I would have no safe way of sending it to you. In fact you would not understand it without a previous explanation as it’s written in quite short remarks. (This of course means that nobody will understand it; although I believe, it’s all as clear as crystal.)”2 It is tempting to take such remarks as testifying to the problematic character of Wittgenstein the man, to a certain arrogance of temperament. After all, what could be so difficult about logic, functions, and classes that Russell could not understand?3 And yet the intrinsic difficulty of understanding is the very issue that is raised by the first line of 1. LRKM, p. 62. 2. Ibid., p. 68. Here is a figure to be compared with the ladder: That something is as clear as crystal suggests that one can see through it. Any clouding or obscurity of thought will then be the result of the reader’s insisting on finding an understanding along the way, instead of working his or her way through the book to the end, thus making it into a transparent medium. 3. Wittgenstein’s correspondence with Frege concerning the Tractatus is a fascinating case of the nonmeeting of minds. See “Gottlob Frege: Briefe an Ludwig Wittgenstein,” eds. A. Janik and P. Berger, in Wittgenstein in Focus—Im Brempunkt Wittgenstein, B. McGuinness and R. Haller, eds. (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 1989). Parts of that correspondence are translated to English in J. Floyd, “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.”

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the preface of the book: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts.”4 This way of thematizing the problem of our approach to the Tractatus makes the difficulty intrinsic to that text. It turns it, one might say, into an esoteric text. Thus the claim that there is an intrinsic difficulty of understanding this book points neither to a psychological problem of Wittgenstein’s nor to the shortcomings of any of the readers who have approached that text. Rather, it is something in the book as a whole, that is, in philosophy itself as Wittgenstein sees it, that creates such a problem of approach. The difficulty is due neither to Wittgenstein’s supposed obscurity or laconic way of putting various points nor to the lack of examples or aids to the reader. The book itself is written in such a way as to present something of an enigma. To read it with understanding is to address its enigmatic nature in a fruitful way. This perception of the nature of the work provided me with a direction of interpretation. The point was not to attempt, with cunning, to solve the work’s riddle, but rather to present its enigmatic character in a truly thought-provoking way. A thoughtful acceptance of this enigmatic character meant that it had to be viewed as integral to the progress of the text. The enigmatic tone that colors the opening of the preface crystallizes in the final gesture of throwing away the ladder, with the author’s claim that a proper understanding demands that his propositions be recognized as nonsensical. But in most readings of the book there is a significant gap between the progress of the text and the philosopher’s final revocation of all that has been said. The end, one might say, comes to the reader as a shocking, unassimilable surprise after the seemingly continuous progress of the text. An interpretation that takes this moment seriously must lead to it, provide an understanding of its necessity, or work through the text to this end point; it must think of the book as a whole. I have worked on the Tractatus in various ways at different times. Anyone who has seriously approached that text knows of the frustration involved in reading it. No doubt frustrations arise with many great philosophical texts, but the form of these difficulties varies from one philosopher to another. When reading a text such as the Tractatus, it is particularly vital to be attentive to the form of these difficulties and to take one’s reactions as guidelines to understanding the text. Insofar as the Tractatus 4. L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, trans., p. 3. Henceforth all references to the Tractatus will be to this edition (unless otherwise specified) by reference to the proposition number immediately following the quote.

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is not geared toward any manifest content, one should think through the gaps as they appear in the frustrations and blockages of reading it. On several occasions I have gone from a sense of the text’s opaqueness, of disappointment with its promises and seductiveness, of feeling that nothing speaks in it, to a sudden insight into its significance as a whole. This pace of understanding and this peculiar mode of clarity intrigued me. It seemed to say more about the work’s structure than about my interpretative skills. This “all or nothing” experience seemed to turn the Tractatus itself into a world in which one could either feel entirely lost or alternatively move freely from one part to the other. This reinforced my conviction that the Tractatus should always be read as a whole, and that our relation to the text should be seen as exemplifying something of our relation to the world. In attempting such an interpretation I hope I have not forced the text against its natural inclination. Whether I have been successful in doing what this conception of philosophical work demands is something that the reader will have to judge for himself. The difficulty of reading such a work also raises questions as to what it means to write about it. Wittgenstein writes in the preface about the difficulty he has in expressing his fundamental insights: “Here I am conscious of having fallen a long way short of what is possible. Simply because my powers are too slight for the accomplishment of the task.— May others come and do it better.” I take this remark as suggesting a direction for reading the text fruitfully: namely, what is required is a certain balance between diligently following the text and the need to try to express differently what the explicit part of Wittgenstein’ s text only half says. Not that I claim that my interpretation expresses better than Wittgenstein what the Tractatus is about, but I do think that a proper conception of the nature of the difficulty of expression requires from a good reader something like the act of rewriting that I attempt. The Tractatus does not ultimately aim at communicating some content that one can grasp and circulate. Its insights must be rediscovered, or recovered from one’s own standpoint. (“Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts.”) The ultimate aim of such a commentary must be the reopening of the space in which Wittgenstein’s speech can be heard, or can resound, as forcefully as possible. This work of

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clearing the ground or opening up a dimension of the text, suggesting its lines of force, and allowing its intensity to come to light is, properly speaking, what a devoted reading of the book should aim at. A particular difficulty resides in trying to write about the end of the book. A diligent reader will find himself faced with the question of how he relates to the emergence of Wittgenstein’s own voice—faced with the ultimate ambition of this text. For by the end one thing is clear: Wittgenstein aims at the deepest and most serious communication. And the question is how to respond to it; how to write seriously, for others, about it, in response to it. Here the writer can fall into the trap of modesty. Since the end demands such a transformative experience, how can I be sure that the work has had its effect on me? And how can I write about the ultimate secret of the text for others? It seems as if no work of explication or criticism (in the sense in which criticism is used for a text of literature) could be adequate to the demands of the end; as if the very attempt at writing in order to make manifest this other form of communication must inevitably fail. Another, much more disturbing possibility of failure I call the trap of arrogance: the belief that one can and will expose what is essentially hidden. Wittgenstein writes: “It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit.”5 In the belief that one has succeeded in discerning what has escaped expression, one is lured into making explicit a moment that must remain unsaid, and that can work forcefully only by remaining unsaid. Figuration, or explicitness, affords a premature release from the true tension of the work. The arrogance lies in claiming for oneself a mastery of what essentially escapes representation. This oscillation between modesty and arrogance is known to the text; it is predicted in the duality of moods Wittgenstein expresses in the preface: “I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved, when these problems are solved” (TLP, p. 4). Nowadays it is not common to find books that are devoted to the 5. CV, p. 8.

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reading of a single philosophical text. Writers prefer to consider the corpus of a philosopher’s work as a whole or to focus on a trend in the history of philosophy with reference to the sociocultural context. But certain philosophical texts resist their contexts and stand in a deviant relation to their times, despite the interminable attention they might elicit and the commentaries they might produce. Indeed, a resistance to assimilation might very well be a definitive trait of a classic work, which means that in every period the task presents itself anew to read and write on such a text and to bring its elusiveness to the fore. Wittgenstein himself, early and late, does not explicitly bring into play the historical or cultural context of his writing. This in itself constitutes a feature of his writing that has to be interpreted. In the Tractatus his writing also assumes the appearance of a somewhat dogmatic, or at least authoritative, tone. By avoiding the historical context I do not mean to imply that I take such authoritative pronouncements to be the ultimate truth—a new form of dogmatism in philosophy. But I do think that ultimately the power of the Tractatus is its own, and its air of autonomy serves the aims it seeks to achieve. In my interpretation I want to show Wittgenstein’s conception of the power of the book in philosophy. This also means that I will avoid at most junctures references to various influences, the intellectual context, and other works of Wittgenstein’s. I have mostly restricted myself to considering only the text of the Tractatus. At times I make exceptions to that rule and refer to the Notebooks and the “Lecture on Ethics.” Even more rarely do I mention the philosophical views that Wittgenstein engaged, such as those of Frege and Russell and also of Schopenhauer and Kant, but not in order to compare the views in any detail. Here, I follow Wittgenstein’s own advice in the preface: “I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been anticipated by someone else” (TLP, p. 3). Wittgenstein himself does not engage in a systematic assessment and criticism of various views. Russell and Frege are mentioned in the Preface as sources of stimulation for his own thinking, and the Tractatus contains various (mainly critical) references to specific points they make. But we are left with the impression that such remarks are not

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meant to serve as a systematic assessment of Wittgenstein’s position in relation to those views. His wish is not so much to open a debate with those thinkers as to use them to further clarify his own central point.6 Since I think that the Tractatus contains a movement that should be grasped in its entirety, my interpretation must remain keyed to that gesture. This means that it will be rather short, endeavoring to express and duplicate the movement of the work, even if this entails foregoing a detailed commentary of various propositions.7 That said, I did conceive my reading of the Tractatus in relation to various other major interpretations of the work. I shall mark points of agreement and disagreement with those interpretations in the second part of this book. Although I wish to read the Tractatus apart from its times, this doesn’t mean that this reading is entirely divorced from the history of philosophy itself. Certain developments which are connected to the very influence and reception of Wittgenstein make it possible to emphasize aspects of the Tractatus that have been neglected, and thus to shift the conception of the work in the direction I want. The fate of the book seems bound up with the fate of the divide between the two traditions of philosophy, the analytic or Anglo-American and the existentialphenomenological, or so-called Continental tradition. I conceive of Wittgenstein’s work, both early and late, as a possible mediation between those two directions of modern philosophy. Insofar as the philosophical climate is changing, it is, I think, possible to return to this text of Wittgenstein’s with a different aim, not in order to collapse the two traditions into one another, but to take the Tractatus as a proper standard for measuring their distance. My wish to touch upon such different traditions of philosophy partly explains the distance, at least in tone, between my way of expressing some of Wittgenstein’s points and the sound of his own writing. Parts of the book will sound closer to analytic elaborations of notions like logic, signs, and symbols. Other parts, elaborating concepts such as world, the subject, the ethical, and the mystical 6. This feature of Wittgenstein’s writing becomes more and more pronounced. Thus the Philosophical Investigations contains very little in terms of an overt argument with other philosophical views. 7. Imitation may not in most cases be the most promising way to elaborate one’s interpretation, but I think that there are works, such as the Tractatus, in which the task of repeating in other words what they say addresses their peculiar difficulty.

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will have a distinctly different tone. Since I have learned much on how to read these topics of the Tractatus from reading Heidegger, I find it fruitful to make Wittgenstein’s pronouncements resonate with what one might think of as Heideggerian formulations.

Signs of Sense

Introduction

Introduction Figures of Writing

What kind of work is Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, what are the philosophical sensibilities of its author, and what does it demand of its readers? The Tractatus is a singular work. Some readers might initially perceive its singularity as the difficulty of placing it in any tradition of modern philosophy. It is usually said that the Tractatus developed from Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with the logic of Frege and Russell, who are indeed the only two sources explicitly, even if problematically, acknowledged in his preface. Thus the work is usually placed in the lineage of analytic philosophy and considered to have fathered logical positivism. Moritz Schlick called it “the first to have pushed forward the decisive turning point” in philosophy, and Carnap named it as the inspiration for his Logical Syntax of Language in particular and for his anti-metaphysicalism in general. And yet the Tractatus is hardly similar in tone either to its ancestry or to its progeny, despite its apparent similarities to them in content and subject matter; it seems to be the product of a completely different philosophical sensibility. Yet this does not mean that it can be squarely placed in the other great modern tradition, emanating from Kant and leading through Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger. The difficulty in assimilating the Tractatus is often revealed by the tendency to divide the book into parts and adopt some of its pronouncements while discarding others. Carnap’s attitude is in this respect typical; he adopts in his Logical Syntax of Language only that part of the Tractatus that can be seen as the elaboration of a general theory of syntax, thereby “correcting” Wittgenstein’s erroneous supposition that logi1

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cal form can be shown but not said and squarely rejecting the ethical or mystical implications of the work. It was Wittgenstein who first exhibited the close connection between the logic of science (or “philosophy” as he calls it) and syntax . . . Further he as shown that the so-called sentences of metaphysics and of ethics are pseudo-sentences . . . If I am right, the position here maintained is in general agreement with his . . . There are two points especially on which the view here presented differs from that of Wittgenstein, and specifically from his negative theses. The first of these theses states . . . [that] there are no sentences about the forms of sentences; there is no expressible syntax. In opposition to this view, our construction of syntax has shown that it can be correctly formulated and that syntactical sentences do exist . . . Wittgenstein’s second negative thesis states that the logic of science (“philosophy”) cannot be formulated . . . Consistently Wittgenstein applies this view to his own work also . . . Such an interpretation of logic is certainly very unsatisfactory.1

This divisive treatment of the work is not restricted to one kind of philosophical sensibility. From the opposite corner of the philosophical landscape, Wittgenstein’s friend Paul Engelmann has a somewhat similar reaction: a whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein for a positivist because he had something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds— and this is its essence—that what we can speak about is all that really matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about. When he nevertheless takes immense pain to delimit the unimportant, it is not the coastline of that island which he is bent on surveying with such meticulous accuracy but the boundary of the ocean.2

Despite his sense of a world of difference between his view of the Tractatus and that of the positivists, it may well be that Engelmann presents only the mirror image of the positivist conception. Ridiculing those who do not see what is really important, he ignores, like the posi1. R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, pp. 282–283. 2. LLW, p. 97.

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3

tivist, the crucial question: what is it in Wittgenstein’s work that makes it possible to mistake the land for the ocean? In other words, how can one fail to see the essential relation between land and ocean? Thus the challenge in reading the Tractatus is to explain how a single work can have all those sides to it, rather than to separate the book into parts that are good and others to be discarded. This divisive approach to the “real” concern of the Tractatus may have been encouraged by some of Wittgenstein’s own remarks concerning his work. In a famous letter to Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein tried to explain the point of his manuscript, which seemed so remote from any of von Ficker’s interests and so forbidding. In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. Therefore the book will, unless I’m quite wrong, have much to say which you want to say yourself, but perhaps you won’t notice that it is said in it. For the time being, I’d recommend that you read the foreword and the conclusion since they express the point most directly.3

It is tempting to interpret these remarks to mean that Wittgenstein has only an instrumental interest in logic. Yet the letter to von Ficker does not merely express the primacy of the ethical but states the necessity of going through logic in order to delimit the ethical. That this is the only way of delimiting the ethical shows the essential relatedness and interdependence of logic and ethics. What is most difficult to understand is the nature of the affinity established between them. Why is it that, in extremis, thinking about logic touches upon the ethical? The easiest and most tempting way of viewing the relationship between logic and ethics is to think of them as two separate domains—as, so to speak, countries bordering on one another. Thus logic would delimit all that is sayable, and the content of the Tractatus would chart this 3. Quoted in R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 178.

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domain. Ethics would then be identified with the domain of the unsayable, whose contours are determined by the negative space that the Tractatus leaves open. After all, the Tractatus, at least in its manifest content, is indeed concerned with logic, and Wittgenstein himself seems to hold that ethics cannot be said. This easy solution, which relies so heavily on the geographical trope of two adjacent domains (as Engelmann’s figure of land and ocean suggests), is unsatisfactory. Ethics, after all, cannot be the other side of logic, that which is not logic, since negation itself belongs to the realm of logic: hence both the content to be negated and the result of the negation belong to the same domain. Moreover, delimiting the logical in that way might leave room for the ethical, but it in no way provides its internal articulation. It would present us at most with the external contours of a domain, its borders. But the Tractatus is not a prolegomenon to a domain of ethics. It is a work with an ethical point, which is inseparable from its work of delimiting the logical. Moreover, it does not seem all that natural to assume without further ado that logic merely delimits the ethical. Why are we not in the least tempted to say that Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica or Frege’s Begriffsschrift delimit the ethical negatively? Would it be possible to perceive the Tractatus as a work with an ethical point without Wittgenstein’s remarks to this effect, and if so, what is the nature of the difference between these two ways of elaborating logic and its limits? In my approach to the text I will assume that only by discarding the figure of adjacent domains can the reader grasp the meaning of the Tractatus: that everything happens at the limits, in the work of delimitation. This means that the task of delineating the logical is as problematic as that of opening ourselves to the ethical. There is not one domain, logic, in which everything is quite straightforward and open, and another, ethics, that is essentially obscure. Work at the limits bears equally on both the ethical and the logical. This perception suggests that the main issue is to explain why drawing the limits of language as such reveals the inner relation of the ethical and the logical. Wittgenstein’s philosophy, far from separating these into distinct domains, brings out their essential affinity.4 These disciplinary or territorial considerations are naturally con4. This intuition runs counter to P. M. S. Hacker’s interpretation: “It is common to view the Tractatus as a completely and wholly integrated work, and hence to think that the so-called ‘mystical’ parts of the book are ‘a culmination of the work reflecting back on everything that

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nected with the difficulties presented by the relation between the form of the Tractatus and its content. From that perspective, the singularity of the work lies in its declining to provide the kind of continuous reading that encompasses the content and the conditions of content. The Tractatus can be read either from its beginning or from its end. At the end, Wittgenstein casts doubt on the beginning and distinguishes the content from the point of the book. He notoriously writes: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. (6.54)

Readers of the work do not cease to be mesmerized (and consequently often paralyzed) by this remark, by the end of the book, and by what supposedly lies beyond it, and seek to use it as the key to understanding the Tractatus and its ethical point. Others, taking a different approach and recapitulating the philosophical division, start reading from the beginning and are drawn to the content or supposed logical doctrine of the book—to the most complex and detailed picture the work presents. Its logic is fascinating though not easily understood. Those who emphasize the point of the book over its content seek to explain that point before analyzing the detailed argumentation (in particular, they try to explain the meaning of the injunction to throw away the ladder). They view our understanding, at the end, as essentially external to the considerations raised in the work. Furthermore, a gradual interpretation of the text, tracing its internal logic, would seem a most misleading enterprise, given what one is left with after the ladder has been thrown away. If we take too seriously what we know to be ultimately nonsense, it will be hard for us to dismiss it at the end. Those who prefer to emphasize the manifest content of the book will went before.’ This is, I think, at best misleading, at worst erroneous. It is true that these sections of the Tractatus are connected with what went before, although the connection is tenuous. It is also true that they were of great importance to Wittgenstein. It is not obvious, however, that they follow from the earlier sections of the book.” See Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, p. 101. As I indicated in the Preface, I think that such a piecemeal interpretation of the Tractatus misses the essential aim of the book. It is a book that demands to be read as a whole.

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Signs of Sense

see such a grand gesture as empty at best. Indeed, why should Wittgenstein write such a complex treatise on logic only to throw it away dramatically at the end? They tend to dilute the remark about throwing away the ladder, to avoid its radical consequences, by arguing that our understanding at the end is still related to what was set forth in the book. They would argue that although strictly speaking the book might be nonsense, it nonetheless manages to convey a view of logic and the world which, on its own terms, cannot be stated.5 The first kind of reading suffers from all the defects of an overhasty identification with Wittgenstein’s voice. In particular, the reluctance to be fooled, by divining the point of Wittgenstein’s work in advance, might give the reader a false sense of mastery which in fact does not contain the truth of the text. The text requires work in order for its truth to be made manifest, or for the discrepancy between illusory mastery and the assumption of subjectivity to be acknowledged. The second kind of readers inevitably will see the fruits of their work snatched away at the crucial moment, and satisfaction withheld permanently. They will treat the Tractatus, despite Wittgenstein’s warning, as a textbook, and thus will not derive any pleasure from reading it. (For, indeed, there is a peculiar kind of pleasure to be had in relating to the end of the book in the proper way.) Here too, the book’s purpose will not have been fulfilled. The oddness of the book might merely be dismissed as a matter of style, which would be to dismiss the philosophical importance of presentation as such.6 The literary dimension of the Tractatus, the peculiar 5. Cora Diamond as well as James Conant have convincingly shown the difficulty of holding to the content of the Tractatus despite the injunction to throw away the ladder. See C. Diamond, “Throwing Away the Ladder,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind; J. Conant, “Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Nonsense,” in T. Cohen, P. Guyer, and H. Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason, pp. 195–224. 6. An excellent example, just because it self-consciously dismisses the peculiarities of Wittgenstein’s writing, is E. Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “In his introduction Wittgenstein suggests that he may be understood only by people who have had the same thoughts as he; certainly he can only be understood by people who have been perplexed by the same problems. His own writing is extraordinarily compressed, and it is necessary to ponder each word in order to understand his sentences. When one does this, they often turn out to be quite straightforward, and by no means so oracular or aphoristic as they have been taken to be. But few authors make such demands on the close attention and active co-operation of their readers. In my account, I have not followed the arrangement of the Tractatus at all. That, I think, is something to do when one reads the book for enjoyment after one has come to understand its main

Introduction

7

style of the work, is usually viewed as an expression of the singular personality of the author. Although no direct attempt is made to explain the content of the book in terms of Wittgenstein’s biography, interpreters seem to feel that the work’s peculiarities are to be attributed either to the author’s cultural background or to his strong personality. Russell’s description of Wittgenstein as “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” might well epitomize the interest that his person can generate.7 However, the Tractatus contains hardly anything that might be called personal, which suggest that its uniqueness cannot be explained as an emanation of Wittgenstein’s personality.8 Indeed, the fascination with Wittgenstein’s personality in relation to his work often hinders a thorough inquiry into the inner necessity of the Tractatus’ singularity. For the impression does arise that Wittgenstein’s reflections on logic and the state of his soul are intimately connected. On reading his diaries, putting together what has been separated by editors (Notebooks 1914–1916, and the secret war diaries or Geheime Tägebuchen), it is certainly tempting to establish a biographical connection to the strictly philosophical writing.9 But the fact remains that no hint of the biographical material appears in the final work. Thus the author’s uniqueness and the uniqueness of the work must be addressed without making the work personal. That is, although the biographical response might be suggested by the work, it actually misrepresents the significance of the person to the work and fails to account for the necessity of the first-person singular in a work of philosophy such as the Tractatus. ideas.” In Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 19, my emphasis. Anscombe’s deliberate shift from “having the same thoughts” to being “perplexed by the same problems,” her insistence that Wittgenstein’s aphoristic style is actually a compressed argumentative form, and her dissociation of understanding from the affective dimension of the book, all contribute to segregating the logical, the ethical, and the aesthetic into separate domains. 7. B. Russell, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 98–99. 8. The distinction between uniqueness and other forms of understanding the personal will be a topic I will address in my interpretation of solipsism in the Tractatus as well as in my reading of the ending of the book. This form of uniqueness will have to be elaborated so as to account for a claim such as: “Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion—science—and art” (NB, p. 79). I assume that here ‘uniqueness’ does not mean features of my character or the events of my life that distinguish me from other human beings. 9. For an attempt to bring into the picture Wittgenstein’s diaries as a whole, see, for example, J. Floyd’s “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.”

8

Signs of Sense

In thinking of Wittgenstein’s writing itself—of, as it were, the style of his work—as giving us a clue to the conception of the work, it is important to grasp that just as an understanding of ethics is inseparable from that of logic, so the aesthetic cannot be seen as a domain apart. Wittgenstein asserts in a well-known statement that “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” (6.421). We should not assume that we know what ethics and aesthetics are. Nor, for that matter, should we assume that we know what logic is. Indeed, we should abandon preconceived ideas about their nature before approaching the text, and such statements should themselves be exemplified and tested in the context of the Tractatus itself. In taking as a starting point the nature of the writing of the Tractatus, I do not mean to imply that such an inquiry is truly separable from the questions of logic or ethics that the book raises, only that it might provide a better or fresh point of entry into its problems. By speaking of the aesthetics of the Tractatus, I do not intend here to raise the issue of the pleasure afforded by reading the work (though Wittgenstein does state in the preface that the purpose of the book is to give pleasure to the one person who reads it with understanding). Rather, I mean to inquire about the nature of Wittgenstein’s writing and what it means to read it.10 Wittgenstein does not speak of his work merely as a work of philosophy but says that it is “strictly philosophical and at the same time literary,”11 implying that there is a literary dimension to the philosophical as such. The question is, then, to what extent does the writing of a book concerning logic, with an ethical point to it, define a literary task which is essential to strictly philosophical thinking? We can approach the question of the nature of Wittgenstein’s writing by considering that the Tractatus is a ‘pointed’ work. It reveals a limit case, or an experience of limits. The task of making manifest such an elusive limit should be conceived of in terms of intensity of expression rather than clarification of a domain (what Wittgenstein calls in the preface “hitting the nail on the head”). In his Notebooks Wittgenstein often presents his problem as one of expression: “My difficulty is only 10. An elaboration of this theme in relation to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations will be found in S. Cavell’s “‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” in S. Mulhall, ed., The Cavell Reader. 11. Undated letter to Ludwig Ficker. Quoted in B. McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, Young Ludwig: 1889–1921, p. 288.

Introduction

9

an—enormous—difficulty of expression.”12 Indeed, in the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein develops an opposition between truth and its expression: If this work has any value it consists in two things: the first is that thoughts are expressed in it, and on this score the better the thoughts are expressed—the more the nail has been hit on the head—the greater will be its value. Here I am conscious of having fallen a long way short of what is possible. Simply because my powers are too slight for the accomplishment of the task.—May others come and do it better. On the other hand the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved. (TLP, pp. 3–4)

Wittgenstein here distinguishes the task of expression from the discovery of truths or the solving of problems. What has value is the force of expression, and not the content of the statements made. The thoughts expressed can be quite simple when uttered as theses.13 An example of the contrast between expression and mere utterance is given in proposition 5.5563, where something like the point of the work is stated: “In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety.” What it takes to express the force of that is no less than the Tractatus as a whole. This emphasis on expression should be read in conjunction with the motto of the book: “. . . and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.” Such emphasis on the expression of a point may seem to go against the overwhelming impression that the Tractatus is a treatise organized almost like an axiomatic system. The numbering system that orders the propositions and divides the text into discrete parts, as well as the asser12. NB, p. 40. 13. I would think of such a separation of the problem of expression from the statement of thoughts as prefiguring what Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations: “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them” (PI, § 128).

10

Signs of Sense

tive mode in which it is mostly written, reinforce that impression, which is why Wittgenstein’s writing has been compared with Spinoza’s geometrical method—and hence also Moore’s suggestion to give a Latin title to the English translation from the German that plays on the association with Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Although elements of Wittgenstein’s text certainly suggest the association with Spinoza, the reasons that prompted Moore to choose that title should not be identified with those that led Wittgenstein to agree to it. Thus the archaic tone of the title, as well as the very form of the treatise, might be seen as expressing the relation between the Tractatus and those past works of metaphysics. But rather than pointing to a similarity of content, this association might serve to emphasize the contrary: that we have lost the capacity to relate to the world through metaphysics, that metaphysics is a matter of the past—indeed, that the Tractatus, in throwing away the ladder, expresses this very loss. Furthermore, one should not identify the geometrical method of the Ethics and the numbering system of the Tractatus, for the latter may carry with it certain rhetorical effects which are at odds with Spinoza’s geometrical thinking.14 The numbering indeed creates the possibility of surveying the progress of reading. But this is not merely the possibility of making perspicuous the way in which one proposition constitutes an explication of another. The numbering frames everything as surveyable; it holds the book together. Wittgenstein’s numbering provides a measure of progress and colors the book as a whole with the sense of linear progress.15 It creates the impression that you can take one step after another 14. See S. Cavell, “‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself” on proofs and perspicuity in Wittgenstein’s later thinking. It is instructive in that respect to compare the Tractatus with the Notebooks. The Notebooks of the early Wittgenstein are, one might say, closer to Wittgenstein’s later remarks than to the Tractatus that comes out of them. This might be explained by Wittgenstein’s later cultivation of the style of the diary entry, but it would be, I think, more correct to say that such was his natural inclination from the very beginning, and thus to associate with the tone of the Tractatus a deliberate striving after a certain tone and effect. It is interesting that his understanding of the tone in which philosophy is to be conducted shifted so radically, whereas something important about his aim remained the same throughout his writings. 15. This stands in sharp contrast to the central figure for writing used in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, that of sketching a landscape: “The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of . . . long and involved journeyings” (Preface, p. ix). The Tractatus, although it allows for various branchings in our modes of advance, is essentially hierarchical and does not form a landscape in which the reader can stroll.

Introduction

11

while keeping in mind what has been said. But maybe it is precisely this ordering that ultimately serves the final gesture: for the ladder to be thrown away, it must have existed in the first place. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s remark that his book is not a textbook does not mean that the reader is not tempted to a step-by-step advance, as if on a ladder. But there will come a decisive moment when the very possibility of this advance will be rejected. One could also say that in order to address the problem of the essentially distant, the unapproachable (and after all the end of the Tractatus is concerned with the mystical), it is necessary to experience the attempt to draw near. The Tractatus is a complex text, yet this complexity does not contradict the possibility of taking it in all at once. (This is not a psychological remark but an aesthetic judgment concerning the form of the work.) In this respect the brevity of the book is important, for it allows the reader to advance while keeping in mind what has been read. The possibility of that activity of comprehension is a condition for the force the work gathers at the end. It is a book with a point, and the point cannot be separated from encompassing its content in a certain way. It is a book whose advance can be visualized, and one that can therefore stage a crisis of visualization. This is what makes it the exact opposite of Philosophical Investigations, a book that cannot be read in terms of a unique gesture, a book with no sublime moment.16 Probing into the literariness of the Tractatus might seem out of place, not just because of its seemingly straightforward logical content, but also because Wittgenstein may often be perceived as a Socratic figure who is essentially concerned with the dialogical teaching of philosophy. This image of Wittgenstein as someone who does not write—an impression that remains despite the two books and innumerable remarks he did write—might be the result of Wittgenstein’s own denials that philosophy consists of a body of doctrine (4.112), and his claims that philosophizing always starts with someone else’s confusion (6.53) or that it is addressed to one person who can relate to it with understanding (pref16. I assume that the category of sublimity is relevant to assess the experience of the world in the Tractatus, which is also, as I want to claim, the experience that is provoked by the reading of the text. This will be developed in the last two chapters of this book. I will only point to Kant’s characterization of the conditions of the experience of the sublime in terms of a ratio between the activities of apprehension and comprehension. See Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C. Meredith, § 26. For an elaboration of the conditions of such an experience, see E. Friedlander, “Kant and the Critique of False Sublimity,” pp. 69–91.

12

Signs of Sense

ace). I do not say that such an image is completely wrong, but merely ask what it implies concerning Wittgenstein’s understanding of the nature of a book of philosophy. Indeed, writing need not be confused with the assertion of positive theses. But then, what is writing, beyond theory, in philosophy? This leads to the question what significance books had for Wittgenstein. He is reputed to have read few philosophical works, and he certainly writes as if the books of others are of no concern to him. And yet mentions of books and book writing appear on various occasions in Wittgenstein’s early writings. In his “Lecture on Ethics” he imagines the writing of a book: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world.17

A book of this sort presents us with the world as the sum total of facts, letting us survey or contemplate all that is the case extensively or exhaustively. Enumeration constitutes the essence of such a book. It displays every possible fact to a reader who is imagined as a stranger or spectator to this world. But Wittgenstein also envisaged another kind of book, in the same “Lecture on Ethics”: And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.18

This book can be seen as the opposite of the great book of facts. If the first kind of book has nothing but facts, nothing essentially beyond facts, or nothing transcendent, then the second kind of book is nothing 17. LE, p. 6. 18. LE, p. 7.

Introduction

13

but pure transcendence. The explosion of that book (for in the fantasy of The Book, the apocalyptic book, or the book to end all books, as I picture it, what explodes is the book itself), evokes the manifestation of the essentially distant or other. The explosion, the éclat, to elaborate the figure, is a flash of light that signals that something has been destroyed, or has disappeared. Plato’s sun, if it were to rise at all, would illuminate the disappearance of the ground we wished to stand on in its light.19 The two books have something in common: they present a view of the beyond; the first in terms of infinitely detailed enumeration, and the second in terms of the intensity of pure transcendence. They are both fantastic or impossible books, the first because of its infinite exhaustiveness, the second because of its immediate explosiveness. But this very feature would seem to distinguish them from the Tractatus, which, after all, we hold before us. But do we? And what precisely do we hold, once we have thrown away the ladder? The Tractatus shares some striking features with the apocalyptic book. It declares, for instance, that it puts an end to all books of philosophy or metaphysics by solving all problems of philosophy. It further exemplifies the explosive movement of the imaginary book on ethics: it does, if we follow what drives it, collapse into nothing. The Tractatus also shares some features of the first imaginary book. Although it does not list all that is the case, it creates the impression that it speaks of the world from the perspective from which that would be possible. It makes us consider the world as all that is the case and elaborates what is involved in adopting such a perspective. I claim, then, that the Tractatus incorporates both kinds of book. Wittgenstein begins with the fantasy of the exhaustive book and ends with the fantasy of the apocalyptic book; that is, he elaborates the Tractatus between two fantasies of doing away with work, in particular with the work of language. This means, not surprisingly perhaps, that the Tractatus is an impossible work. Logically speaking, the Tractatus does not exist. An impossible work must necessarily have an illusory consis19. Walter Benjamin uses a similar figure to express his understanding of the philosophical text. He writes: “In the field with which we are concerned, knowledge exists only in lightning flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterwards.” Quoted in G. Smith, ed., Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, p. 43. Importantly, Benjamin does not identify the philosophical text with the lightning but rather with the thunder that is separated from the lightning. Thus for him too the book that is pure transcendence is an impossible book.

14

Signs of Sense

tency. Here we find a first reason why it is necessary for the Tractatus to be written. It does not exist in the realm of thought; it has a fictional or literary existence. For thought alone, the Tractatus is a lost cause. In the Tractatus there is yet another book that Wittgenstein imagines writing. If I wrote a book called The World as I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book. (5.631)

In contrast to the two impossible books, Wittgenstein presents The World as I Found It as a book he could write. He writes in the Notebooks: “I have long been conscious that it would be possible for me to write a book: ‘The world I found.’”20 Without going, at this point, into a detailed interpretation of this proposition, it is clear that it presents a peculiar case, standing, as it were, in the space between the two impossible books. On the one hand, it contains a form of enumeration. It proposes a way of presenting an impersonal view of my place among things. On the other hand, such an enumeration is a way of isolating the subject. It is an attempt to delimit my will by placing my body among things, rather than by reference to a transcendent subjectivity. It is a form of autobiography that brings the world into a relation with the I. What stands in the way of writing such a book? That is, what prevents me from thinking of my own life in such terms, through such detailed attention to the embodiment of my will in the world? Why did Wittgenstein not write such a book? Is this the part of the Tractatus that he left unsaid? One thing is clear: the Tractatus is not The World as I Found It. What stands in the way of writing the latter book is no less than metaphysical pictures of the world, facts, transcendence, and subjectivity. It is precisely the persistent fantasy of the two other impossible books, the book of facts and the apocalyptic book, that stands in the way of the proper autobiographical relation. To the extent that the Tractatus incorporates something of both those books, it is necessary to work through it to reach the possibility of writing The World as I Found It. The World as I Found It can be thought of as presenting a conception of 20. NB, p. 49.

Introduction

15

experience which overcomes the tension between the impossible book of facts and the impossible book of transcendence. It presents the possibility of relating to the world as I found it, that is, to things as they have significance or touch me, yet without the subject’s being in any way the subject matter of that book. It opens onto experience, as would the great book of facts, but introduces the possibility of viewing the world as significant. What is the place from which the world can be viewed not merely as the sum total of facts laid out for us, but as a world of things that are significant for a subject? What steps take us to that standpoint? Can we be led there step by step? Taking as a clue the similarity of the Tractatus to the two imaginary books—which can only be thought of as of divine origin—I want to consider the relation of the Tractatus to the Scriptures.21 Consider a work that is divided into seven parts, that opens with the world as such, appearing out of nothing, and that ends with the withdrawal and silence of the creator, after all that could be done has been done. If the seven parts were seven mythical days, this might be called a story of creation, or be thought of in relation to the story of creation in the first chapter of the book of Genesis. But if that description fits Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, should the book then be understood as addressing the question of the emergence of Being out of Nothing, or should this feature be dismissed as a mere coincidence, or at best as a joke in bad taste on the part of Wittgenstein, who thereby relates his text to the Scriptures?22 Without dismissing the possibility of the parodic, ironic, or comic tone that might counterbalance the pristine seriousness of the rest of the text (for this text is not merely written in that neutral, matter-of-fact tone which is the supposed analytic ideal of writing, but rather embod21. A reference to the quasi-biblical tone of the work and its elaboration of a version of creation appears in B. McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, pp. 299–300, without a consideration of the significance of the analogy. 22. It is interesting to compare the Tractatus with another text, written at about the same time, that addresses the account of creation in Genesis: it is Walter Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1. 1913–1926, M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, eds. Specifically, the division of language into the perspective of the world, the perspective of objects, and the perspective of facts, which I view as essential in the Tractatus, can be compared to Benjamin’s distinction between the divine creative verb, the Adamic naming, and the state of language after the Fall, which essentially involves the bipolarity of judgment.

16

Signs of Sense

ies what I would call a pathos of seriousness), I shall inquire whether that comparison can be taken seriously and propose a reading to account for it. I have claimed that to read the Tractatus fruitfully is to work through it so as to justify its enigmatic character. But an enigma is not a secret withheld by the author of the book in silence. As I have suggested, the esoteric nature of the text, the difficulty of expression inherent in it, does not derive from the attempt to convey a particularly difficult content but rather from the necessity of directing the reader to experience differently. I have tried in what follows to convey that aim in the movement of my interpretation. But it may be useful to provide here, at the end of this introduction, a broad overview of my understanding of the Tractatus. This should not replace working through the text. Indeed, if what is at stake is the intensity of expression, such an overview might not help much. Nevertheless, my hope is that it may serve as a guide for the reader if the sense of the overall movement of the Tractatus gets lost in the more detailed unfolding of my interpretation. The Tractatus aims to open us to our own experience as it is revealed through language. This means that there is a gap between the way we represent to ourselves facts in the world and our recognition of the significance of experience. This recognition is not the experience of a transcendent source of significance, but rather the possibility of viewing our ordinary dealing with things as presenting a face of significance. To speak here of significance means, on the one hand, that what one is looking for is a phenomenon of meaning, that is, the appearance of meaningfulness in the language we use, and on the other hand, that we have a phenomenon of value. Thus I find Wittgenstein attempting to lead us to a point where the ‘linguistic’ issue of recognizing meaning is fused with the ‘evaluative perspective’ of things having significance. These are not two separate domains of inquiry, one linguistic and the other ethical; rather, it is that the proper opening onto the possibilities of meaning also provides the fundamental evaluative dimension. (We can also say that the evaluative dimension of the recognition of meaning relates that recognition internally to the appearance of affects, so that it can be thought of as aesthetic as well as ethical.) It is a world of things that appear to us significant. Thus in my reading the recognition of significance correlates with properly expressing the fundamental role that objects play in the Tractatus. Such objects, far

Introduction

17

from being mysterious logical preconditions for the functioning of language, form a world of possibilities of meaning which a human subject can assume and through whose appropriation the subject is made manifest. They are internally related to our everyday use of language, to the opening of possibilities of existence in that everyday world of concerns. It is for this reason that objects cannot be given systematically; our recognition of them cannot be grounded in advance of experience, for they stand at the place of our openness to experience, which is the ultimate imperative of the work. That the recovery of experience is an imperative means that it is to be achieved against an urge to transcend the limits of experience, an urge which manifests itself in language in the form of nonsense. The recognition of significance is thus achieved as a return from nonsense.23 23. This description of the aim of the Tractatus might strike readers acquainted with it as strange. Part of the aim of the detailed reading is to make it convincing. But I would add this: opening onto meaningfulness or significance is to be contrasted with two perspectives, that of facts and that of pure transcendence. Those are the two temptations between which the book is stretched: the temptation of the beginning and that of the end. Giving in to the first temptation will yield the understanding of the book as concerned essentially with the elaboration of the possibility of language to picture facts. Giving in to the second temptation will yield seeing the whole point of the book as concerned with a mystical grasp of the transcendent source of value outside the world. It is nevertheless important that the Tractatus touch upon those two extremes. It is concerned, one might say, with this world, with experience as it is given in language (thus sharing something with the perspective of facts), but also with viewing this experience as the emergence of meaning out of nothing, a certain experience of ungroundedness of meaning (thus sharing something with the perspective of transcendence). I call the possibility of going beyond the dichotomy of facticity and transcendence the opening onto creation in language.

Part One

Signs of Sense

Logic Apart

1

Logic Apart

The tendency to focus mainly on the oddity of the end of the Tractatus may cause us to overlook the striking nature of its opening. The force of the opening propositions is surely connected to their ontological tenor. How can one start with the world as such, after Kant? How can one bypass language after Frege and Russell? To be sure, language is introduced later in the text, and this makes it possible to read back into that beginning a more nuanced account. But such a retroactive reading would lose the tone to which the opening is pitched—a tone that itself needs to be explained and its purpose examined. Is it, as we are tempted to say, the tone of metaphysics, and if it is, why should Wittgenstein have even begun with the tone of a metaphysical treatise in a work that problematizes to the extreme the very possibility of metaphysics? An easy way out of this initial quandary is to invoke the end of the book at the very beginning. Several interpreters have been tempted to say that Wittgenstein introduces ontology only to overcome it after a few steps up the ladder.1 For if the book is ultimately metaphysical non1. E. Anscombe, for example, immediately opens her commentary with a discussion of elementary propositions, as if it were obvious that there were no place for the ontological question. T. Ricketts thinks of Wittgenstein’s rhetoric in the 2.0s as “carefully calculated both to limn a metaphysical picture and simultaneously to cancel the incompatible implicatures that any presentation of this metaphysics carries with it . . . When subsequently we reflect on Wittgenstein’s words, on the view we take these words to convey, we realize that, on their own telling, they do not communicate a view at all. Wittgenstein’s words pull themselves apart.” See “Pictures, Logic and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in Sluga and Stern, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, pp. 89–90. This description might indeed convey the dialectic at work in the Tractatus, but in that case it must be carried all the way to the end. By stressing the attempt to start from the world, I do not mean to say that the perspectives of

21

22

Signs of Sense

sense, why shouldn’t that fact be made clear from the start? Undoubtedly, some justice bolsters the intuition that a certain way of speaking of the world that is exemplified at the very beginning of the text has to be overcome. But what I find suspicious is the hasty recourse to a safe haven in the realm of language, that is, the apparent need to invoke the ladder at the very outset, while neglecting it throughout the rest of the book until it reemerges at the end. The relation between beginning and end must indeed be conceived in the context of the ontological tone of the opening, but not necessarily in order to reject the ontological perspective. Indeed, I suggest that Wittgenstein’s return to the possibility of seeing the world aright at the end should itself be interpreted ontologically, not beyond language but at the limits of language. In a circular structure, the book starts with the world as such, a world as if beyond language, only to return to it at the end through an understanding of the limits of language.2 Overemphasis on the figure of the ladder as the key to understanding the structure of the book distracts attention from this circle. I am suggesting then that we can think of the structure of the Tractatus by means of a figure that stands to some extent in tension with the figure of the ladder, that of the circle. The seeming tension between the linear advance suggested by the ladder and the idea of return suggested by the circle is resolved by the fact that the ladder must be thrown away. Having thrown it away, we do not find ourselves somewhere outside or above the world. To throw it away marks, one might say, the realization that one is being returned to the world, with no further need for any ladder. What is it like to enter this circle, to be returned to the world we have left behind in the very first steps of thinking? Does Wittgenstein indeed world and of language are entirely independent of each other. Wittgenstein importantly interweaves remarks about language with his account of the world and its objects (see, for instance, 2.0122, 2.0211–2.0212, 2.0231). Nevertheless it remains to be explained why he chooses to start with a seemingly ontological perspective. Often the wish to see language there from the beginning burdens Wittgenstein’s thinking with a form of transcendentalism, as if he argued that the condition of the possibility of language is that the world be thus and so. Such transcendental arguments miss the force of Wittgenstein’s anti-a priorism. This will be demonstrated in my discussion of Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature of analysis and of the subject. 2. I find it significant that neither the opening propositions nor any hints at the surprise of the end of the book appear anywhere in the Notebooks. Most of the Tractatus appears in some form in the Notebooks, but such material is ordered and enclosed, encircled as it were by the beginning and the end.

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close a circle when he returns to the world at the end? Does he make ends meet and return to the world he opened with, that is, to “all that is the case”? Or is there a certain gap, something that does not let itself be closed and that constitutes the very thing which the Tractatus teaches to be the experience of the world? Although seeing the world aright is not just seeing all that is the case, nothing is added. To think of the world as more than all the facts there are cannot be regarded as determining a realm apart from facts. The book as a whole can be seen as a work of elaborating and intensifying that fundamental tension, the tension inherent to transcending the factual. The book’s circularity of structure provides a clue to the Tractatus’ aim and effects. Wittgenstein’s statement in the preface that “the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought” can be read as meaning that thought is to be restored to its proper bounds, as in Kant’s work of critique, and as further implying that there is nothing beyond thought. In a certain way this expresses the aim of the Tractatus correctly. But Wittgenstein’s aim is just as much to show that thought is limited, to present us with an interpretation of finitude.3 Such a limitation does not mean that there is something beyond the limits, but it does grant a fundamental importance to the very experience of limitation. Limitation will mean that there is the world itself in excess to what can be said. The experience of limitation, I suggest, is the experience of the world. Thus the problem of the circle in the Tractatus is how to advance to a sense of the limits of thought, while realizing that limitation does not place anything on the other side of thought (except the very existence of a world). The difficulty is to see that there is always something more to what is said. As Wittgenstein put it to Ficker, there is always that part of the book that he did not write. We should add that this is not a part that can ever be written. It is the world that is the aim of thought. But having barely been mentioned, the world seems already lost in an avalanche of terms leading from facts to states of affairs to their constituents. We are abruptly introduced to a multitude of terms and distinctions: the world, what is the 3. To think of the Tractatus as elaborating a conception of finitude hinges on an understanding of Wittgenstein’s concept of limit. Juliet Floyd presents a powerful interpretation of his position on this issue in “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in L. Rouner, ed., Loneliness (forthcoming). I find many points of agreement as well as of difference with Floyd’s position, which will be mentioned in chapter 11.

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case, the totality of facts, facts, states of affairs, objects, possibilities of combinations, logical space, substance of the world, logical form, structure of state of affairs, form, possibility of structure, positive facts, negative facts, reality, sum total of reality, configuration of objects. Let us remain for a moment at the beginning, for it is all too tempting to enter into the network of articulations, distinctions, and conceptualizations and become enmeshed in figuring out how terms relate to one another. We should not lose sight of the fact that it is the world that opens this book, that it is the world to which we provide articulation. And if such an endeavor seems odd, would not all further articulation, while serving to clarify, also convey the very loss of what we aimed for— as if language, its very occurrence, both clarified and essentially interfered with our relation to the world; as if, once the movement of thinking about the constitution of the world is broached, the world itself is lost.4 The attempt to recover the world will then create the fundamental tension of the book, wherein the very distinctions introduced create new modes of alienation. While advancing in the reading, it will be necessary to retain throughout this double perspective of concealment and discovery, as if striving to use language so as to get rid of it, in order to return to the world in silence.5 Not that the vision of acceding to the world in silence should be immediately embraced, for it might itself be as much of a fantasy as the vision of a world fully articulated in language. But we must recognize the movement, the tension that arises in bringing language to the world. From the outset we must remember that Wittgenstein thinks of the 4. A curious aphorism related to that matter appears in Culture and Value: “In art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying nothing” (CV, p. 23). I would read this aphorism as claiming that we are fated to language when we wish to express anything at all, but that the driving force of expression in art is to do away with language. What is it to attain the point in language in which we recognize the force of doing away with language? Attempting to express such an understanding characterizes for me the movement of the Tractatus, which aims, through language, at the world, in silence. 5. This sense of loss and nostalgia is recorded in many of the interpretations. N. Malcolm, for instance, writes: “In certain respects the Tractatus belongs to an old tradition of metaphysical philosophy,” in Wittgenstein: Nothing Is Hidden, p. 236. P. M. S. Hacker writes: “The Tractatus . . . is not a prolegomenon to any future metaphysics, but the swan song of metaphysics,” in Insight and Illusion, p. 27. D. Pears writes: “The exposition of [this] ontology is notoriously difficult to follow, a last message from a vanishing world, barely articulate, because it is spoken in such a strangled voice,” in The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 17.

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Tractatus as a problem of expression. We must therefore orient ourselves first to what it is that needs to be expressed. This initial orientation, albeit still vague, is crucial to the attempt to come to terms with the Tractatus. The movement of reading must incorporate Wittgenstein’s own sense that “a single insight at the start is worth more than ever so many in the middle.”6 And what needs expression, we must keep in mind, is the world. It is vital not to yield to the lure of detail but to keep the world in view, if only because of its return at the very end. The single simple insight that governs the writing here is that the world can be viewed apart from logic, without our attributing any reality to logic. This insight is compatible with the sense that Wittgenstein wants to open us to the world beyond our structuring efforts, to provide an experience of the world at the limits of language. The attempt to put such an insight to work is, I suggest, to question the status of logic as determinative of what there is. This statement itself requires much explication, partly to avoid misunderstandings. I am far from claiming, for instance, that there are illog6. NB, p. 31. Throughout the Notebooks various remarks reveal Wittgenstein’s sense that he is dealing with one infinitely difficult thought: “The problem of negation, of disjunction, of true and false, are only reflections of the one great problem in the variously placed great and small mirrors of philosophy” (NB, p. 40); and his constant feeling that he is losing his grip on that perspective shows up in his strictures to himself to recover it, despite the temptation of apparent puzzles and problems: “Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one” (NB, p. 23). Sometimes Wittgenstein is tempted to give a name to this problem: “The great problem around which everything that I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a-priori, and if so what does it consist in” (NB, p. 53). And in a somewhat altered formulation, he writes: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition. That is to say, in giving the nature of all facts, whose picture the proposition is. In giving the nature of all being. (And here Being does not mean existing—in that case it would be nonsensical)” (NB, p. 39). This perspective on the problem also provides a mode of advance and inquiry: “Don’t worry about what you have already written. Just keep on beginning to think afresh as if nothing at all had happened yet”(NB, p. 30) and further: “In this work more than any other it is rewarding to keep on looking at questions, which we consider solved, from another quarter, as if they were unsolved” (NB, p. 30). This last claim sometimes conveys, for me, the experience of reading the Tractatus, providing a sense of the difficulty of advance, along with the realization that this advance always leads back to the same place. Such an approach to the single problem of philosophy should be contrasted with Russell’s sense of the possible parcelization and piecemeal advance concerning the problems of philosophy; see P. Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. One should not assume, though, that Wittgenstein’s perspective of the unique problem means a retreat to a form of absolute idealism.

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ical or contradictory facts in the world. But I do insist that there is something peculiar about the attributes of logic in the Tractatus. One of its famous claims is that there is no such thing as logical laws; that the laws of logic, say in Frege or Russell’s view, are tautological or senseless. Wittgenstein also writes that logical constants do not stand for anything. Such claims should, I think, raise some questions about the role of logic in determining what there is, the constitution of objects. If, for example, someone were to argue that the laws of physics were senseless and that physical constants had no meaning, would it not be incoherent to then say that things had irreducible physical properties? So why does it seem to readers of the Tractatus coherent to argue that the laws of logic are senseless, to add that logical constants are not representatives of objects, and yet to want to insist that logic determines what there is? Such a misinterpretation stems partly from the reluctance to take seriously the ontological standpoint, the centrality of the term ‘world’ in Wittgenstein’s account. More specifically, it results, as I will show, from a misreading of his notion of object. Indeed, facts, or for that matter propositions that represent facts, cannot exist without logic; but is Wittgenstein’s aim ultimately to account for facts? What is required then is to challenge the idea that our grasp of what objects are is given to us by the logic which, according to Wittgenstein, essentially characterizes what facts are. The understanding of the grammar of the object will be distinct from the understanding of the space of facts spanned by logic.7 An intuition of the world apart from logic will also be a view of the world apart from the perspective of facts. Such a view will go through many refinements and complexities, but will express the fundamental tension throughout the book to its end. It will take some time until we are in a position to assess the significance of the possibility of opening to the world apart from logic, but we require something that can start us on our way up the ladder. It is necessary to perceive that all the distinctions Wittgenstein makes are subordinate to that insight, that all his claims revolve around it. Lifting us up to 7. Frege, for instance, thinks of ontology as supervenient on logic. To be an object is to behave thus and so in inferential patterns. See on this point Frege’s “On Concept and Object,” in Translations From the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. P. Geach and M. Black, as well as T. Ricketts’ powerful interpretation of Frege’s understanding of the primacy of judgment in “Objectivity and Objecthood: Frege’s Metaphysics of Judgment,” in L. Haaparanta and J. Hintikka, eds., Frege Synthesized.

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this perspective requires teaching us how to think differently about the world, facts, and objects. We will thus find many of the terms used in the tradition shifted, subverted, reconceived, or translated. The first move on Wittgenstein’s part, the first move in thinking about or breaking down the totality suggested by the term ‘world’, is to consider how the world breaks down into facts (Tatsachen). Wittgenstein then relates facts to states of affairs (Sachverhalten) constituted by objects (Gegenstanden, Sachen, Dingen). This progress can be presented succinctly by means of the following propositions: The world is all that is the case (1). What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs (2). A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things) (2.01).

Reading this series of claims we might be tempted to a reductivist picture and take facts to be constructed out of states of affairs and these in turn to be composed of their basic elements, the objects. In such a picture something must provide the structure of the construction, and this “cement” would be logic.8 But is this Wittgenstein’s picture? What is the relation between facts and states of affairs, and between the latter and objects? What is the nature of the contrast between facts and states of affairs? What is the nature of the shift from one perspective to the other? For I will, indeed, 8. I realize that this presentation is rather schematic. I do intend it to refer to Russell’s early conception of logic, according to which logic is, strictly speaking, part of the ‘furniture of the universe.’ Certain aspects of this early realism also carry over to his later logical atomism. In his preface to “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” Russell associates his thought with Wittgenstein’s: “The following [is the text] of a course of eight lectures [which] are largely concerned with explaining certain ideas which I learnt from my friend and former pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein”; see B. Russell, Logic and Knowledge, p. 177. This assessment of Russell’s concerning the relation of his logical atomism to Wittgenstein’s thought is problematic. Indeed, it might be the source of many misreadings of the relation between facts and states of affairs. The problem appears first in relation to the question of simplicity, for Russell does not think of simple objects as containing internal complexity. But that is the reason why everything that pertains to the realm of possibilities must be expressed through external relations, thus in relation to molecular propositions rather than elementary propositions. For that reason logical structure is part of the constitution of reality. There is no sense in speaking of a perspective on the world apart from logic. There is no opening to possibilities apart from the space of possibilities given by logic.

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attempt to show that these must be viewed as two perspectives on the world, rather than as placed in some hierarchical ordering. In response to a letter from Russell asking for clarification of the difference between a Tatsache and a Sachverhalt, Wittgenstein writes: Sachverhalt is what corresponds to an Elementarsatz if it is true. Tatsache is what corresponds to the logical product of elementary propositions when this product is true. The reason why I introduce Tatsache before introducing Sachverhalt would want a long explanation.9

Wittgenstein does not say that a Tatsache is a logical product of Sachverhalten. He says that it corresponds to the logical product of elementary propositions. This apparently pedantic distinction on my part is actually essential. If we were to say that it is the fact itself that is a conjunction of states of affairs, this would imply that there is a relation (that of conjunction) between those states of affairs. But what Wittgenstein wants to emphasize is precisely that a fact consists of states of affairs that stand in no logical relation whatsoever to one another, that are independent of one another (2.061). States of affairs merely co-exist. There is nothing that holds states of affairs together to constitute a specific fact. A fact is, ontologically speaking, just the taking place or existence of individual states of affairs. This then clarifies the nature of the contrast between the two perspectives. Speaking of the perspective of facts, Wittgenstein emphasizes that facts are in logical space, that “The facts in logical space are the world” (1.13). But as he shifts to the perspective of states of affairs, logical space, as it were, disappears.10 A fact is just the existence of states of 9. LRKM, p. 72. 10. Such a shift away from the logical space that surrounds facts explains the rather puzzling sequence of claims: “The world divides into facts” (1.2); and “Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same” (1.21). Why state that “The world divides into facts” after having said that “The world is the totality of facts”? What is the nature of this division that makes it worth mentioning? And is it not contradictory to assert that facts are in a logical space and then say that the division into facts results in items that are logically independent of one another? I assume that the possibility of that division must reinforce the sense that there is a perspective from which logical relations are seen to disappear. Thus the division is the possibility of separating all the facts into classes, such that the existence of any one class is independent of any other class. When Wittgenstein says that “Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same” (1.21), he does not mean that any fact re-

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affairs, their bare existence with no logical relations between them.11 Whereas facts are surrounded by possibilities in logical space, states of affairs stand in logical isolation.12 It is not the case that state of affairs are just the simplest kinds of facts. Rather, I take it that Wittgenstein emphasizes that states of affairs cover all the space of facts, or include within themselves all that is covered by the perspective of facts. This means that a complete description of the world through the perspective of facts can be replaced with a complete description of the world through the perspective of states of affairs. In the more common reading of the Tractatus, there would be simple facts as well as complex facts. The simple facts by themselves would not cover all the space of facts by themselves. To cover all of reality we would then need to invoke logical combinations of states of affairs. Doing so would immediately demand that we assume the ontological reality of logical constants and take logical space as constitutive of the ultimate structure of the world. My reading attempts to make the perspective of facts and that of states of affairs overlap completely. It is motivated in part by the assumption that logical constants do not have ontological reality and laws of logic are not contentful, an assumption which Wittgenstein repeatedly asserted and to which I will return in later chapters. Wittgenstein’s statement, “The facts in logical space are the world,” could be interpreted as meaning that logical space is one of the constituents of the world, together with facts. In that case it cannot be dispensed lates to any other fact in that way (since some of them obviously stand in logical dependencies). Rather, the “item” is a class of facts that is independent, logically speaking, of all other such classes. All such classes exhaust whatever facts there are in the world. Considering these classes we need not invoke any kind of logical relations between the various “items.” They are logically independent. That independence prepares the transition to speaking of states of affairs. Indeed, one could say that any such class contains all the ‘material’ that is implicit in a state of affairs. 11. The tendency to think of a fact as a logical combination of states of affairs might result from reading back onto the ontological level Wittgenstein’s claim that all propositions are the result of truth—functional operations on elementary propositions. 12. Such an initial picture of the space between facts being internal to facts requires that all facts be at the same level, that there be no hierarchies of facts. That is, there is no ground level of facts and then a second level of the facts as to the relation of those facts, and so on. In other words, there are no facts about facts. We will see this insight developed in the context of Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing.

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with even at the level of states of affairs. Granted, the notions of logical space and fact are correlative, but this does not require that logical space be viewed as a constituent added to facts. That facts are in this space means that logical space belongs internally to what it is to be a fact. This does not make logical space a reality external to facts, which belongs to the furniture of the universe. When Wittgenstein writes “The facts in logical space are the world,” it is precisely to emphasize that logical space is not an additional entity but a condition of facticity as such.13 The logic of facts, the relations of implication among facts, are not external properties of facts. Indeed, to have a fact is to have something that is, for instance, negatable or conjoinable with other facts. Placing facts in logical space brings out the way a fact is internally related to various logical possibilities. Logical space is not an entity in which facts are embedded. One could say that each and every fact opens a space around it that is determined by the particular fact it is. This is the space of inferential relations of that fact—the various logical possibilities that are intrinsically related to the taking place of that fact. The aim of adopting a perspective apart from logic, as I initially understood this move, is to shift away from the perspective of facts. To go beyond that perspective is to view the world in terms of states of affairs, recognizing which states of things there are. This does not mean that a state of affairs is a different kind of entity than a fact. Obviously, states of affairs are facts, but they have another aspect, which is revealed by turning to their constituents. In states of affairs the objects are given to us. The space of states of affairs is the space of possibilities opened by objects. But I want to emphasize that this is a different space from what Wittgenstein calls the logical space of facts. Speaking somewhat figuratively, we can also say that a fact opens onto an outside, onto other facts, whereas a state of affairs is closed upon it13. Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘logic’ is complex, and there are reasons for that complexity. When I emphasize the aim of viewing the world apart from the perspective of logic, I take logic to be something like Frege and Russell’s view of logic. Wittgenstein also uses logic to mean something like the philosophical investigation into the nature of that conception (as in 2.012). He uses the notion of space both in connection with logic (‘logical space’ as in 1.13, 4.463) and in connection with objects (as in 2.013, 2.0131). In his discussion of space in relation to objects, what is emphasized is that such space is internal to what the object is. It is not an entity that stands over and above such objects. This should also be the way one understands the notion of logical space surrounding a fact. In Chapter 2 I will develop further the understanding of form based on the identification of form and space.

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self, or its connection to other such states is made through its inner constitution—its objects. Its space is the space of its objects. This does not mean that it cannot be taken as a fact, only that viewed in itself it reveals something other than the space-of-facts (logical space).14 These issues will be discussed later at length; here I should just like to stress that a state of affairs is where two aspects of reality come together (call them the form and the content). On the one hand, by virtue of the determinate way in which the objects of the state of affairs are combined, the state of affairs is a fact. The state of affairs viewed as a fact stands in a space of possibilities spanned by logic. On the other hand, in a state of affairs we are given objects, and thus there is also a realm of possibilities determined by the nature or form of the objects.15 I assume that while these two perspectives overlap, the view of the world through its objects presents us with substantive possibilities (I will also use the term ‘real possibilities’ to indicate this aspect), whereas logical space gives us only abstract or formal possibilities. To think of the world apart from logic, or beyond facticity, is to open up to real possibilities. Although the above may point at the direction to take when interpreting the opening of the Tractatus, it cannot show how such an interpretation would work in detail. In particular, we need to clarify how to determine possibilities at the level of states of affairs without assuming logical space, the space of facts. To appreciate the kind of problems such an account can raise, let us consider the following two propositions: “The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts”(1.11); “For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case” (1.12). This claim might at first sound trivial: if we list all that is the case, then what remains is what is not the case. But things are not so simple. The question is precisely how to determine what remains? How is what remains determined by all that is the case? In the 14. The German term Wittgenstein uses, ‘vorkommen,’ which has the connotation of coming out (from beneath the cover of facts), reveals the connection between states of affairs and the appearance of the object, its uncovering. 15. Wittgenstein’s distinction between ‘situation’ (Sachlage) and ‘state of affairs’ (Sachverhalt) marks these two perspectives. He uses ‘Sachlage’ to emphasize the factual aspect of states of affairs. Thus ‘Sachlage’ can be used in relation to facts in general, but also to emphasize the factual aspect of states of affairs. See, for instance, 2.0122, where the independence of the thing means its being considered as occurring in situations, whereas its dependence is a connection with states of affairs.

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case of facts, their being in logical space provides the necessary determination; it is, for example, internal to a fact that its negation is not a fact but is possible. But Wittgenstein also states that “The totality of existing states of affairs determines which states of affairs do not exist.” How would existing states of affairs determine nonexisting states of affairs?16 Indeed, whoever has a realistic conception of logic might do away with the problem by saying that since logical constants such as negation have reality, we can not do without ultimate facts of the form ‘this and that is not the case’. But if my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s intentions is correct, he needs an account of so-called negative facts that do not presuppose an object that is negation (or for that matter the reality of logical constants). What this initial picture of the world is supposed to convey is that we can have a complete account of all existing states of affairs and of what is merely possible, without postulating logical objects. According to Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘fact’, the nonexistence of a state of affairs is not itself a fact (although the negation of a nonexistent state of affairs is one).17 Rather, we should say that the nonexistence of states of affairs has reality. Understanding the notion of reality de16. To take a concrete example, given that facts are in logical space, it is a fact that such and such is not the case; but what is this very fact composed of, in terms of states of affairs that exist? 17. Wittgenstein’s terminology might be somewhat confusing. From his letter to Russell quoted above we can say that facts, as Wittgenstein uses that term in the opening of the Tractatus, are the correlates of conjunctions of true elementary propositions. He does not talk of existing facts and nonexisting facts (facts as it were that are only possible). He reserves the term ‘fact’ for what is the case. What we would be tempted to call ‘possible facts’ should be explained by appealing to the logical space internal to what it is to be a fact. States of affairs, as opposed to facts, can have existence or not have existence: “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality. (We also call the existence of states of affairs a positive fact, and their non-existence a negative fact.)” (2.06). This might cause some confusion, unless we realize that the terms ‘positive fact’ and ‘negative fact’ are replaced by Wittgenstein’s analysis of states of affairs. “We” here does not refer to the author of the Tractatus but to the users of traditional logical notions. The existence of states of affairs replaces the traditional notion of a positive fact; the nonexistence of states of affairs replaces the traditional notion of a negative fact. This shift then points precisely to Wittgenstein’s aim to do away with the logical constants, in particular with the operation of negation. We can account for what we called negative facts, facts which seem essentially to involve negation, by the existence and nonexistence of states of affairs. Moreover, the states of affairs which do not exist do not involve negation, but are rather determined by the internal constitution of those states of affairs that exist through the objects. (See Chapter 2.)

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pends on grasping how the existence of states of affairs determines the nonexistence of other states of affairs. It is only by considering states of affairs that one can understand the reality (as opposed to the facticity) of the possible. Indeed, it is the nature of the objects constituting the state of affairs that will allow us this determination, which is not an inference. This point can be explained by considering Wittgenstein’s concept of an object, its form and its relation to the structure of states of affairs.

Signs of Sense

The Form of Objects

2

The Form of Objects

The difficulty we experience in grasping Wittgenstein’s aim in his account of objects derives from the prevalence of certain traditional notions of objecthood which are evoked by, and then imposed on, his text. It is therefore essential to be aware that Wittgenstein subverts the various distinctions that are used in the metaphysical tradition of elaborating the concept of an object. Traditional approaches to the notion of object postulate some of the following oppositions: internal (essential) and external (material, or contingent) property, the universal and the concrete particular, the simple and the complex, form and matter. Working through the propositions concerning objects in the Tractatus reveals how Wittgenstein goes beyond these distinctions to give us another approach to the object that escapes traditional frameworks. “A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects” (2.01). We can start by asking, as we did when considering the relation of states of affairs to facts, what holds the objects together in a state of affairs. The answer will be similar: nothing does. There is no thing holding the objects together. What holds things together cannot be another thing. “In a state of affairs objects fit into one another like the links of a chain” (2.03). The elements of the chain are not held together by something like glue, but rather hold together by virtue of their own constitution. This way of putting the point is rather empty, but it can serve to illuminate the priority of the states of affairs over the object, which would explain why we need not account for the unification of objects into states of affairs. We might nevertheless be tempted to say, wrongly, that there is something about an object that enables it to be combined with 34

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some objects and not with others. However, there is no prohibition or law that divides possible from impossible combinations of objects; there are no rules of combination. Attempting to state such a law would result in nonsense, for it is not a fact about the object that it combines with certain objects and not others. There are no facts about what the object is. To take a simplistic example: the absence of red sounds does not follow from a law or contentful characterization of objects. There is no reason why sounds cannot be red.1 There is no a priori specification of the range of states of affairs. This understanding places the objects beyond the sphere of justification. It is part of Wittgenstein’s aim to open up, through his concept of an object, a perspective beyond the lawfulness identified with the logical. This means that it is wrong to think of a self-standing object and, over and above it, a contentful characterization of what states of affairs it could appear in. The object is exhausted by its possibilities of combination. Wittgenstein uses ‘object’ to name any constituent of a state of affairs. What distinguishes the form of one object from the form of another is the other objects it combines with, the states of affairs it can occur in. We must beware of making the object into an isolated “it,” something wholly self-standing that is then placed in various facts. Indeed, many of the problems encountered when interpreting Wittgenstein’s concept of an object arise from precisely such a reification of the object. Thus the object’s independence—its being self-standing, insofar as it is not tied to any particular fact or insofar as it can occur in various possible situations—is itself definitive of the object’s dependence on that range of possibilities. The object is given by the states of affairs it can occur in: Things are independent insofar as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connection with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves, and in propositions.) (2.0122)

To know an object is to know its possibilities of combination, what Wittgenstein calls its form. It is impossible to understand the role of objects 1. This is, one could say, an ontological version of Cora Diamond’s understanding of nonsense and of her claim that there cannot be informative nonsense. See in particular “On What Nonsense Might Be,” in The Realistic Spirit.

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and their place in states of affairs if we do not follow closely Wittgenstein’s distinction between form and structure. Form is a notion that can be elaborated both with respect to logical space and to what I have called the space of the object. I will first think of it, as Wittgenstein does, in relation to the object. Initially we can say that the form has to do with the possibilities of combination of objects. The form of an object is, so to speak, its grammar, shown through the states of affairs it can occur in. “Objects contain the possibility of all situations” (2.014); “The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object” (2.0141). In order to avoid the temptation of thinking of the object as an ‘it’, Wittgenstein further elaborates the account of possibilities by means of the analogy with a space. Thus we are invited to think of a form not so much according to the model of a figure in space (which, I take it, would be the natural understanding of form), but rather in terms of a space taken as a whole. Objects are not in space, as if the space were independent of the object that occurs in it. Rather, the space is precisely the form of the object. Just as there is no spatial point apart from space, so there is no object apart from the space of possibilities that characterizes it: Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space, or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others. (2.0121) A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.) A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some color: it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. (2.0131)

A structure is a mode of combination of objects in a state of affairs. It is the way in which objects with given forms are combined within that space of forms. The articulation of the state of affairs is the structure. Wherever we have a fact, we have structure or articulation, a particular configuration of objects. If the central figure for elaborating form is that of space, then the central figure for elaborating structure is that of an arrangement in space, a configuration. To take a simple example: suppose we have spatial objects or objects with the form of space (supposing

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space is a form), then their arrangement in a circle would be a structure of that form. But the arrangement of those objects in a square would also be a structure of that form. Though these are two completely different figures, both are structures of the same form.2 The possibilities of various configurations must be understood in the light of the analogy of form with space. Space permits its objects to be arranged in various ways. There is, then, a categorical distinction between form and structure, between space and arrangement in space. The structure is only the how of the relation, the form is what objects are. The structure is the specific relation between objects—the form is what makes those relations possible. “Form is the possibility of structure” (2.033). Every property an object can have depends on a pre-existing form of that object. The form of an object, which makes the object what it is, determines the possibility of properties that are attributed to it contingently, that is, the properties that appear through the structure of facts. Form provides the background against which facts are possible. Form is not a property of an object but the condition of the attribution of properties. It can also be called an internal property of the object. “If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties” (2.01231). This might sound as if Wittgenstein were saying that an object has two distinct sets of properties: internal properties (form) and external properties, and that when we philosophize we deal only with the internal properties. It might also sound as if the very having of a property had the same grammar, whether we talk of an internal or an external property. This way of putting it is, to my mind, quite misleading, for it fails to indicate the radical shift that Wittgenstein makes in our understanding of these no-

2. To refer to an example given by Wittgenstein later on, suppose ‘being a successor’ is a form. Then: aRb (∃x) aRx.xRb (∃x,∃y) aRx.xRy.yRb are all structures of the same form. This shows that Wittgenstein’s concept of form should be distinguished from the Frege-Russell concept of logical form, for Frege or Russell would not say that all these are propositions of the same logical form.

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tions.3 He brings out the fundamental difference between the grammar of those attributions. A moment of reflection suffices to make evident why this difference is necessary, given what was claimed about facts and states of affairs. If ‘to have an internal property’ were to be construed with the same grammar as ‘to have an external property,’ then it would be a fact that the object has an internal property, just as it is a fact that an object has an external property. In that case, all facts could not be reduced to the existence of states of affairs. There would be further facts as to the nature of the objects constituting states of affairs. Wittgenstein must preserve a clear distinction between what it is to know an object and what it is to know a fact. This difference is fleshed out or reconceived in terms of the distinction between form and structure. In order to see how the distinction between form and structure replaces the distinction between internal and external properties, we should follow closely Wittgenstein’s formulation in 2.0231: The substance of the world can only determine a form, and not any material properties. For it is only by means of propositions that material properties are represented—only by the configuration of objects that they are produced.

It would be tempting to read this proposition as simply stating that each object can combine with various other objects and that these combinations are the various facts. But this interpretation does not address Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the notion of configuration, or the way in which objects are combined. Only by using the analogy of a space as a way to think of the form of objects can we start to appreciate the force of the term ‘configuration’. We realize that there are different ways of relating objects in the same space, and it is those ways that produce the material properties. We have what might be called a structural account of facts. In order to flesh out this idea of a mode of configuration as distinct from the form of the object, we must now introduce the idea that facts also have form. A fact has form simply by virtue of being a fact at all (not 3. This will be taken up explicitly when considering Wittgenstein’s treatment of formal properties. On the confusion between internal and external properties, he writes: “I introduce these expressions in order to indicate the source of the confusion between internal relations and relations proper (external relations) which is very widespread among philosophers” (4.122).

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a fact of space, a fact of color, a fact of time, but rather a fact at all). The form of facts is what we have called the logical space that surrounds a fact. Once more, we must be careful to point out that here too form means the occurrence of possibilities that are internal to the fact. But those possibilities are merely what is internal to being a fact at all, not to the nature of the objects which occur in that fact. Thus it is internal to a fact that it can be negated. It is part of the grasping of the form of that fact that we understand its relation to its negation. The configurations that express material properties are therefore configurations of a certain form, of the form of facts in logical space. The form that allows these configurations is in no way the form that determines the real possibilities of objects. This distinction between the form of the object and that of the fact is essential and will recur as we develop Wittgenstein’s account of picturing. In attempting to further refine the idea of form in relation to objects, care should be taken to avoid certain misleading pictures. One attractive, but to my mind false, conception of what Wittgenstein means is that an object is a space of possibilities, as it were, laid out before us. A combination of such objects would be a choice of particular places in such spaces of possibility. For instance, the objects are a space of color, a coordinate system, and a time axis. A fact would then be a red square in such and such a place between two o’clock and two thirty. The problem with this picture is that we think of the fact as containing objects, that is, we think of the object as given in a specific fact (or we separate it from its space). But the fact cannot give us the objects since they are what they are only by virtue of their relations with other possibilities; they appear only through the space of combination. The object we imagine within a fact is falsely contained, isolated, reified, or made into an entity which we imagine we can grasp independently of its space of possibilities. Therefore we should not say that in grasping a material property we are given objects in a particular configuration, for this gives us only a configuration in logical space: the objects, as it were, recede from our view. Inversely, when we have an object, we can only have a form, a whole space of possibilities, never a specific fact. We can also say that in establishing the fact of the relation of objects, we lose the object space that makes the relation possible—the background. Conversely, when trying to make the form of the objects appear, we do not take any particular fact into account.

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A correct understanding of the distinction between an internal property and an external property depends on grasping the difference between the perspective of facts and that of objects. That difference of perspective will develop into a radical distinction between what is represented by propositions and what is shown through the internal relations of their constituents. Attributing a property to an object is always a matter of producing a particular structure or configuration of a space of possibilities, a form. Facts are always a matter of how objects of given forms are related, always a matter of structure, articulation, or configuration given the form. Objects are conditions of facts. The fact is the ‘how’ given a ‘what.’ A fact can be said to be skeletal; it is the specification of a configuration which does not include any elements to be combined. It is the how of combination provided by logical structure in which things form the nodes of that structure.4 Should we say that objects ‘in themselves’ are only form? Wittgenstein writes: “In a manner of speaking objects are colorless” (2.0232), meaning that they are only form and have no material properties. But this is just a way of characterizing a different grammar of internal and external properties of what belongs to the object and what appears in the fact. Indeed, the claim that objects ‘in themselves’ are only form might lead to various misunderstandings. It might tempt us to think of objects as universals. It is therefore necessary to clarify that a form is not a general property. In a certain space of form one can speak of facts concerning particular points in that space, or of facts about points in general. But the general should not be identified with the formal (in Wittgenstein’s sense). A general fact is no less a fact. It is a determination of a certain configuration of objects rather than a form (or space of possibilities).5 Related to the misconception of forms as universals is the temptation 4. We must take care not to introduce here a distinction between the schematic and the contentful that will be later reproduced as an interpretation of what happens at the level of language. We must remember that the distinction between form and structure is drawn before language is brought into the picture and concerns the relation between facts and objects. 5. Contrast this with, for instance, Frege’s view in which logic is correlative with the most general properties of facts and will be expressed in fully generalized propositions. The distinction between a regular concept and something that exhibits form will become clearer in Wittgenstein’s account of formal concepts.

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to read Wittgenstein’s account of form in terms of a dichotomy between form and matter, as though we needed something like matter to individuate and distinguish objects that have the same form. Wittgenstein avoids drawing such a distinction between form and matter:6 If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different. (2.0233)

Let us consider again the analogy with space. Two points in space have the same form, and apart from their external properties, the fact of their relation with other points, there is nothing that distinguishes them. As we move to the level of language, the statement that distinctness appears through external properties or facts translates into the claim that the only distinction we can make is by representing such facts: by describing an object in such a way as to distinguish it from another. Thus there is no way to determine absolute difference. This is further reinforced by the following proposition, with its peculiarly convoluted structure: Either a thing has properties that nothing else has, in which case we can immediately use a description to distinguish it from the others and refer to it; or, on the other hand, there are several things that have the whole set of their properties in common, in which case it is quite impossible to indicate one of them. For if there is nothing to distinguish a thing, I cannot distinguish it, since otherwise it would be distinguished after all. (2.02331)

This formulation has an empty sound which warns us against trying to come up with a substantive notion (such as matter) to explain the difference of individuals. One would think that absolute difference could be expressed by means of the proposition ⬃(a ⫽ b).(∀f )(fa ↔ fb), which would then allow us to say that two objects that share all properties are different, and would enable us to make this difference into a fact. But just as Wittgenstein’s shift away from the perspective of facts and logic 6. This avoidance might suggest a certain bond between the recognition of the particular case and the recognition of possibilities. It points to Wittgenstein’s tendency to distance himself from any attempt to determine form in advance, in theory, as universal ideas, apart from instances of experience in all their particularity.

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implies that logical constants have no ontological reality, so nothing corresponds to the relation of identity. There is no translation, in terms of elementary propositions, of ⬃(a ⫽ b).(∀f )(fa ↔ fb). We cannot ultimately say that two objects have all their properties in common yet are different. Two different objects will just be given two different names in a proper notational system. Wittgenstein’s characterization of objects as subsistent, unalterable, making up the substance of the world, tempts us to turn them into eternal ideas, to entirely dissociate them from happenings in the world, from the concreteness of experience. Brooms or beds cannot simply be objects, it seems. We are tempted to think of such objects as existing necessarily, and our grasp of them as a priori. I want to insist nevertheless that considering states of affairs, and thus objects, provides a different perspective on experience. Their connection with facts is yet to be made clear, but we should be alert at this point against assuming various misleading presuppositions. It is true that the objects form the background of alteration, of configuration, of the changeable and the unstable, but they cannot be recognized apart from an investigation of phenomena. Indeed, as I understand it, Wittgenstein’s insistence on distancing himself from traditional accounts of form is ultimately connected to his wish not to reify the space of possibilities, not to make it a realm of a priori ideas distinct from experience. These considerations allow us now to address a deep confusion concerning simplicity in the Tractatus. In it Wittgenstein never uses the term ‘simple object’, which would imply that some objects are simple and some are complex, but states that “objects are simple.” Nor does he say that every object is simple. The claim that objects are simple does not express accidental generality but defines the very concept of an object, the essential distinction between objects and facts, or between what an object is and what can be attributed to it through its appearance in situations. In the traditional picture we think of simple objects as a subset of all objects, as those which are the ultimate ‘building blocks’ or atoms of reality. The picture I suggest makes the simplicity of the object constitutive of the notion of objecthood. It is opposed to the articulability of facts, or their inherent complexity. It marks a distinction between facts and the condition of facts. Wittgenstein writes: “Every statement about complexes can be re-

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solved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes completely” (2.0201). It is significant that this statement concerns language. We can treat a fact as if it were an object by naming it, but this does not make it into a complex object. It will always be resolved in analysis. Complexity is always a matter of fact. A fact and a complex are one and the same. There is no complex object over and above the fact that consists of the specific relation of its elements. Speaking of the complexity of objects is speaking nonsense. The desire to make simple objects into a subset of all objects derives, I think, from a misconception of the nature of simplicity. Simplicity is often pictured as uniformity, as a lack of discernible parts. This is why sense data are taken to be paradigmatic examples of simplicity. But for Wittgenstein recognition of simplicity is recognition of the possibilities of an object as internal to what it is. A broom, for instance, might be composed of various parts, but that does not make it complex. One could say that the possibilities of its parts are not in the same space as the possibilities of the broom. What is usually called the argument for simples in 2.021– 2.0212 is then misinterpreted if it is conceived as involving something like a Russellian notion of analysis, which leads to ultimate constituents that are really simple. Wittgenstein would say that analysis must lead to elementary propositions containing names in immediate combination. This is very different from saying that analysis leads to logically structured propositions containing ultimate constituents. Wittgenstein’s scheme incorporates the logical scaffolding into the form of the object to get to a level of names in immediate combination, so as to make contact with a world apart from logic. Russell’s scheme complicates logical structure to get to constituents that cannot be broken down any further. In the former case, the criterion of success is the disappearance of logic; in the latter case, the discovery of the most basic building blocks bound with the cement of logic. This perception calls into question the soundness of the interpretative enterprise of filling in for Wittgenstein the category of simples, of determining which of the things we encounter in experience could count as such—whether sense data or physical objects or space-time points, whether particulars or universals. The fact about the Tractatus is that

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Wittgenstein does not present a specific category of things which are to count as objects.7 This argument might be countered by citing proposition 2.0251: “Space, time, and color (being colored) are forms of objects.” Are we to read this as Wittgenstein’s example of objects? And if not, why does Wittgenstein speak of space, time, and being colored as forms of objects? A possible reason is that these are traditional examples of the domain of the a priori, which have a central feature in common and introduce the difficult claim that objects are both form and content. These examples are then to be thought of in relation to the claim in 2.0121 that “we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time.” Wittgenstein further elaborates the analogy of the form of objects with space developed in 2.013 and 2.0131 but, importantly, finds traditional notions in which this conception of object could be said to be operative. Space does not contain spatial points. A spatial point is a point-in-space. Each point is what it is by having the form of space. The same could be said for time and for being colored. An object is form and content (2.025). An object is form only insofar as it is inseparable from a space of possibilities; it provides content insofar as it occurs as a node in a specific configuration of that space. The examples Wittgenstein gives are therefore intended to clarify the very concept of an object rather than to serve as examples of specific objects. Wittgenstein’s failure to specify objects is not inadvertent. It is not due to his contempt for the kind of hard work that would constitute a successful analysis, or to a desire to obfuscate what he means by ‘object.’ The concrete example is not elaborated simply because this does not belong to the task and aim of the Tractatus. Later Wittgenstein expresses this separation of tasks by speaking of the distinction between questions raised about logic itself and questions that have to do with the application of logic, which we can call questions of ontology. I will discuss this 7. D. Pears suggests that by not specifying the nature of the objects, Wittgenstein left “a vacuum which commentators felt obliged to fill with dogmatic interpretations, and so there was a proliferation of exegeses offering to unlock the secrets of the ontology of the Tractatus.” See The False Prison, vol. 1, pp. 91–92. Although I disagree with his final assessment of a basically uncritical realism concerning objects, I think that objects are a source of attraction and mystery in the Tractatus. Indeed, I think that Wittgenstein himself conceives of the wish to express objects as one of the driving forces behind problematic pictures of ineffability. (See Chapter 7 below.)

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distinction in turn, but it is crucial to grasp that insofar as the Tractatus has a contentful task, it consists of accounting for what can be given all at once, before experience. Objects, as opposed to Kantian categories, do not fall into that kind of inquiry. As I will explain later, this division of tasks is not arbitrary but rather inherently related to the deeper aim of the book, to its ethical point. Wittgenstein opens the book with the claim “The world is all that is the case” (1). He further specifies “What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs” (2). Later he defines the concept of reality: “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality” (2.06) and claims that “The sum total of reality is the world” (2.063). Does this mean that he ultimately distinguishes between the world and reality? This series of claims seems to be inconsistent: how could reality be more than the world (since it contains the nonexisting states of affairs in addition to the existing ones) and yet its sum total be the world? In what sense do nonexistent states of affairs have reality if they have no existence? In sum, what is Wittgenstein’s account of possibility? The concept of possibility, of what could be the case but is not the case, can be understood by means of the idea of logical space or the space of facts, but the above interpretation of states of affairs was to lead to a different grasp of the possible, one that depends ultimately on objects’ having form. The notion of form opens a way of moving from existing states of affairs to the determinate totality of those that do not exist. “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality” (2.06). That reality includes nonexistent states of affairs does not imply that there are more facts in the world than those that are the case—a fact is merely what is the case. Nor does it imply that there are objects that exist and objects that only subsist. When Wittgenstein writes that “The sum total of reality [gesamte Wirklichkeit] is the world” (2.063), the term ‘gesamte Wirklichkeit’ should rather be read as meaning all that this amounts to is the world, as it is given in states of affairs. ‘Sum total’ does not mean the numerical sum; it is not the totality of everything put together but what that totality amounts to—what counts, not what is counted. The world is the totality of facts, but the reality of nonexisting states of affairs is the result of the form of things. It adds nothing to the facts there are or to the things there are. The notion of reality is the result of drawing a distinction between facts and their conditions. The

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condition of having facts is that there is a form within which facts take place. By grasping that form, we grasp what it is for states of affairs to exist, and what it is for states of affairs not to exist. It is important to note that Wittgenstein does not argue that an existing state of affairs determines the nonexistence of other states of affairs. He writes: “The totality of existing states of affairs also determines which states of affairs do not exist” (2.05). The idea of a totality of existing states of affairs allows Wittgenstein to distinguish the concept of determination from inference. “From the existence or non-existence of one state of affairs it is impossible to infer the existence or non-existence of another” (2.062). Indeed, when we speak of facts in logical space, such inferential relations would hold. From p being the case we can infer that ⬃p is not the case. But in order to determine which states of affairs do not exist, we must consider the existing states of affairs as a whole. They, through their objects, will allow us to grasp the whole space of possibilities and thus to determine the nonexisting states of affairs without this being a matter of inference. In other words, what is real for us is not just that a state of affairs exists, but also that a state of affairs does not exist. The nonexistence of a state of affairs should be distinguished from no reality at all, and the basis for that distinction is that objects have form. What is not the case is not nothing, but it is not a fact either. There is something real beyond the facts: that which makes facts possible; this is what I will call the horizon of form. The Wittgensteinian understanding of objects through the notion of form establishes a connection between an object and real possibilities. An object cannot be grasped apart from a space of possibilities. So we can now use this conception of object to open a perspective beyond the conditions of possibility provided by logic. What are the possibilities of an object? Do possibilities exist in the world apart from human subjects? How are they opened to our view, or how do we open ourselves to them? These are questions that cannot be answered at this stage of our inquiry, for one of the most important requirements for a proper reading of the Tractatus is to know when to ask the right questions.

Signs of Sense

“We Make to Ourselves Pictures of Facts”

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“We Make to Ourselves Pictures of Facts”

One of the most striking features of the opening propositions of the Tractatus is the impression they create of a world without any human subjects. This is not only because the discussion mostly avoids mentioning language or thought, but also because the very tone, the matter-offactness of these opening moments makes one imagine a world of mere facts. Indeed, some of the most influential interpreters of the Tractatus seem to react to this humanless world by forcing a problem upon the text for which subjectivity is the only solution. According to them, the book’s central concern is how language is connected onto this world of brute facts. Thus, far too quickly in my view, the subject is brought into a relation with this humanless world by means of the assumption that subjectivity will secure the connection between language—a human construction—and the world as such. This conceptualization of the problem might seem useful when thinking about various issues in the book: it can be used to explain, for instance, the supposed emptiness of logic, the formal aspect of Wittgenstein’s account, by locating language apart from the world, in the sphere of human convention. But I think that to impose a division between the realm of language and that of facts, and thereby to create the problem of relating them, goes far beyond the intent of the text and may lead to misinterpretations. Specifically, this reading suggests that the central problem in picturing facts is how something that is other than the world of fact, namely language, can be related to that world so as to be about it. Yet as we read Wittgenstein’s account, we realize that pictures are facts, and the question we should ask is rather how certain facts can be used to represent 47

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other facts. This formulation of the problem reduces the temptation to resort to a metaphysical subject in order to guarantee the connection between these two domains of facts. I certainly recognize the initial impression of a world devoid of human subjects, but I wish to refrain from introducing subjectivity so soon into the account of picturing. I also acknowledge that some connection does exist between picturing and human activity, for, as Wittgenstein puts it, we do make pictures to ourselves (2.1). But we should note that Wittgenstein systematically avoids introducing intentions of human subjects into his account of picturing. Indeed, the Tractatus treats the relation of propositions to facts as unproblematic. It asks us to acknowledge a deep level at which the form of language and that of objects is one. The difficulty is not that of specifying a complex relation between language, or mind, and the world, by virtue of which language is about the world, but rather that of perceiving their mutual involvement in producing the very possibility of significance. A proper understanding of Wittgenstein’s account of picturing is a fundamental crossroads in the text. It relates to later issues such as the understanding of the subject and the ethics of the Tractatus. Various presuppositions about the place of the subject are based on the assumption that the Tractatus gives a substantive account of the relation between language and world, that is, that there is a need for an account of reference. A subject will therefore be involved in order to secure the relation of language to the world. Much of my discussion of picturing will be devoted to arguing, on the contrary, that there is no fundamental issue or substantive theory of the relation of language to the world. That is, I argue that such a relation is characterized at the most fundamental level as one of identity. This means that language and objects are equiprimordial: we discover our world through language. Such a shift in the understanding of language and world will also mean a total shift in our conception of the subject. It will also allow us to elaborate the dimensions of the unveiling of truth, understood as the discovery of the identity of language and world—an unveiling which may very well have an ethical dimension to it.1 1. This remark serves only to indicate the direction of my reading. The issues mentioned will be elaborated at length in chapters 8, 9, and 10 below.

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In order to bring out these issues, my discussion of picturing will contrast the representation of facts (through the structure of pictures) with the pictorial form that provides a locus of identity between language and things. This distinction introduces into my interpretation of picturing the split between the articulation of the structure of facts and the form of objects, a split that I identified in talking about the opening propositions of the Tractatus. It is this intuition that will guide me through a reading of Wittgenstein’s discussion of picturing. I will thus endeavor to address both the possibility of representing facts and the sense that such a capacity does not characterize the subject for us. If the most general capacity of relating through pictures to facts is what Wittgenstein calls thinking, this means that such thinking is not wholly constitutive of human subjectivity (“There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas”; 5.631). Many commentators emphasize that we should understand a picture through the concept of an isomorphism. It is a picture of some fact, we are told, if its elements are arranged in the same way as the objects are arranged in reality. Two things are thus identified: what makes a picture a picture—the pictoriality of the picture—and what makes it a correct picture of some specific fact. A mere glance at the text, however, raises doubts about this interpretation. We note first that pictures can be correct or incorrect. But if picturing is defined by its isomorphism to the fact, then something would be a picture only if there were a corresponding fact. How could there be an incorrect picture? One way of thinking of false pictures would be to say that isomorphism obtains between the picture and a possibility. This solution has a drawback, since it would fail to explain what distinguishes the representation of a possible state of affairs, thus a false picture, from a correct representation of what is the case. The capacity of the picture to represent possibilities must be independent of the relation that determines its truth or falsity. Indeed, this stress on isomorphism as the central component of the account of picturing leads us to think of picturing mainly in terms of a relation between structures. But I should like to shift the emphasis to the role of form (as elaborated in the previous chapter) in the account of

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picturing. Shifting the emphasis from structure to form will, I think, provide a wholly different interpretation of Wittgenstein’s account.2 To understand the use and function of the notion of picturing in the Tractatus we first have to sort out the distinctions among five terms that Wittgenstein introduces: (a) “Standing for” or “being representative” (vertreten): “In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects” (2.131); (b) “depicting” (abbilden): “A picture can depict any reality whose form it has” (2.17); (c) “presenting” (vorstellen): “A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs” (2.11); (d) “representing” (darstellen): “A picture represents a possible situation in logical space” (2.202); and (e) “agreeing” (stimmen): “A picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false” (2.21).

A. Being Representative A central drawback of the interpretation that emphasizes the isomorphism of structure in the account of picturing is that it sidetracks us to problems of reference, prompting us to ask what it is that enables the elements of the picture to refer to objects in the world so as to make the isomorphism possible. We are then led to think of Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘being representative’ as involving an account of reference. But Wittgenstein merely says: “That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it” (2.1511). Rather than accusing Wittgenstein of philosophical naivete, we should realize that he is not at all concerned with giving an account of reference at this point. Wittgenstein’s account of picturing does not include an account of reference. This can explain why he uses the term ‘being representative’ rather than ‘meaning’ (bedeuten) for the relation of the elements of the picture to objects. Indeed, the term ‘representative’ suggests some arbitrariness in the choice of the element. Its properties are unimportant beyond the fact that it stands for an object. Picturing does not depend 2. To avoid misunderstanding, I note that the term ‘isomorphism’ is used in interpretations of picturing to characterize the relation between arrangements of representatives in the picture and arrangements of objects in the world. Isomorphism might also be used to characterize a mapping from one space to another that shows a fundamental identity of form between such spaces. In that case form would be used to characterize a space in which various structures or arrangements are possible.

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upon the external properties of the elements that are the representatives. Such a relation of representativeness, ‘standing for’ rather than ‘meaning,’ implies at least that we should ask not how such a correlation can be established or by virtue of what a given element refers to an object, but rather, given that elements stand for objects, how do we use such representatives to make pictures of facts. (As in the case of political representatives, what ought to be important is how they represent their constituencies, once they are elected.) Wittgenstein showed his lack of interest in the nature of those representatives and their connection with things in his response to Russell’s query on this matter: “Again, the kind of relation of the constituents of thought and of the pictured fact is irrelevant. It would be a matter of psychology to find it out.”3 Thus Wittgenstein assumes the barest contact with the world, that we bring words to the world. The picture reaches right out to the world, as he says in 2.1511: “The correlations are, as it were, the feelers of the picture’s elements, with which the picture touches reality” (2.1515). The term ‘feelers’ suggests that the touching tests how reality responds, seeking to feel it, to uncover it, or get a sense of it, rather than referring to an already given reality.4 Let us consider another analogy suggested by Wittgenstein in propositions 2.1511–2.1513: “[A picture] is laid against reality like a measure. Only the end points of the graduating lines actually touch the object that is to be measured.” In measuring we do not ask what enables the ruler to refer to the object. No property of the ruler itself determines what it represents. The ruler in itself says nothing about the object. Rather, the ruler can be used in a certain way to determine a fact (the fact that the object has such-and-such a length). I bring the ruler to reality, which is 3. LRKM, p. 72. P. M. S. Hacker, quoting this claim, confuses the relation of representativeness with that of meaning, which results in an unfounded criticism of Wittgenstein’s psychologistic tendencies in the Tractatus. See Insight and Illusion, pp. 39–57. 4. I find it extremely interesting that in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud uses the same figure of feelers to express the activity of perception in relation to an external reality: “It is characteristic of [sense organs] that they deal with only very small quantities of external stimulation and only take in samples of the external world. They may perhaps be compared with feelers which are all the time making tentative advances towards the external world and then drawing back from it.” S. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 28. In the case of both Freud and Wittgenstein, what follows is a problematization of what it is for a human subject to have an object.

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not to say that the ruler is somehow isomorphic to reality, only that a fact results from the encounter of the ruler with reality. The figure of touching also makes clear that the object is not taken up into what the picture says. It has representatives, but this is precisely why it escapes being present there, in its essence. What there is to say depends on the scale we bring to the object, and saying whatever we say will be distinct from recovering the object.

B. Depicting A picture depicts the reality it is about. It depicts a reality even though it can be an incorrect representation of that reality. That it is about reality has to do with the identity of form: “What a picture must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—correctly or incorrectly—in the way it does, is its pictorial form” (2.17). We should bear in mind, from the account of objects and facts, the sharp distinction between form and structure. Form is the possibility of structure. The structure will determine the specific situation that is presented, but that it is a picture, that it depicts anything at all, is due to an identity of form and not to an isomorphism of structure. “There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all” (2.161). It should be noted that Wittgenstein speaks here of identity. He does not use weaker terms such as ‘harmony,’ ‘similarity,’ or ‘agreement.’ At the level of form, there must be an identity between the picture and the reality depicted, whether the picture is correct or incorrect. This explains how a picture can be incorrect: the form will be such as to enable us to construct a structure that does not agree with reality and yet can still be about it, since it has the same form as that reality. Placing representatives of objects in a background of form will produce a way in which those are related in fact.

C. Presenting “A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and nonexistence of states of affairs” (2.11). A picture, in itself, is a certain fact (see 2.141). The picture, we should recall, is not an object. In the picture there are elements that stand for objects, but the constitution of those elements is irrelevant to what the picture presents. The picture consists of

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the arrangement of elements in the space of form to make a structure, a fact. A picture is a fact—the fact of the relation of its elements. Just like any fact, the picture itself stands in logical space. It is, then, the fact of the relation of its elements in logical space. By emphasizing that a picture is a fact, Wittgenstein intends to address the possible criticism that a picture could be interpreted in different ways. Take, for example, a picture of flowers in a vase. We might want to say that it can present different things: that the flowers are in the vase, or that the flowers are beautiful, or that there are 12 flowers in the vase, or that the vase holding the flowers is blue. This criticism would seem to depend on thinking of the picture as a kind of object that could be said to have various properties, to consist of various facts, and that it is up to us to decide which fact it presents. What causes the apparent difficulty is, first, that we do not treat the elements of the picture as mere representatives of objects, but, as it were, take them to have various properties which could be seen as relevant or irrelevant, thereby deciding what is expressed in the picture. Moreover, we do not take the space of form as determined, or we ignore that what is at stake is the arrangement of elements in a space of form. (In the above example, we introduce color space only when we take the picture to present the fact that the vase holding the flowers is blue, and at other times ignore it.) In Wittgenstein’s account, a picture need not await our interpretation for it to be a determinate fact. “The fact that the elements of a picture are related to one another in a determinate way presents (vorstellt) that things are related to one another in the same way” (2.15). We might indeed ask why a picture is not just another fact, of a certain form. How is it that the picture presents something other than itself? How does it present that objects are related in the same way as its elements? Do we not need to introduce here the intention that the picture be about something? We must clarify what is meant here by the term ‘presenting.’ The picture is indeed taken to be a model of how things are, but even if we were to introduce (contrary to Wittgenstein’s language) some intention on the part of the one who makes such a picture, the intention in no way determines the reference of the picture, or makes it about reality. Intentions can be involved to the extent that what is at stake here is an activity of human beings which has various purposes. But I want to take this appeal to our activity as unproblematic, at least at this stage. Intention, in some metaphysical

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sense, is not needed to make something into a picture, in the sense of securing its relation to its subject matter. Indeed, enough of the intention is implicit in the idea of having representatives for objects. We arbitrarily choose certain terms with the intention that what we do with them would stand for what happens to objects. But such an intention does not make the elements function in such a way. There are various conditions for the possibility of picturing which must come into play, such as an identity of form, which is not ours to make. Insofar as we can speak of the aboutness of the picture, it involves an identity of form. The central precondition for picturing is what one might call the background of the picture—the form. This pre-existence of the background of form has various consequences, which I want to start elaborating at an initial, intuitive level. We place elements in a space of form, but it is form that makes them a fact. The factuality of the picture takes care of itself. However we place elements in a space, an arrangement is established; they present us with a fact in that space. One could also say that there is no nonsense in a picture.5 There is no way of placing the elements so that nothing specific will result. There is also no vagueness in a picture: the properties of the elements are unessential, the only important thing is their place, as representatives in a pre-given space of form, and this arrangement is always a specific fact. A picture is always contingent. There are no a priori pictures. When we see something pictured (say, some elements in some spatial relation) we can also see how the elements could be placed in a different position (suppose we move this one to the right; I can see that it is possible when I see the picture). Nothing in our visual space is necessarily where it is, and the same is true of pictorial space. What makes a picture a picture is identity of form, and form is the possibility of structure; hence whatever is pictured could be otherwise than it is. It already stands in a space of possibilities which is constituted by the form. 5. D. Pears seems to acknowledge this, but then retracts the claim in reflecting on language: “once the systems for producing pictures has been set up, there is no risk that a would-be picture might make an impossible claim . . . false claims are possible but not nonsensical ones. However, that is plainly not true of language, because it is not only possible but easy to produce nonsensical strings of words.” The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 121. Of course it is possible to have nonsensical strings of words, but this just means that nonsense cannot be produced at the level in which form comes into play; that is, there is no such thing as nonsense deriving from category mistakes. Indeed, a complete translation of the account of picturing, in particular the notion of form, to the level of language precisely shows that nonsense does not occur at the level of form or at the level of the symbol.

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Finally, a picture cannot depict the space of possibilities itself. It makes sense to speak of showing the properties of space through the placing of objects, or more precisely by considering the internal relations between various ways of placing objects in that space. But I cannot present in a picture with no objects at all the necessary properties of space itself. “A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it” (2.172).

D. Representing “A picture represents its subject from a position outside it. (Its standpoint is its representational form.) That is why a picture represents its subject correctly or incorrectly” (2.173). We might have learned something from the claim that there must be something identical in the picture and in the reality depicted, but why is it worth mentioning that a picture represents its subject matter (Wittgenstein’s term is Objekt) from a position outside it? What is the nature of the distance between the picture and what it aims at—its subject matter? We have already established that there is an identity of form of depiction between the picture and reality. Wittgenstein distinguishes between ‘form of depiction’ and ‘form of representation’. The former comes to express the identity with reality, the latter the distance—the standpoint apart from the subject represented. The form of representation determines the possibilities of making sense with a picture. The picture represents a sense. Those possibilities are external to the reality depicted, insofar as they are possibilities of the medium of representation. The distinction can be further elaborated as follows: we can use the picture, operate with the means of representation, in a way which is not necessarily congruent with the form of depiction. A spatial picture presents a reality of the spatial form, but this form does not determine the possibilities of using the picture to make a claim about reality. I can, for instance, use such a picture to express the sense that things are not like that. Negation is not a possibility in visual space, but it is an option of construction in representational space. We can also say that the issue is what we can do with the picture. In the case of presentation this is not an option, for the way in which objects are combined presents that things are combined in the same way. But precisely because there is a distance between the picture and the object, I can use a picture to express

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anything in its representational space. Such use determines the standpoint of the picture with respect to the facts. It gives us directions as to how to take what is presented. Such directions, the way of taking the picture, are what Wittgenstein calls the sense of the picture. Thus we distinguish between what a picture actually presents and what it can be used for (can represent). ‘Presenting’ involves how the arrangement of the elements makes a structure given the form of depiction; ‘representing’ involves the way the picture itself is taken to state something that might be other than what it presents. We can use presented facts to represent other facts. For example, I can use the spatial state of affairs that the picture presents to represent that things are not like that. I can use a picture to represent the negation of a state of affairs, but the spatial picture itself cannot present us with a negation.6 Wittgenstein emphasizes the distinction between what a picture presents and what it can logically represent in the following formulations: “A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs” (2.11); “A picture represents a possible situation in logical space” (2.202). In other words, whereas presentation directs us to how things are in fact in the picture, in representation we can use that fact to make a possible situation, and take that possible situation to be how things are. The form of representation is not necessarily the same as the form of depiction. Let us call the former the space that is external to the picture, and the latter the inner space. One can use a picture (represent a possible situation by means of it) without even knowing exactly what its inner form is. I take the picture wholesale, treating it as a fact, to represent another fact. I think of the ‘inner’ space of depiction as the form of objects, and the ‘outer’ space of representation as the space of facts, namely logical space. The split between objects and facts is thus reproduced at 6. Freud writes in Interpretation of Dreams: “What representation do dreams provide for ‘if,’ ‘because,’ ‘just as,’ ‘although,’ ‘either-or,’ and all the other conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences or speeches? . . . The incapacity of dreams to express those things must lie in the nature of the psychical material out of which dreams are made. The plastic arts of painting and sculpture labor, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared with poetry which can make use of speech” (Standard Edition, vol. 4, p. 312). Could we say that seeing the world from the point of view of form, without bringing in the logical operation, opens us to a ‘dreamy’ aspect of reality? I will want to say something of the sort by showing the unsystematic nature of meaning. The overdetermination of form in dreams or in painting is analogous to the power of creation Wittgenstein’s text evokes in language.

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the level of picturing. This is why Wittgenstein’s considerations of the form of representation are immediately followed by a discussion of logical picturing. Insofar as representation is related to our taking a fact to express a certain possibility in logical space, then a precondition of representation is an identity of logical form between the picture and what is depicted: “What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—correctly or incorrectly—in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality” (2.18). Here, clearly expressed, is the contrast between the particular pictorial form and the general possibility of picturing facts. Every picture, whatever its inner form, can be used to represent the nonexistence of the state of affairs that it presents (or, for that matter, it can be used to represent various logical relations between the states of affairs it presents). Wittgenstein can therefore say: “Every picture is at the same time a logical one. (On the other hand, not every picture is, for example, a spatial one.)” (2.182). It is the notion of representing that introduces what he will later call logical operations. The logical constants are operations on pictures. Making sense is operating on pictures. “What a picture represents is its sense” (2.221). The sense, then, is external to what the picture in itself presents. There is no sense by itself; there is only the taking of what is presented to represent a sense. The notion of logico-pictorial form should be kept distinct from the general notion of pictorial form of objects. It is form only in a very special sense. Logico-pictorial form is the form of our activity of constructing pictures.7 This is a way of saying that there is no space spanned by logical constants that preexists the activity of using the picture to represent. Logical space, as opposed to object space, has no ontological reality. “A logical picture of facts is a thought” (3). Given our understanding of the framework of representation, one could say that in thinking I use a picture to represent in a certain way. It follows from our understanding of picturing that the form of thought is the same as the form of reality: “A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the 7. This permits an initial understanding of Wittgenstein’s claim: “The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives. My fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts” (4.0312).

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thought. What is thinkable is possible too” (3.02). Wittgenstein proceeds to identify the form of reality with the form of thought by turning the thinking of a thought into a construction of possibilities of facts out of given facts. Thinking a thought is an operation on facts, which is why the form of thought and the form of reality are one and the same: in both cases the form is that of facts. A logical picture is the construction of a situation in logical space. It is a construction of something being the case (and of something not being the case). Logical space determines how we can take the picture to represent facts. This is also what leads Wittgenstein to say: “It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic.—The truth is that we could not say what an ‘illogical’ world would look like” (3.031). Our understanding of what constitutes facts in the world and our understanding of thinking, making sense, are internally connected. Consider in this context the metaphor of coordinates he introduces, in which logic is to be thought of as the coordinate system that allows us to represent possible facts: It is as impossible to represent in language anything that ‘contradicts logic’ as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist. (3.032)

E. Agreement and Disagreement A final aspect of the various relations of the picture to the world is the agreement of the sense of the picture with reality. Let us recall the distinct relations of the picture and its components to reality. The first is a relation of representativeness, which exists exclusively between the components of the picture and objects. It consists of the correlation of a sign with an object and in no way depends on being given the form of the object in question. The second is the relation between pictorial form and the form of what is depicted, which is the precondition of the possibility of making sense. Pictorial form is the possibility of structure; it is not something that we determine, but what allows us to make determinations. It makes no sense to ask: How can we be sure that we have correlated the pictorial form properly with reality? Moreover, the ‘relation’ to the world is that of identity, which is not, strictly speaking, a relation at all. A third relation that Wittgenstein introduces is the agreement or

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nonagreement of the picture with reality. This relation between the logical structure of the picture and a fact is the truth relation. The pictorial form is identical in both the picture and what it depicts, but there can be correct and incorrect pictures. The concept of form is what underlies our understanding of possibility, that is, in grasping the form of a picture we grasp what it is for it to be true, and what it is for it to be false. The making of sense of a specific claim presupposes a whole space of possibilities, a form. This is crucial: the picture represents what is the case, but in doing so it allows us to determine also the possibilities of its falsity. We have not only a representation of what must be the case if the proposition is to be true, but also the possibility of representing what is the case if it is to be false. We do not merely say that all the rest of the facts make it false, but we can specify what must be the case for it to be false. This is the point of working always within a given space of possibility determined by form—truth and falsity are always determinate. The adequation or agreement involved in truth is not a relation of absolute correspondence. The problem with a correspondence theory, as Frege has pointed out, is that the relation of correspondence is conceived to be a real relation. It would then be possible to ask whether it is true that it holds or not, and this would cause a regress in our determination of truth. Wittgenstein avoids that by making agreement depend on a form that is always identical in both the proposition and reality. The possibility of truth depends on a relation between the proposition and reality, the pictorial relation, which is not a material relation (the forms are identical); that is, we cannot ask whether the pictorial relation does in fact hold between the sense and reality, since the very possibility of its having a sense depends on having that identity of form. Truth is always a relative, internal truth: it is an agreement given certain conditions, not a fact of absolute agreement. Whether the picture is true or false, there will be an internal connection with the world. Depending on whether the picture is true or false, there will be ‘different parts’ of the logical space of the sense that will agree with the facts, but such agreement will always exist. This is precisely the point of basing the agreement on an identity of form and not of structure, which means that the possibility of agreement is internal to the picture. As Wittgenstein puts it later, to say that a proposition is either true or false is not like saying that all roses are either yellow or red (6.11). This account of truth leads us to appreciate that what is philosophi-

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cally important is not the question concerning the relation of adequation, but rather the universe of form that conditions it. One might say that there is a deeper notion of truth, which is that of the disclosure of what things are, or of the form of the world. This distinction reveals yet again Wittgenstein’s attempt to separate the perspective of facts from that of objects. The question of disclosing or uncovering the form of objects is a completely different activity from assessing the agreement of sense with reality. Wittgenstein’s account distinguishes between a propositional sense of truth and falsity, understood as the agreement or disagreement of structures with facts, and a more important idea of the unveiling of form, which is what allows representation at all. We will be led through various stages and transformations of this idea of unveiling, but it is in this idea that I locate the force of Wittgenstein’s account. He refers us to a deeper level of identity between the subject and his world, which is presupposed in the capacity to manipulate language in order to represent the world.

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Wittgenstein’s account of picturing in general and of thought in particular leads us to examine more specifically the conditions of language and the nature of the linguistic sign. When making the transition to his elaboration of language, it is essential to keep in mind his account of depiction, especially since our object of study, the propositional sign, does not look like a picture: At first sight a proposition—one set out on the printed page, for example—does not seem to be a picture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to be a picture of a piece of music, nor do our phonetic notations (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech. And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what they represent. (4.011)

We ask, then, how the pictorial character is translated at the level of the linguistic sign. We must make sure that the translation retains all the elements of the account of picturing, and, in particular, we should pay attention to the way in which form is translated. To ask about form in language is to ask about the appearance of the symbol through the sign, that is, about their difference as well as their essential relatedness. Specifying the relation of sign and symbol will help address a confusion that might have been produced by the account of picturing. The separation of the form of facts (logical space) from the form of objects and the identification of representation with logical picturing might have suggested a mode of access to objects and their form that com61

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pletely bypasses the conditions of representation, that is, logic. This would suggest the need to resort to a special form of intuition, nonlinguistic in nature. I do not think this is Wittgenstein’s picture. The distinctions he makes, as will become clear, always pertain to registers of language; they express dimensions of language. Indeed, logic will be seen to be indispensable to the formation of a network of signification, and it is only through the existence of such a network that we recognize the form of objects. Certain things are absolutely necessary to open us to the world, to enable us to relate to objects. These will be shown to derive from the very nature of signification or from the existence of the linguistic sign. Logic provides the conditions of the linguistic sign, but this does not mean that such conditions are imposed as a necessary form on experience. Logic does not determine the form of objects that appear in language or show through the use of signs. Hence the account of linguistic signification will contain two separate moments. The first, establishing an association between the space in which signs can express sense and logical space, the space of facts; the second, recognizing that language has a dimension that is related to, yet distinct from, the linguistic sign, the dimension of the symbol, through which the form of objects can be recovered. Thus, once more, the structure of our discussion of signification will repeat at a higher level the initial fundamental separation of facts and objects. Elaboration of the specific interconnection between sign and symbol will enable us to recognize that these two dimensions are inseparable, that both belong to language as such. Wittgenstein opens his account of signification with the claim: “In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses” (3.1). From the outset we must beware of thinking of Wittgenstein’s problem along Cartesian lines, wherein thought is identified with an inner mental realm and expression would be the externalization of that thought content in signs. Expression is not the duplication of an inner thought in the external world, for this distinction of inner and outer plays no role in Wittgenstein’s account. The notion of expression as it is related to thought must, then, be understood differently. Our original understanding of thinking referred to the notion of logical representation, or the representation of possibility in logical space. From the way we have characterized thinking, it follows that grasping a

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thought is not the relation of a passive subject to a ready-made entity. A thought is not an object; there is only the thinking through, the production of sense, of logical pictures of facts. What is produced does not stand on its own. Thinking, one might say, has priority over the thought. This, in turn, implies that just as we assume that thoughts can be expressed and communicated in language, so we need to explain how thinking can become perceptible in signs, how the result of the acts of thinking can be perceived, that is, how they form the common ground which we call language. It is in this context that we must understand Wittgenstein’s use of the concept of expression. In order to make the result of thinking—the thought—perceivable, the result of the operation of thinking must become a fact in a medium that is perceptible to our senses. We can perceive with our senses only what exists in fact. Since the thinking of a possibility does not itself result in a fact, it can only be made a perceivable fact by being translated. This means that the translation must be projected onto a space of facts sharing the same form, or a space whose form is merely logical form. This is the space of signs. This translation, which projects a possibility as a fact in another medium, is what introduces the propositional sign: the fact that results from the projection of thinking. It is a possibility in logico-pictorial space made into a linguistic fact in the space of signs having logical form. In the space of signs itself we can now distinguish between the fact that results from making a possibility perceptible (a propositional sign) and the space of possibilities that is the condition of depiction as it appears in the new medium. The proposition, as opposed to the propositional sign, shows that space of possibilities as it appears through the medium of signs. Always attached to it is a propositional sign, a fact. I assume then that for Wittgenstein a proposition is essentially related to a mode of expression, to a system of signs. This is why he first characterizes the proposition in relation to a thought on the one hand and to the perceptible sign on the other. A proposition occurs at the meeting place of thinking and signs, that is, the proposition and the propositional sign are elaborated conjointly. The issue is always how the form of thought expressed as a proposition can be recovered from the factualization of possibility in signs perceptible by the senses. That is the reason that Wittgenstein introduces the concept of proposition by means of

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the concept of the propositional sign, reversing the order of priority we would expect: I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign.—And a proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world. (3.12)

The proposition is, one might say, the propositional sign as it exhibits the form of the thought in the medium of signs. It depends on the projection of form onto the medium of signs. In order to refine the relation between thought, proposition, and propositional sign, we must elaborate the notion of projection that links them: We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation. The method of projection is to think of the sense of the proposition. (3.11)

It should be emphasized from the start that projection has nothing to do with any activity on the part of a metaphysical subject that is supposed to secure the applicability of the proposition to the world. It is not an explanation of how language hooks onto the world or of the way in which an abstract formal syntax is provided with meaning. A projection involves two spaces and a rule of translation between them. A projection is the general rule of translation between those spaces, independently of the specific figures projected. Emphasizing as I do the importance of form in understanding the logic of depiction, I suggest that what must define a projection is the identity of form between the two spaces. It is the internal relation of depiction that is the invariant that defines a projection. Wittgenstein’s analogy with musical notation can elucidate this point: And if we penetrate to the essence of this pictorial character, we see that it is not impaired by apparent irregularities (such as the use of å and ã in musical notation). For even these irregularities depict what they are intended to express; only they do it in a different way. (4.013)

I assume that what Wittgenstein has in mind is the way a scale is transposed in musical notation. Thus if our invariant, our form, is the C-major scale, its natural expression in the standard musical notation does not require any sharps or flats. If we now project it, starting from an-

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other pitch, say G, we will have to introduce the notation of å in order to keep the same succession of intervals; that is, we introduce apparent irregularities in order to retain the same form, that of a major scale. This apparent irregularity is necessary in order to express the invariant form in the new key. A scale is not a specific musical composition. Wittgenstein does not think of projection in relation to structures but rather as determining the invariance of form. There is a rule of translation, or projection between spaces, which determines how a certain form will remain invariant.1 This rule reconstitutes the invariant of form in the new space or medium. Elaborating the musical example, Wittgenstein writes: A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. They are all constructed according to a common logical pattern. (Like the two youths in the fairy-tale, their two horses, and their lilies. They are all in a certain sense one.) (4.014) There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score again. That is what constitutes the inner similarity between these things which seem to be constructed in such entirely different ways. And that rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into the language of musical notation. It is the rule for translating this language into the language of gramophone records. (4.0141)

What is retained in the translation is the internal relation of depicting, namely the form rather than some similarity of structure. Moreover, Wittgenstein speaks here of a common logical pattern (Bau), suggesting that the commonality has to do with organization and requires no similarity at the level of the individual elements. The identity of pattern required for depicting is the identity of depicting form. 1. This is reminiscent of the mathematical idea of embedding one space in another in order to constitute a model. Indeed, Wittgenstein refers to his use of ‘Abbildung’ in that way: “I have inherited this concept of a picture from two sides: first from a drawn picture (Bild), second from the model (Bild) of a mathematician, which already is a general concept. For a mathematician talks of picturing in cases where a painter would no longer use this expression” (WVC, p. 185).

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Hence the projection determines how the form of a certain space will be expressed in a completely new medium, with new signs or elements of representation. Such a rule is not necessarily simple. Indeed, complex constructions in one medium may be required to reflect what appears completely simple in another. But the apparent dissimilarity should not obscure that what is at stake in projection is the invariance of form, the common pattern required for depiction. The rule of projection reveals how the form of one space can be recovered in another space. Projection is the term used for the relation of translation between two different systems of signs, but also for the transition from the pictorial form to the space of signs. We apply the notion of projection to the relation between the proposition and the propositional sign as follows: the projection translates into the medium of signs the essence of depiction, the pictorial form. To find the rule of projection is to recover through the new medium the form which is essential to depiction. For Wittgenstein, perspicuous expression is the recovery of the symbol, the way in which signification that depends on the form of depiction appears through signs. The symbol is an expression. It is the way in which form expresses itself in the medium of signs. Having thus characterized the notion of projection, we can now attempt to interpret the difficult propositions concerning the relation of expression, projection, thought, proposition, and propositional sign: We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written, etc.) as a projection of a possible situation. The method of projection is to think of the sense of the proposition. (3.11)2 I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign.—And a proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world. (3.12) A proposition includes all that the projection includes, but not what is projected. 2. R. Rhees finds the translation of this proposition problematic: “In other words, the method of projection is what we mean by ‘thinking’ or ‘understanding’ the sense of the proposition. (Messrs. Pears and McGuinness read it differently, as though the remark were to explain the expression ‘method of projection’ here. I do not think that fits with what follows. And I think ‘projection’ which is a logical operation, is written to explain ‘das Denken der SatzSinnes’).” See Discussions of Wittgenstein, p. 39. My reading supports his claim.

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Therefore, though what is projected is not itself included, its possibility is. A proposition, therefore, does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it. (‘The content of a proposition’ means the content of a proposition that has sense.) A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its sense. (3.13)

The separation of the propositional sign from the proposition, as well as their essential relatedness, can be expressed by associating the sense represented with what is perceptible, as well as with taking a direction in space (3.144). Thought is the representation of a particular possibility in logical space. It takes a direction in that space. To become perceivable, such a possibility (a direction) must be projected upon a screen—the medium of signs. The propositional sign is, as it were, the result of the projection on that screen. Thus what was mere possibility becomes fact on the screen. “A propositional sign is a fact” (3.14). The propositional sign makes sensible the activity of representing a possibility. It transforms what is only a direction, a sense, into a sense perceivable by the senses. That fact, so perceived, is connected with the space of possibilities in which thinking operates. This space itself can be seen as projected onto the medium of the linguistic sign. It is not perceivable, but is capable of being shown through the network of signification in ways that will be subsequently elaborated. The proposition is the space of possibilities surrounding the linguistic sign. Thus Wittgenstein says that the proposition is a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world. But the proposition does not include the projected sign, even though the latter belongs to it. The proposition is a background of possibility for that fact, which is the propositional sign. A proposition includes the possibility of what is projected: “A proposition, therefore, does not actually contain its sense, but does contain the possibility of expressing it” (3.13). Strictly speaking, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘the content of a proposition’ actually means ‘the content of a proposition that has sense’. The propositional sign determining the sense constitutes the content, and it is not included in the proposition but belongs to it. “A proposition contains the form, but not the content, of its sense” (3.13). This independence yet relatedness of

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proposition and propositional sign makes it possible to say that the propositional sign does not express completely the conditions of the sense that it presents, thus opening up the dimension of analysis. I will further elaborate an understanding of the proposition in my account of symbols, but at this stage I would like to focus on the propositional sign. The propositional sign is not a list of signs but rather the fact that signs stand in relation to each other. “What constitutes a propositional sign is that in it its elements (the words) stand in a determinate relation to one another. A propositional sign is a fact” (3.14). As we have seen, for something to be a fact depends on the pre-existence of form. The proposition provides the background of form in which the propositional sign can be seen to be a way of combining elements. A proposition is not a blend of words.—(Just as a theme in music is not a blend of notes.) A proposition is articulate. (3.141)

Such an articulation, the way in which we direct ourselves in a space of form, is a sense. “Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot” (3.142). This last claim is, I take it, a direct attack on Frege’s conflation of propositional signs and names, and indeed Frege is mentioned in the next proposition. Although a propositional sign is a fact, this is obscured by the usual form of expression in writing or print. For in a printed proposition, for example, no essential difference is apparent between a propositional sign and a word. (That is what made it possible for Frege to call a proposition a composite name.) (3.143)

Wittgenstein gives a particularly vivid example to clarify the dependence of the propositional sign on a background of form: The essence of a propositional sign is very clearly seen if we imagine one composed of spatial objects (such as tables, chairs, and books) instead of written signs. Then the spatial arrangement of these things will express the sense of the proposition. (3.1431)

The spatial form is not an element of the scene but appears through the arrangement of the elements. Similarly, the propositional sign is an ar-

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rangement, a fact dependent on the space of form opened by the proposition. In a propositional sign aRb, what represents the relation of a to b is not the fact that we have a sign for a, a sign for b, and a sign for the relation. This set of signs represents no sense; rather, what represents the relation of the elements is the fact that the linguistic sign ‘a’ stands in a certain relation to the sign ‘b’: Instead of, ‘The complex sign “aRb” says that a stands to b in the relation R’, we ought to put, ‘That “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.’ (3.1432)

Similarly, we should not say that the sign “fa” says that a is f, but rather, that “a” stands to the right of “f” says that a is f. Now, even as we consider such propositional signs as fa or aRb, which do not contain logical constants, we must keep in mind that what is at stake at the level of the propositional sign is the representation of facts. Thus the sign itself need not make manifest the form of the objects but only the fact of their relation. This is indeed the basis of the capacity of representing any situation which we attribute to language. The facts that are the propositional signs of our notation have the form of reality and thus can represent any logical structures, that is, structures of the logical form. Wittgenstein says in his Notebooks: It can be said that, while we are not certain of being able to turn all situations into pictures on paper, still we are certain that we can portray all logical properties of situations in a two-dimensional script.3

For such an account to work, the notation must allow us to distinguish in the propositional sign as many parts as there are in the fact. This is its mathematical multiplicity. But this does not mean that the notation in any way reflects the form of the elements or objects. There is, once more, a sharp division between what is expressed by propositions—facts—and what can be named—objects.4 3. NB, p. 7. 4. For Frege sense was primarily the mode of presentation of a meaning. Sense was originally introduced for names. Every name had a sense. The sense provided, as it were, a description of what the thing is, it identified it in a certain way. Propositions, according to Frege, are to be thought of as names themselves, since the logical functions are taken to be real functions. It follows that the sense of a proposition is a derivative notion from the sense of a name. It is what allows us to find the meaning of the proposition, namely, its truth value. Wittgenstein views

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It is because a propositional sign is a fact that it can express a sense. But the reverse implication is that only facts can be expressed in propositions. “Situations can be described but not given names. (Names are like points; propositions like arrows—they have sense.)” (3.144).5 This raises the question of what it means to recognize form in language. It is in the dimension of the symbol that form will appear. this as completely misguided. He insists on the distinction between signs that express a sense and signs that name. Objects are named; this means that a sign is correlated with them. We do not need to provide the sign with instructions that would help it find its meaning. The names are representatives of objects. But it is only because this correlation exists that we can now produce sense. As Wittgenstein says later on: “The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives” (4.0312). Thus the distinction between sense and meaning is completely shifted in Wittgenstein’s account. This will have dramatic consequences when we think of what it means to recover the object in language, through our making of sense. The object must be shown, but such showing is to be kept distinct from the idea of a mode of presentation as it is elaborated in Frege’s conception of sense, for what is shown is not content. 5. This image of the arrow is indeed very suggestive if we think of it in the context of the account of picturing. Logical signs, one can say, mark the way in which we take elements in a space of form. We should think of logical signs as directions for forming a content. But this means precisely that a logical sign does not stand for an object, which should give us a further indication of the meaning of Wittgenstein’s claim that logical constants are not representatives of objects.

Signs of Sense

The Symbolic Order

5

The Symbolic Order

The topic of symbolism constitutes one of the most complex issues in the Tractatus. It is related to the nature of analysis, the nature of generality, the nature of formal concepts and of logical laws, as well as the distinction between saying and showing. My own mode of exposition of this issue will attempt to show the connections between these apparently different sets of issues and will necessitate abandoning the attempt to follow Wittgenstein’s numbered propositions more or less in sequence. Wittgenstein’s account of signs and signification leads one to reflect on the distinction between the essential and the accidental in language. As he stresses, the accidental features of language derive from the way we produce propositional signs: A proposition possesses essential and accidental features. Accidental features are those that result from the particular way in which the propositional sign is produced. Essential features are those without which the proposition could not express its sense. (3.34)

It is therefore necessary to draw a distinction between the sign and its arbitrary features on the one hand, and a symbol, what is essential to the expression of the sense of the proposition, on the other. An elaboration of the nature of the symbol cuts across the various contexts we have kept separate: the proposition, the logical constants and quantification, as well as names in relation to their meaning. Thus an investigation into the nature of the propositional symbol will elucidate the general form of the proposition (what is common to all sign languages); an investigation 71

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into the nature of the symbols of logic (the logical constants and the quantifiers) will yield a deeper understanding of the emptiness of logic; and an investigation into the signification of names will shed light on the nature of analysis and the possibility of recognizing objects through language. I will at first ignore the differences between these contexts and consider symbolism in general. Wittgenstein initially introduces the distinction between the sign and the symbol by considering the relation of the propositional sign to the proposition. These considerations are later extended to include parts of the proposition that are essential to expressing the sense. Hence the account of the proposition takes precedence over the account of the components of the proposition. Wittgenstein indeed begins his discussion of symbols in general (of which the proposition is a special case) by stating the above priority: “Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning” (3.3). The priority he gives to the context of the proposition can be interpreted in different ways.1 In determining meaning we go beyond the way in which names are representatives of objects. Representativeness, as I have elaborated it in the account of picturing, involves an arbitrary correlation of name and object. Wittgenstein’s concern is how to go beyond this arbitrariness in language, how to discover what is essential to signification, or how to reveal through the use of signs in propositions the form that allows signification. The form determines the symbol to which the sign belongs. Saying that a name, viewed as a symbol, has a form does not mean that the name itself is complex. The form is internal to the name. It 1. This proposition brings to mind Frege’s context principle: “Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition” (Foundations of Arithmetic, p. x). It is important, however, to distinguish Wittgenstein’s understanding from Frege’s. For Frege the context principle does not instruct us how to find the specific meaning of a sign but rather directs us to its form or logical category. But determining the logical category of a sign depends on grasping the kind of inferences that could be performed with propositions containing the sign. Thus the context principle refers not to a single proposition but to the network of logical implications between different propositions. This is quite foreign to Wittgenstein’s picture, at least when it comes to specifying the mode of signification of the name of an object, since form can be grasped in elementary propositions (that is, just as the form of objects appears in states of affairs), so the form of names will show up in the elementary proposition. The elementary proposition is the expression whose constituents perspicuously contain their form within themselves. Since elementary propositions do not stand in any inferential relations, the context principle cannot have the same sense for Wittgenstein as it does for Frege.

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makes the name what it is and is revealed through its appearance in propositions. Wittgenstein writes: I call any part of a proposition that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol). (A proposition is itself an expression.) Everything essential to their sense that propositions can have in common with one another is an expression. An expression is the mark of a form and a content. (3.31)

As we consider the representation of facts, the construction of content, the names appear as mere representatives, as points or nodes of a structure. To reveal the form of the object is to consider the name in the context of a proposition, and the proposition within a larger class of related propositions. It is only thus that the name can be grasped as an expression—something that is the mark of both a form and of a content. In order to bring out the formal properties of a sign, the symbol to which the sign belongs, we have to consider the common feature of the various propositional contexts of which it is a constituent, that is, to identify the internal connection between various propositions that contain the expression. I call this an internal or formal relation insofar as it determines the very identity of the expression in question: An expression presupposes the forms of all the propositions in which it can occur. It is the common characteristic mark of a class of propositions. (3.311)

Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘presuppose’ implies that one cannot characterize what a symbol is without having been given all the possible contexts in which it could occur. A crucial point here is the analogy between Wittgenstein’s elaboration of the notion of an expression and his understanding of objects through their form.2 His insistence that an expression cannot be determined apart from its possible combinations in propositions means that, in a specific proposition, the expression contributes to a content only by virtue of having its form determined by a whole class of propositions. To 2. Compare 2.025, “[Substance] is form and content,” and 3.31, “An expression is the mark of a form and a content.” One can now understand better Wittgenstein’s parenthetical remark in his account of objects: “(It is impossible for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves, and in propositions.).”

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take a simple example: a given proposition expresses a specific sense, but it can do so only by its symbol’s being a symbol for propositions; that is, being determined by a form that involves a whole space of possibilities out of which this particular sense is asserted. This is the logical space that comes with the propositional symbol. A proposition can determine only one place in logical space: nevertheless the whole of logical space must already be given by it. (3.42)

This suggests that understanding what a symbol or an expression is constitutes the first step in discovering how form appears in language, and in particular how the form of objects appears. Just as objects reveal their form by exhibiting their possibilities of combination with other objects, so Wittgenstein suggests that in order to isolate an expression one has to see the propositional contexts in which it could occur. Therefore it is crucial to understand Wittgenstein’s idea of what precisely propositions can have “in common.” The form of a sign is shown by means of a whole class of propositions—by giving a characterization that captures that whole class. What stands for that class is a variable whose range covers the kinds of propositions in which that expression can occur meaningfully: [An expression] is therefore presented by means of the general form of the propositions that it characterizes. In fact, in this form the expression will be constant and everything else variable. (3.312) Thus an expression is presented by means of a variable whose values are the propositions that contain the expression. (In the limiting case the variable becomes a constant, the expression becomes a proposition.) I call such a variable a ‘propositional variable.’ (3.313)

It is easy to misinterpret Wittgenstein’s picture by assimilating it to what philosophers such as Frege, Russell, or Carnap meant by logical form. For example, proposition 3.315 may tempt us to conclude that the procedure for discovering logical form is akin to what we would call schematization: If we turn a constituent of a proposition into a variable, there is a class of propositions all of which are values of the resulting variable

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proposition. In general, this class too will be dependent on the meaning that our arbitrary conventions have given to parts of the original proposition. But if all the signs in it that have arbitrarily determined meanings are turned into variables, we shall still get a class of that kind. This one, however, is not dependent on any convention, but solely on the nature of the proposition. It corresponds to a logical form—a logical prototype [protopicture, Urbild].3 (3.315)

However, imposing the idea of schematization on Wittgenstein’s account of the symbol seems to me misleading on several counts: schematization provides us with a certain structure, but such a structure is not a form; a space of possibilities is different from a specific mode of combination, even generalized; a fully generalized proposition is not a form but a determinate statement about the world.4 The form reveals the combinatorial possibilities of an expression. To take a simple example: in order to characterize the form of a propositional symbol p, we must characterize all the propositions in which it can occur—thus, p, pvq, p.q, qvp, and so on. This class of propositions cannot be viewed as having a common structure. The variable that determines such a class is something that Wittgenstein will elaborate in terms of a procedure of construction (see 5.2552). Hence his notion of logical form as the presentation of the kinds of contexts in which an expression can sensically appear is very different from that of Frege or Russell. For logical form is most clearly presented by a class of propositions containing very different kinds of structures. It is also tempting to impose on Wittgenstein’s account of the symbol the idea of an uninterpreted syntactical system for which we need to provide meanings; to make a contrast between syntax and semantics.5 Indeed, the procedure that Wittgenstein describes might seem to do

3. The translation of Urbild as ‘prototype’ obscures the connection between Bild and Urbild, and hence the relation between the account of the variable and quantification, and the account of picturing. See below, p. 86. 4. Wittgenstein makes clear in 5.526–5.5261 that the generalized proposition is as contentful as any other proposition: “We can describe the world completely by means of fully generalized propositions . . . A fully generalized proposition, like every other proposition, is composite.” 5. This contrast would then force on us the assumption of a metaphysical subject, which would be responsible for providing meaning to the empty formalism.

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away with all the components of meaning, leaving only the syntactical possibilities of the signs. For instance, he writes: “In logical syntax the meaning of a sign should never play a role. It must be possible to establish logical syntax without mentioning the meaning of a sign: only the description of expressions may be presupposed” (3.33).6 But I read this to mean precisely that everything that contributes to signification must be grasped through the interrelation of propositions, by means of the class that determines the expression. In other words, there is no need for a further step in which meaning is specified, that is, there is no need to interpret a formal syntax. Wittgenstein equates the symbol with the way in which the sign signifies or has meaning. Once a symbol has been determined, the issue of providing a meaning has also been solved.7 Let us now return to proposition 3.315 and ask once more about the arbitrariness of meaning that Wittgenstein wants to get away from. This arbitrariness can be thought of in terms of the notion of representativeness, which I elaborated in the account of picturing. The correlation that is formed between a sign and the world in naming things is indeed arbitrary. This connection does not show what precisely allows the sign to signify, that is, the identity of form that enables depicting. In order to bring out that level of form, we must get away from the arbitrariness of the relation of representativeness and ask about the combinatorial properties of the sign. This does not mean moving from the world to a merely 6. There are also good textual grounds on which to refrain from imposing on the text the contrast between syntax and semantics, as it is usually understood. For instance, Wittgenstein writes: “In order to recognize a symbol by its sign we must observe how it is used with a sense” (3.326). “A sign does not determine a logical form unless it is taken together with its logicosyntactical employment” (3.327); “If a sign is useless, it is meaningless. That is the point of Occam’s maxim. (If everything behaves as if a sign had meaning, then it does have a meaning.)” (3.328). 7. This claim should be qualified, for the relation of representativeness has to be determined, but this relation is a condition of the very formation of the symbol. Indeed, the problems of meaninglessness do not derive from the properties of the symbol but from the lack of this initial relation: “Frege says that any legitimately constructed proposition must have a sense. And I say that any possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and, if it has no sense, that can only be because we have failed to give a meaning to some of its constituents. (Even if we think that we have done so.) Thus the reason why ‘Socrates is identical’ says nothing is that we have not given any adjectival meaning to the word ‘identical’. For when it appears as a sign for identity, it symbolizes in an entirely different way—the signifying relation is a different one—therefore the symbols also are entirely different in the two cases: the two symbols have only the sign in common, and that is an accident” (5.4733).

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formal symbolic system, for the form of depiction is identical in the picture and in the world. Thus by doing away with the arbitrariness of meaning we can now perceive the fundamental identity between language and reality. Logical syntax, as Wittgenstein understands it, does not merely deal with schemata of signs; it rather shows the way in which the sign signifies. As with 3.315, a misreading of 3.316–3.317 may suggest that Wittgenstein elaborates an arbitrary or conventional syntax which gives us the power to stipulate what the sign signifies: What values a propositional variable may take is something that is stipulated. The stipulation of values is the variable. (3.316) To stipulate values for a propositional variable is to give the proposition whose common characteristic the variable is. The stipulation is a description of those propositions. The stipulation will therefore be concerned only with symbols, not with their meaning. And the only thing essential to the stipulation is that it is merely a description of symbols and states nothing about what is signified. How the description of the proposition is produced is not essential. (3.317)

The form of a symbol is brought out by the inner relation of a whole class of propositions. Wittgenstein insists that the characterization of the variable is produced through a description of that class of propositions. This does not mean that the class over which the variable ranges is somehow arbitrarily stipulated. The stipulation makes the variable into a representative of that class, which itself is nonarbitrary: “What the values of the variable are is something that is stipulated. The stipulation is a description of the propositions that have the variable as their representative” (5.501). Here the translation by Pears and McGuinness of the term Festsetzung as “stipulation,” which suggests a certain arbitrariness, might be the source of the misunderstanding. Ogden uses “determination,” which correctly expresses the notion of characterizing the range of the variable as something that corresponds to a given, nonarbitrary class. Indeed, that class is the result of doing away with the arbitrary elements. I wish to stress the point that Wittgenstein characterizes our grasp of

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the symbol as something achieved by paying attention to expressions and not by any direct reference to meaning. Indeed, there is no such thing as direct access to meanings. We arrive at meaning by considering the combinatorial possibilities of expressions, by bringing out the symbol or the form. Hence his claim: “Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning” (3.3). The symbol should not be reified and equated with a separable sign in the notation. A symbol is only brought out by the interconnection of propositions. As a mark of form, it is the internal relation between such propositions. We can use a variable to range over all such propositions and thus give a sign of the notation that will stand for the symbol, but this does not mean that the symbol has been turned into something wholly separable and self-standing. This may be why the symbol is not perceivable as the sign is: not because the symbol is somehow hidden beneath the surface of language or belongs to an inner mental realm, but rather because it does not belong to the factual. It is shown through the internal relations of propositions and this showing of form is not a perceiving. This point can be elucidated by considering a further complication in Wittgenstein’s account of the symbol. We tend to draw the distinction between the accidental and the essential in language in terms of the arbitrariness of the sign, but Wittgenstein speaks of arbitrariness at the symbolic level as well. If a symbol is what is essential to the expression of sense, then in a particular notation that contribution can be expressed in different ways, with different symbolic constructions: A proposition possesses essential and accidental features. Accidental features are those that result from the particular way in which the propositional sign is produced. Essential features are those without which the proposition could not express its sense. (3.34) So what is essential in a proposition is what all propositions that can express the same sense have in common. And similarly, in general, what is essential in a symbol is what all symbols that can serve the same purpose have in common. (3.341) What signifies in a symbol is what is common to all the symbols that the rules of logical syntax allow us to substitute for it. (3.344)

Even our symbols are the result of a certain arbitrariness in our choice of means of representation. Take the example of negation: before reading

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Wittgenstein’s account we might have been tempted to say that “⬃” expresses the symbol of negation; we grasp the symbol when we see that we can negate the proposition “p” by placing a “⬃” in front of it. But Wittgenstein shows us that we have not grasped a form in that way. The essence of the symbol for which “⬃p” stands can be grasped only by considering what is common to the following signs of the notation expressing the negation of p: “⬃p”, “⬃⬃⬃p”, “⬃⬃⬃⬃⬃p”, “⬃p.⬃p,” “⬃pv⬃p,” and so on. The symbol is what is common to all those modes of representing negation. It is a rule that characterizes the construction of all the signs that could negate “p”: But in ‘⬃p’ it is not ‘⬃’ that negates; it is rather what is common to all signs of this notation that negate p. That is to say the common rule that governs the construction of ‘⬃p’, ‘⬃⬃⬃p’, ‘⬃pv⬃p’, ‘⬃p.⬃p’, etc. etc. (ad inf.) And this common factor mirrors negation. (5.512)

This shows that grasping the symbol that “⬃p” stands for involves grasping the whole of the logical space of “p.” In order to know the symbol of negation, I must know that “⬃p” and “⬃⬃⬃p” signify the same thing. Moreover I must know that “⬃p” and “⬃p.⬃p” signify the same thing. Thus when I know the essence of the symbol, I know various things which we would normally say follow from ⬃p (or are logically equivalent with it). Wittgenstein makes a similar point concerning conjunction and disjunction: We might say that what is common to all symbols that affirm both p and q is the proposition ‘p.q’; and that what is common to all symbols that affirm either p or q is the propositions ‘pvq’. (5.513)

These last examples show very clearly that determining the symbol does not merely give the syntactically possible combinations of signs but what we would call logical relations of content. To elaborate the symbol means to bring out the internal properties that determine what an expression is. We should expect then a close connection between such an account and Wittgenstein’s elaboration of how internal relations and properties appear in language, his account of formal concepts, which begins in 4.122 with an apparent reversion to a discussion of ontology:

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In a certain sense we can talk about formal properties of objects and states of affairs, or in the case of facts, about structural properties: and in the same sense about formal relations and structural relations.

In contrast to the straightforward ontological tone of the opening of the book, however, Wittgenstein here elaborates the question of how we can talk about those very ontological notions, that is, how they appear in language. As we recall, the important point concerning these internal properties, which was already adumbrated in the opening of the book, is that propositions cannot say that things have these properties, which is why we can talk about those properties only in a certain sense. We cannot attribute those properties to anything; there can be no propositions that describe such attributions. Nor can there be propositions distinguishing one property from another by means of a characteristic mark: It would be just as nonsensical to assert that a proposition had a formal property as to deny it. (4.124) It is impossible to distinguish forms from one another by saying that one has this property and another that property: for this presupposes that it makes sense to ascribe either property to either form. (4.1241)

Wittgenstein calls concepts purporting to signify such internal properties ‘formal concepts’ and distinguishes them from concepts proper. The essence of Wittgenstein’s account of the symbol is that we are given the possibilities of combination, the combinatorial space, when we are given the symbol. This applies to the proposition as a whole as well as to the various component parts. Wittgenstein warns against the confusion that may result from thinking that the possibilities of combination that are internal to the symbol are something that we add to it—that stand in an external relation to the symbol rather than in an internal one. The result of such a confusion, the treatment of a formal concept as a real property, is the generation of nonsensical propositions purporting to use that concept: So one cannot say, for example, ‘There are objects’, as one might say, ‘There are books’. And it is just as impossible to say, ‘There are 100 objects’, or, ‘There are ℵo objects.’ And it is nonsensical to speak of the total number of objects.

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The same applies to the words ‘complex’, ‘fact’, ‘function’, ‘number’, etc. (4.1272)

The various signs such as ‘object’, fact’, ‘complex’ are used in philosophers’ propositions as real concepts (indeed Wittgenstein himself uses all those concepts in the opening of the Tractatus). But he insists that at the symbolic level there are no component terms that such signs belong to—no things that they signify. How do we use language to talk about such formal properties? We can do it insofar as we can bring out how in language the internal relations between propositions show those formal and structural properties: The existence of an internal property of a possible situation is not expressed by means of a proposition: rather, it expresses itself in the proposition representing the situation, by means of an internal property of that proposition. (4.124) The existence of an internal relation between possible situations expresses itself in language by means of an internal relation between the propositions representing them. (4.125)

The formal concept is, properly speaking, the mark of an internal relation between propositions belonging to the same space. It is thus represented in language by means of a whole class of interrelated propositions. Some such classes can be arranged in what Wittgenstein calls a formal series. The ordering reveals the form common to the propositions in that class. Wittgenstein gives the example of the successor in 4.1273: If we want to express the conceptual notation the general proposition ‘b is the successor of a’, then we require an expression for the general term of the series of forms aRb, (∃x)aRx.xRb, (∃x,y)aRx.xRy.yRb.

Hence what the propositions of a formal series have in common is not one of their component parts but what Wittgenstein calls a feature of the symbols: So the sign for the characteristic mark of a formal concept is a distinctive feature of all symbols whose meanings fall under the concept. (4.126)

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Such a feature is brought out by means of the use of a propositional variable whose values belong to the class of propositions that have that feature in common.8 Just as we considered what happens to formal concepts when they are used as though they were real concepts, so we can consider ways in which structural properties are treated as though they were real ones. Structural properties have to do with the logical connections between propositions. Thus to treat structural properties as real properties results in what we would call logical propositions (tautologies and contradictions). That a certain proposition follows from another or contradicts it is not a fact about such propositions but an internal relation between them. For instance, it is part of the symbol p.q that p follows from it; or to return to an example we have considered before, an essential feature of the symbol ⬃p is that propositions such as ⬃⬃⬃p follow from it. As Wittgenstein puts it: “One could say that negation must be related to the logical place determined by the negated proposition.” That ⬃p contradicts p is not external to the nature of p. To think of logical laws as contentful propositions would purport to turn that internal relation into a statable fact and would reveal a fundamental misunderstanding as to how formal relations are shown: The fact that the propositions of logic are tautologies shows the formal—logical—properties of language and the world. The fact that a tautology is yielded by this particular way of connecting its constituents characterizes the logic of its constituents. If propositions are to yield a tautology when they are connected in a certain way, they must have certain structural properties. So their yielding a tautology when combined in this way shows that they possess these structural properties. (6.12) 8. It is no coincidence that Wittgenstein develops his understanding of the variable in both the account of symbolism and that of formal concepts. In the account of symbolism the variable is necessary to express the whole combinatorial space that belongs to the symbol, which is precisely the reason why it can be seen as the proper representation of what Wittgenstein calls a formal concept: “Every variable is the sign for a formal concept” (4.1271). It would seem that not every variable or formal concept can be represented by means of a formal series. Indeed, in 5.501 Wittgenstein characterizes three ways of fixing a variable by describing the propositions it stands for, the last of which is the giving of a formal series. (I thank Michael Knemer for very helpful criticisms and comments regarding earlier attempts to interpret Wittgenstein’s idea of a formal concept and of generality.)

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Wittgenstein’s treatment of logical laws stands in important contrast to his treatment of formal concepts, which relates to the distinction he draws between the senseless and the nonsensical. Wittgenstein speaks of tautologies and contradictions as being senseless. They are valid combinations of signs that do not represent anything or that produce no sense. In opposition to them, the attempt to state the internal properties of an object is an attempt to turn internal relations into purported facts. It is, in that way, strictly speaking nonsensical. Unlike tautologies and contradictions, which will still appear in a perspicuous notation, such purported statements concerning internal properties will disappear. This of course does not mean that internal relations cannot be shown in a proper notation.9 This insight into the symbolic order underlies much of Wittgenstein’s criticism of various positions concerning the nature and possibilities of logic. It not only serves to show the emptiness of logical laws, but also constitutes the basis of his argument against the logicist reduction of arithmetic to logic. Wittgenstein’s account of the successor as a formal concept undermines the notion that lies at the very heart of such a reduction: If we want to express in conceptual notation the general proposition, ‘b is a successor of a’, then we require an expression for the general term of the series of forms aRb, (∃x):aRx.xRb, (∃x,y):aRx.xRy.yRb, .... In order to express the general term of a series of forms, we must use a variable, because the concept ‘term of that series of forms’ is a formal concept. (This is what Frege and Russell overlooked: consequently the way in which they want to express general propositions like the one above is incorrect; it contains a vicious circle.) (4.1273)

A correct understanding of symbolism also shows the problematic nature of Russell’s theory of types. Wittgenstein’s account of the symbol demonstrates that a function must contain within itself a characteriza9. One could also say that a structural property is shown by tautologies and contradictions, whereas a formal property can only be shown by a class of propositions that share that internal property.

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tion of its argument. For it to be a symbol at all, it must be defined through the range of arguments it can take. Thus it makes no sense to think that, after determining a symbol, there remains a further task of deciding which arguments it is allowed and which it is not allowed to take: No proposition can make a statement about itself, because a propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the whole of the ‘theory of types’). (3.332) The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and it cannot contain itself. For let us suppose that the function F(fx) could be its own argument: in that case there would be a proposition ‘F(F(fx)),’ in which the outer function F and the inner function F must have different meanings, since the inner one has the form ␾(fx) and the outer has the form ␺(␾(fx). Only the letter ‘F’ is common to the two functions, but the letter in itself signifies nothing . . . (3.333)

This argument emphasizes the point that a symbol is defined through its possibilities of combination. Wittgenstein does not need to introduce a special rule for distinguishing the inner and the outer Fs. It is part of what they are: they are defined in part by the kind of arguments they take. One could say that the syntax takes care of itself, for it is a logical impossibility to construct an expression F(F(fx)) where the two Fs are the same symbol. We can of course have such a string of signs, but this identity of sign says nothing about the symbol.10 We must never confuse the level of signs and the level of symbols. It makes sense to speak of a confusion at the level of signs, but there is no such thing as a mistake in the order of the symbol. There can therefore be no rules for the proper combination of symbols, for symbols are internally related to possibilities of combination. Finally, let us consider the consequences of this account of the symbol for the nature of logical constants, starting with an elaboration of Wittgenstein’s insight concerning the theory of types. If he were to take logi10. The argument Wittgenstein deploys against Russell’s theory of types could also be used against Frege’s elaboration of the distinction between concept and object. In particular, what is problematic is Frege’s identification of the complete proposition with an object, that is, a truth value, which precisely allows a construction such as F(F(fx)) where the first application of F to some object produces once more the type of argument that F itself could take.

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cal constants to be real functions (as Frege did), he would be committed by the logic of his argument to say that in ⬃⬃p negation cannot be the same function in both occurrences. Wittgenstein sees that argument as pointing to the difference between logical constants and real functions. The fact that logical symbols such as negation can be iterated shows that logical constants are not real functions but what he calls operations. (Operations and functions must not be confused with each other.) (5.25) A function cannot be its own argument, whereas an operation can take one of its own results as its base. (5.251)

Drawing this distinction between function and operation is tantamount to expressing the peculiar status of logical constants. It means that such constants are not ultimate constituents of the content: The occurrence of an operation does not characterize the sense of a proposition. Indeed no statement is made by an operation, but only by its result, and this depends on the bases of the operation. (5.25) Truth-functions are not material functions. For example, an affirmation can be produced by double negation: in such a case does it follow that in some sense negation is contained in affirmation? Does ‘⬃⬃p’ negate ⬃p, or does it affirm p—or both? The proposition ‘⬃⬃p’ is not about negation, as if negation were an object: on the other hand, the possibility of negation is already written into affirmation. And if there were an object called ‘⬃’, it would follow that ‘⬃⬃p’ said something different from what ‘p’ said, just because the one proposition would then be about ⬃ and the other would not. (5.44)

The analogy between form and a space might help us understand this distinction. If we think of form as a space, then what is essential in a specific proposition is revealed through its connection with every other possible structure in that space. That is, a certain possibility of movement or transition within that space from one structure to another is crucial. This means that all these structures must share a procedure for transition from one to the other: this is the operation which can take us from one structure to another.

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The structures of propositions stand in internal relations to one another. (5.2) In order to give prominence to these internal relations we can adopt the following mode of expression: we can represent a proposition as the result of an operation that produces it out of other propositions (which are the bases of the operation). (5.21) An operation is the expression of a relation between the structures of its result and of its bases. (5.22) The operation is what has to be done to the one proposition in order to make the other out of it. (5.23) And that will, of course, depend on their formal properties, on the internal similarity of their forms. (5.231)

Insofar as form is constituted through the internal relations of propositions, we can speak of cases in which that internal relation is shown by means of an operation that takes one proposition as a basis and another of that class as its result. The concept of the operation is then intimately connected to the notion of a formal concept: We can determine the general term of a series of forms by giving its first term and the general form of the operation that produces the next term out of the proposition that precedes it. (4.1273)

It is crucial to realize that the occurrence of an operation has no correlate at the level of meaning. The operation is not part of what we speak about in the proposition, but is operative in making the transition in a space of internal relations. In itself the occurrence of an operation means nothing, for it can vanish. Sometimes a repeated application can cancel previous applications of the operation; this, for instance, is what happens in the case of the equivalence of ‘p’ and ‘⬃⬃p’. The fact that the operation can be canceled shows most clearly that it is not a component expression of the sense. Insofar as these operations do not in themselves transform the space of signification, they can be repeated or applied repeatedly. At this point we are finally in a position to fill in a lacuna in my previous account of logical constants, concerning Wittgenstein’s understanding of the quantifier. What I emphasized in Wittgenstein’s conception of a picture is the pre-existence of a background of form which conditions

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the possibility of structures. Classes of structures will bring out features of that background. Related to every picture, we can conceive of protopictures which make no determinate statement but show features of the background of form. Such protopictures can be presented by means of classes of propositions related by an internal relation. Wittgenstein’s account of the quantifiers appeals to such protopictures: I dissociate the concept all from truth-functions. Frege and Russell introduced generality in association with logical product or logical sum. This makes it difficult to understand the propositions ‘(∃x).fx’ and ‘(x)fx’, in which both ideas are embedded. (5.521) What is peculiar to the generality sign is first, that it indicates a logical prototype [protopicture], and secondly, that it gives prominence to constants. (5.522) The generality-sign occurs as an argument. (5.523)

The generality sign indicates the presence of a logical protopicture, that is, a class of structures that are related by an internal relation. Indeed, the variable which is involved in the generality sign is always the mark of a formal concept. That formal concept is precisely a protopicture, that is, a formal feature shared by a class of propositions. These structures are, first of all, constructed by means of the scaffolding provided by logical constants. In that sense we can say that the generality sign gives prominence to constants. The generality sign is an argument in the sense that it “completes” the indeterminacy of the protopicture so as to form a definite sense. It allows a statement concerning the structures that present the formal concept. This makes it clear that the quantifier, while not an operation on pictures, can be seen as an operation on protopictures that produces a determinate sense.

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The Grammar of Analysis

While we have gained some insight into the nature of logical signs and the existence of formal and structural relations, we still need to determine the symbolic properties of names, that is, how to analyze language into elementary propositions. Wittgenstein’s account of symbolism enables us to address the question of analysis. Indeed, Wittgenstein gives an initial statement of the relation of symbolism to the question of analysis immediately after he introduces the notion of the symbol: A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol. (3.32) So one and the same sign (written or spoken, etc.) can be common to two different symbols—in which case they will signify in different ways. (3.321) Our use of the same sign to signify two different objects can never indicate a common characteristic of the two, if we use it with two different modes of signification. For the sign, of course, is arbitrary. So we could choose two different signs instead, and then what would be left in common on the signifying side? (3.322)

Wittgenstein gives several examples of this phenomenon: the use of the sign “is” to signify both the copula and identity, or the proposition “Green is green,” where the first word is the proper name of a person and the last an adjective. Such examples are well known, yet their significance remains to be interpreted. They might give the impression that everything about everyday language is problematic and confusing. In88

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deed, when Wittgenstein addresses the issue of specifying the correct logical perspective, or sign-language (as in the present context), ordinary language appears deficient: In everyday language it very frequently happens that the same word has different modes of signification—and so belongs to different symbols—or that two words that have different modes of signification are employed in propositions in what is superficially the same way. (3.323) In this way the most fundamental confusions are easily produced (the whole of philosophy is full of them). (3.324) In order to avoid such errors we must make use of a sign-language that excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of signification: that is to say, a sign-language that is governed by logical grammar—by logical syntax. (3.325)

Such statements, read in isolation, might suggest that Wittgenstein is involved in the same project as Frege and Russell after all—that of replacing ordinary language with a logically perfect one. For Wittgenstein, however, the problematic nature of everyday language pertains to the level of signs and not to that of symbols. This is a crucial point, since it directs analysis to make perspicuous the form of that very sense which we make in ordinary language, rather than to replace ordinary language with an ideal or perfect language.1 Wittgenstein is concerned with replacing signs rather than with constructing a symbolism. He does not 1. Frege’s conceptual notation is primarily concerned with the language of science. In his view ordinary language has an extremely problematic status: “If it is one of the tasks of philosophy to break the domination of the word over the human spirit by laying the misconceptions that through the use of language often almost unavoidably arise concerning the relation between concepts and by freeing thought from that with which only the means of expression of ordinary language, constituted as they are, saddle it, then my ideography, further developed for these purposes, can become a useful tool for the philosopher.” (In J. van Heijenoort, Frege and Gödel, p. 7.) In Frege’s view a conceptual notation is necessary for a stable scientific enterprise. Science would be threatened with innumerable confusions unless a precise syntax for its language were laid down once and for all. Everyday language is full of symbolical confusions. Frege sometimes expresses himself in such a way as to imply that language requires our help to function properly. One might say that the whole project of the Foundations of Arithmetic is motivated by the possibility of mathematical catastrophe. It is this idea of a conceptual notation and its attendant idea of logic as the standard and foundation of meaningfulness that Wittgenstein attacks.

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assume that ordinary language has no clear symbolic structure, but aims precisely at making the symbolic form of ordinary language perspicuous. There are no logical problems in ordinary language; there are only problems arising from the ambiguity of signs, not from the signs’ modes of signification. In every case that a sign stands for two different modes of signification, thus for two different meanings, the symbolic form corresponding to each can be revealed if we consider the sign together with its use. It would be possible then to dispel the ambiguity of the sign, which might in certain cases ease our recognition, but we have not thereby corrected anything concerning the logic of that sign. The very concept of logic implies that it takes care of itself. This means that in a certain sense there cannot be a mistake at the level of symbols. Misinterpretations are caused by our use of similar signs for different symbols. Mistakes that are related to how we use the signs (for instance missing an inference) certainly exist, but these cannot be illogical symbolic formation. The very concept of a malfunctioning symbol is problematic, since it involves a grammatical confusion concerning the nature of logic: it makes us responsible for the working of logic in language. Whereas a mistaken theory of physics would still be a theory of physics, a mistaken logical theory is simply inconceivable. But this just means that logic is not a theoretical domain. The notion that we need to help language out, logically speaking—that without our logical corrections and intervention language would be threatened by illogical constructs—is fundamentally erroneous. Wittgenstein points out that such a conception of philosophical work is incoherent. Logic must look after itself. If a sign is possible, then it is also capable of signifying. Whatever is possible in logic is also permitted . . . In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic. (5.473)

It is not a question of the possibility of logical trouble in language but merely an issue of our failure to make an arbitrary determination of the signs we use, that is, of the relation of representativeness. It has nothing to do with the functioning of language in itself.2 2. Cora Diamond makes these points forcefully in considering Wittgenstein’s view of nonsense. I have taken a somewhat different path, thinking of the very concept of logical work, to arrive at the same place. See her “On What Nonsense Might Be,” “Frege and Nonsense,” and “Throwing Away the Ladder” in C. Diamond, The Realistic Spirit.

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Hence there seems to be a certain duality in Wittgenstein’s attitude to everyday language. While he recognizes ambiguities at the level of signs, his concept of symbolism shows ordinary language to be in perfect logical order. This point can be elucidated by considering more broadly his view of the task of the Tractatus and of the possibilities of work in logic and philosophy. Wittgenstein makes three fundamental statements concerning his insight, method, and aim, which at first sight seem to be unrelated: The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives. My fundamental idea is that ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts. (4.0312) Our fundamental principle is that whenever a question can be decided by logic at all it must be possible to decide it without more ado. (And if we get into a position where we have to look at the world for an answer to such a problem, that shows that we are on a completely wrong track.) (5.551) In fact, all the proposition of our everyday language just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety. (Our problems are not abstract, but the most concrete that there are.) (5.5563)

Thinking about these three statements together provides an insight that could guide our reading of the Tractatus as a whole. In the first statement Wittgenstein speaks of a fundamental idea or thought (Grundgedanke); in the second, of a fundamental principle; and in the third, of the utterly simple truth in its entirety. The fundamental idea or thought, whose consequences one has to elaborate, is the starting point of our inquiry. The simple truth is, as it were, the endpoint of such an enterprise of thinking, something that we come to recognize by following the path of thinking. It is what needs expressing and for whose sake we have to develop the fundamental idea. The fundamental principle allows us to advance along that path and keeps us on track. The fundamental idea determines the principle of inquiry, the method of advance toward showing the truth in its entirety. The simple truth is not a new thought or a complicated idea, but an acknowledgment or recognition that, contrary to what seems to be the case, ordinary language is

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in fact perfectly in order as it is. This recognition seems to imply some as yet undetermined concreteness and urgency. It opens an ethical dimension or opens us to the ethical. It reveals that the problems of the Tractatus are not abstract but rather the most concrete that there are. In order to reach the opening of such a dimension, it is first necessary to approach this simple truth of the Tractatus in the right way, by linking it to the other fundamental propositions. My earlier discussion of picturing and of symbolism addressed some aspects of the claim that logical constants are not representatives of objects. I now want to elaborate this insight from a different angle. Wittgenstein’s “fundamental idea” is based on the duality of signs that stand for objects and logical constants that are not representatives; on the notion that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts. We now perceive that this separation of domains derives from Wittgenstein’s understanding of the ontological status of the logical constants. Thus if we have signs that are representatives of objects, the question is how the form of these objects is manifested in language. Wittgenstein argues that while the logical signs help reveal this form, they themselves are not representatives of anything in the world. According to his notion of the logic of portrayal, and of portrayal by means of logic, no element of the logical system of representation stands for anything in the world. This might sound odd, for we are used to thinking that the possibility of representing the world is based precisely on some such correspondence. Wittgenstein has already attempted to lead us away from that concept of representation in his account of symbols, where he stated that to express the form (which is the symbol) required bringing out a whole network of internally related propositions. Similarly, he writes in the Notebooks: We should then work with signs that do not stand for anything but merely help to express by means of their logical properties.3

But how is the world expressed by means of logic, without logic’s being part of the world? Wittgenstein often refers to this mode of expression as mirroring. How can logic—all-embracing logic, which mirrors the world—use such peculiar crotchets and contrivances? Only because they are all 3. NB, p. 10.

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connected with one another in an infinitely fine network, the great mirror. (5.511).4

Mirroring is intimately related to the nature of showing: Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it. (4.121)

The notion of mirroring emphasizes that form is expressed by a reflecting surface. This means that we do not immediately express the world by means of the signs we choose, but that our linguistic activity results in that infinitely fine network of interrelated signs, of surfaces, in which the world is reflected. We have seen how this idea is developed in Wittgenstein’s account of symbolism, where the symbol is related to the recognition of a class of internally related propositions which express its form. The notion of mirroring further suggests that we need not go beneath the surface of language to recognize objects. Objects appear through the recognition of internal relations in the network formed by our use of language. They are not mysterious hidden entities, but wholly in view. There is thus a clear division between the means of logical representation on the one hand, and what shows itself through our constructions, what there is in the world, on the other. Indeed, it is possible to perfectly express or show things, in their essence, without there being any correspondence between an element in the proposition and the internal properties of the thing. This means, then, that Wittgenstein’s concept of an adequate notation is a notation that will allow constructions through 4. It is interesting that the locution ‘mirror of the world’ occurs in Schopenhauer, and, given Wittgenstein’s acquaintance with his work, it might very well be related to his thought on the matter. Schopenhauer speaks of ideas rather than representations as being mirrors of the world: “Man . . . is the most complete phenomenon of the will, and, as was shown in the second book, in order to exist, this phenomenon had to be illuminated by so high a degree of knowledge that even a perfectly adequate repetition of the inner nature of the world under the form of representation became possible in it. This is the apprehension of the Ideas, the pure mirror of the world.” See The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, pp. 287–288. We can schematically suggest a parallel between the Wittgensteinian ‘thing’ and the Schopenhauerian ‘idea,’ which is the expression of the will in experience.

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which the forms of objects will show. It does not mean in any way that the form of the signs will be the form of the objects. We can now attempt to see how this fundamental idea—that logical constants and signs that stand for objects constitute two separate domains—is expressed in the fundamental principle of inquiry. The latter seems to demand that the logical be separated from the empirical, a separation that is commonplace in philosophy. What then is the radical innovation in Wittgenstein’s view of the matter? First, consider the odd distinction between “can” and “must be possible without more ado” in Wittgenstein’s formulation of the fundamental principle: his claim that when a question can be decided by logic at all, it must be possible to decide it without more ado. Wittgenstein is not warning us against confusing a supposed logical law with an empirical generalization (for instance, mistaking the principle of nonmathematical induction for a logical principle). He assumes that logic can be strictly delimited from factual statements. He is concerned with the very nature of logical as opposed to scientific investigation. It is this necessity of separating modes of inquiry that opens the question of the relation between “can” and “must be possible without more ado” in Wittgenstein’s statement of the fundamental principle. The principle concerns, then, our conceptions of the nature and possibilities of logical investigation. Thus it will also have implications for the nature and possibility of philosophical work. The fundamental principle seems to warn us against confusing logical work with empirical work, that is, against defining the tasks of philosophy in a way that would fail to distinguish between the logical and empirical modes of inquiry, as if logical investigation could be conducted like a scientific inquiry. Unlike Frege’s stricture against mixing empirical or psychological observations with logical ones, Wittgenstein’s concern here is with the tendency to rely on what properly belongs to the grammar of scientific investigation when attempting to describe the possibility of work in logic. But how can the grammar of a scientific question be distinguished from that of a logical investigation? The grammar of science involves the concept of hypothesis, thus a space of possible options among which something can be discovered to be the case. Moreover, the concept of a scientific inquiry also involves the possibility of error, and hence we have to assume the responsibility for determining the truth. Unless we do something, take steps and make decisions, truth will not be discov-

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ered, but it is this task that also opens up the possibility of error. The task of science further assumes the possibility of classification and hierarchy, the difference between the general and the specific, and all the work demanded by this mode of thought: the problems of reclassifying, asking how many kinds of things of a certain species there are, asking questions about the domain of application of general laws, and having to revise them in the light of particular cases. Furthermore, the notion of incompleteness is inherent to the concept of scientific inquiry, allowing one to determine a direction of research and questioning without coming up with complete answers. We can undertake scientific work without aiming to complete science at every step, and without fearing that this incompletion would show what we have done to be nonscience. Issues can be left open to further work; questions can be undecided yet statable. Every scientific question can be answered, since the possibility of a sensical question involves laying out a space of options among which the answer can be found. But finding the answer might require some more work. This is the gap between “can” and “must be possible without more ado.” Scientific inquiry can pose a question which it can solve, but it cannot solve it without more ado. Put differently, to ask a question is always to ask about alternatives in a given framework or space of possibilities. This is why there can be an answer; this is also why it takes some doing to arrive at the answer. In logic no such gap can exist. As Wittgenstein puts it at the very beginning of the Tractatus: “Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts” (2.0121). This is why “in a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic” (5.473). This is not a psychological remark but a grammatical one. Because logic is the condition of the possibility of facts, it is a field where one cannot go wrong; where there is no place for alternatives of true and false. The various possibilities associated with the form of scientific work are dismissed in logic: All numbers in logic stand in need of justification. Or rather, it must become evident that there are no numbers in logic. There are no pre-eminent numbers. (5.453) In logic there is no co-ordinate status, and there can be no classification.

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In logic there can be no distinction between the general and the specific. (5.454)

Moreover, logic is not something we are responsible for or must take care not to misuse. We express ourselves with logic and have the responsibility for expressing the truth, but we are not responsible for the functioning of logic. It takes care of itself. Logic does not require our assistance. Wittgenstein expresses this insight in a way that ties together our interpretation of the fundamental idea that logical constants are not representatives with the fundamental principle concerning the possibilities of inquiry in logic: [L]ogic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself. (6.124)

To this feature logic owes its a priori character and its completeness It is possible—indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic—to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions. (6.125) Hence there can never be surprises in logic. (6.1251)

Wittgenstein’s understanding of the a-priori nature of logic implies that there is no possibility of partial or cumulative work: It is clear that whatever we can say in advance about the form of all propositions, we must be able to say all at once. (5.47)

The a-priori in this sense is internally related to completeness. In logic there is no possibility of hypothesis, projects, partial inquiries, looking, searching, and finding. No work in logic is work unless it is complete. Partiality is a sign that what is intended has not been captured. This is the sense of simplicity that is associated with logic: The solutions of the problems of logic must be simple, since they set the standards of simplicity. Men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symmetrically combined—a priori—to form a self-contained system. A realm subject to the law: Simplex sigillum veri. (5.4541)

Such simplicity is to be understood not as the opposite of complexity— it is not the simplicity of the one as opposed to the complexity of the

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many—but as a sign of the essential otherness of logic. That simplicity is fleshed out by the peculiar grammar of logical work. It contains no hypothesis, no classification, no partiality; it must always be one, complete. As I have noted, these remarks of Wittgenstein’s are important not so much for defining the domain of logical propositions as for helping us grasp the nature of logical work and its conditions. In particular they have implications for what seems to be the very foundation of analytic philosophy, namely, Russell’s statement: “That all sound philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions is a truth too evident, perhaps, to demand a proof.”5 Wittgenstein’s questioning of this supposed self-evidence is expressed early on in his Notebooks. That worry has to do with what it takes to complete an analysis, to end it, or to answer the original questioning. For, once we distinguish grammatical and logical form, we also require a criterion for recognizing when an analysis is completed. This criterion, established before undertaking analysis, must specify the nature of the objects reached at its end.6 The formal criterion for ending an analysis is the simplicity of the component terms. But how to decide whether something is simple? Is a point in our visual field a simple object, a thing? Up to now I have always regarded such questions as the real philosophical ones: and for sure they are in some sense—but once more what evidence could settle a question of this sort at all? Is there not a mistake in the formulation here, for it looks as if nothing at all were self-evident to me on this question; it looks as if I could say definitively that these questions could never be settled at all.7

Analysis cannot be thought of in terms of a scientific inquiry, for we lack any criterion for determining what would satisfy us that we have reached the correct analysis. The outcome cannot be determined in advance, but for it to be scientific we must at least be able to state in advance the kind of objects to be reached at the end. But this means that the task of philosophy would be to specify a priori the ultimate constitu5. B. Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz, p. 8. 6. “Let some philosophical question be given: e.g. whether ‘A is good’ is a subject-predicate proposition; or whether ‘A is brighter than B’ is a relational proposition. How can such a question be settled at all? What sort of evidence can satisfy me that—for example—the first question must be answered in the affirmative? (This is an extremely important question.) Is the only evidence here once more that extremely dubious ‘self evidence?’” NB, p. 3. 7. NB, p. 3.

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ents of reality. For Wittgenstein this is not a question that can be resolved a priori; indeed, the attempt to resolve it a priori results in nonsense. What is analysis then? And if it is not what it seemed to be, then what is the task of philosophy? Can there be philosophical logic?8 The Tractatus repeats emphatically that it does not make sense to ask questions about the ultimate form of reality: It would be completely arbitrary to give any specific form. (5.554) It is supposed to be possible to answer a priori the question whether I can get into a position in which I need the sign for a 27-termed relation in order to signify something. (5.5541) But is it really legitimate to ask such a question? Can we set up a form of sign without knowing whether anything can correspond to it? Does it make sense to ask what there must be in order that something can be the case? (5.5542) If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)

It is at this point that Wittgenstein’s thinking requires the recognition of the perfect order of everyday language.9 Objects must appear as the correlate of the sense we want to make, not as transcendental anchor points of language as such. They are present at the surface of language, wholly tied to the functioning of everyday language. In attempting to grasp this relation of simple signs to simples, to objects, it is necessary to reflect once more on the starting point, on the apparent independence of the realm of objects from language. The initial move I attributed to Wittgenstein was to undermine the concept of an object as an independent “itness.” The object is inherently related to the 8. In response to Ogden’s suggestion that the English translation should bear the title “Philosophic Logic,” Wittgenstein wrote: “although ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ isn’t ideal still it has something like the right meaning, whereas ‘Philosophic Logic’ is wrong. In fact I don’t know what it means! There is no such thing as philosophic logic. (Unless one says that as the whole book is nonsense the title might as well be nonsense too.)” LO, p. 20. 9. In his Notebooks Wittgenstein contrasts his philosophical method with Russell’s and criticizes the latter as being too close to the method of science: “My method is not to sunder the hard from the soft, but to see the hardness of the soft. It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him. Russell’s method in his ‘Scientific method in Philosophy’ is simply a retrogression from the methods of physics.” NB, 44.

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space of possibilities it can occur in. That space of possibility is the form of the object. The apparent independence of this space of possibility from language, which is suggested by the ontological tone of the opening of the Tractatus, is already qualified in some of Wittgenstein’s parenthetical remarks throughout his discussion of objects by his introducing the linguistic parallel to the strictly ontological language. It is his discussion of picturing that reveals the fundamental identity of language and world, when he claims that the very possibility of making sense depends on an identity of form (the depicting form) of language and world. The fundamental identity of language and world can be interpreted in different ways. We may be tempted to understand it as a form of realism according to which objects underlie the functioning of language. In this view, language must reproduce in itself the form of those independent objects in order to be able to function; that is, although the objects would not be independent of states of affairs, they would have some cluster of internal properties which would completely determine what they are. But, most importantly, they would in a certain sense be independent of language, insofar as they could be independent of particular uses of language. In Wittgenstein’s understanding of language, however, the object is not an entity existing entirely in itself underlying the functioning of language in general, but the correlate of a determinate act of sense-making: “The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate” (3.23). Wittgenstein has been criticized for failing to provide any examples of simple objects, as though he had some kind of argument for the existence of simples but had no idea how to conduct a specific analysis and what its outcome would be. He supposedly turns objects into mysterious entities hidden deep beneath the surface of language, maybe never to be discovered. But his correlation of the possibility of simple signs with the very determinacy of sense points to an opposite conclusion: that objects are not hidden, mysterious entities but lie at the surface, completely tied to the sense we produce. It is for this very reason that they do not form part of the progress of the Tractatus. Objects appear in the context of making perspicuous determinate acts of sense-making. They are not presupposed by language in general, but are correlates of concrete uses of language. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein makes this idea very clear: “All I want is only for my meaning to

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be completely analyzed”; and further, “The demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense.”10 It is crucial to see that this contextualization does not imply a relativism with respect to meaning. It explains the relation of objects to specific contexts of use and in no way involves the idea of private or incommunicable meaning.11 When sense is made at all, then something must be able to be expressed in a definite manner. This means that the possibilities involved in this act of sense-making have been made perspicuous. This is precisely how the object is shown. Put differently, if there is sense, there is always some complete and determinate sense. There is no indeterminate sense. “What a proposition expresses it expresses in a determinate manner, which can be set out clearly: a proposition is articulate” (3.251). This apparently obvious statement is one of the important insights of the Tractatus. It is intimately connected with the claim that everyday language is in perfect logical order. All supposed indeterminacy and vagueness in ordinary language are the result of not recognizing the forms that are involved in our sense-making; that is, they result from an imposition of a standard of exactness derived from some a priori understanding of how reality must be for language to function. Instead, Wittgenstein directs us to recognize what is completely precise in such supposed vagueness: “I only want to justify the vagueness of ordinary language, for it can be justified.”12 Many arguments could be invoked to counter such a view. We could argue, for example, that as they stand, propositions of everyday language are essentially ambiguous. In this view, the issue is not how to bring out 10. NB, p. 63. 11. An example might illustrate the problem regarding the relation between objects and the determination of sense. Take the proposition Wittgenstein discusses in his Notebooks, “The book is lying on the table.” As an object the book has various characteristics that do not appear in this sentence, such as a specific color or size. Now if the object is given independently of a specific context of use, the task of analysis is to bring out the form of the object, and those dimensions must therefore be part of analysis itself. Thus although the analyzed proposition does not make a determinate reference to the color of the book, it should specify the range of colors (or sizes) it could have. However, the clear link between objects and determinacy of sense means that only such dimensions that are relevant to the specific sense I am trying to make should be brought out. To arrive at a determinate sense does not mean to add all the dimensions that seem to belong to the general concept of that kind of object; it means expressing what is implicit in a specific attempt to make sense. 12. NB, p. 70.

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the sense that is implicit in them, but rather how to endow them with determinate sense. It is our decision to take them in a particular way that makes definite sense. However, this belief—that ordinary language is defective, inherently vague—arises from a misunderstanding of the notion of making sense. It is precisely Wittgenstein’s understanding that we only say how things are, not what they are, that leads him to contextualize objects and to assert the determinacy of sense: “Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are” (3.221). In order to recognize that ordinary language is in perfect logical order, that language requires no logical work, we have to maintain the distinction between showing objects and stating facts. Keeping these levels strictly apart allows us to avoid various misleading pictures of problems with everyday language for which logical work is required. In general we could say that the very notion that there are logical problems in everyday language depends on associating logic with the constitution of objects and not merely with facts. When Wittgenstein thinks of logic as altogether the basic condition of any sign-language, and of such sign-language as concerned with picturing facts, he shows that ordinary language, to the extent that it is a sign-language, is in perfect logical order. This means that any problems that may arise with regard to ordinary language are only those concerned with dispelling ambiguity of signs, and not any intrinsic problems concerning symbols. Now we can sketch the way in which the Tractatus addresses the problem raised by the preceding reflections on analysis and logical work. The task of completing logic must be kept quite separate from the domain of work concerned with applying logic. The question of logic has to do with the level of the linguistic sign, whereas understanding the form of reality derives neither from the structure of the sign nor from logic. Logic allows us to make sense with signs; it determines the possibility of language, but this does not mean that its forms are the forms of objects. Hence, on the one hand, the general form of the proposition has to be provided, that is, the logical syntax of any sign-language. On the other hand, all questions concerning the nature of the things—the ontological questions—have to be left open as inherently beyond the scope of philosophical work. In particular they are beyond the task the Tractatus set itself.

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The Tractatus, then, proposes a kind of truce: the general form of the proposition can and must be completely characterized, but the inner relations that constitute the richness or complexity of experience, of the world, are not something we can arrive at a priori. The uncovering of the object constitutes a completely different dimension of thinking. We are now in a position to assess the last of Wittgenstein’s three fundamental propositions cited earlier and show its intimate connection to the other two: In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety. (Our problems are not abstract, but the most concrete that there are). (5.5563)

Indeed, if there is no possibility of work, of discovery, in analysis, if all analysis must aim at expressing better what we already have present, and what we always already have present is ordinary language, then ordinary language acquires the importance of a standard. Ordinary language is the very thing that is wholly in view, that we do not need to think of as an object of in-depth research. In this chapter I have elaborated the idea of what expresses itself through language in the context of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the problem of analysis. The question now arises as to how such expression in language can be recognized. The very idea that showing is always in relation to what is already there, to what is given, implies that we cannot view the project of the Tractatus as constructing an ideal language. Instead, we need to acknowledge what already exists and expresses itself in language. Thus the task of the Tractatus emerges as the defense of the language that is implicated in our lives and in our world, our everyday language. This was primarily characterized as a defense against the imposition of certain pictures of exactness. I shall now consider how everyday language is recognized in and of itself as a locus of significance.

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Making Sense and Recognizing Meaning

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Making Sense and Recognizing Meaning

I ended the discussion of picturing by suggesting a distinction between two levels in language: that of the manipulation of pictures, the activity of thinking which determines what can be said, and a deeper identity of form which can only be shown, and which makes it possible to depict things at all. This distinction parallels the distinction between facts and objects, but it can also be approached through the distinction Wittgenstein draws between sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung) in proposition 4.002. Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes. The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.

This proposition stands out from the rest of the text. It contains concepts such as the ‘human organism’ that seem to belong to the repertoire of the later Wittgenstein, anticipating his understanding of forms of life. 103

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Moreover, these concepts are not directly elaborated elsewhere in the Tractatus, in contrast to the very slow pace that characterizes the analysis of other terms in the text (compare the painstaking analysis of ‘picture’ and ‘sign’). This difference in pace is not fortuitous. It corresponds, in general, to the different treatment Wittgenstein accords issues such as the nature of picturing, signs, logical constants, on the one hand, and isolated propositions pertaining to life, death, the subject, metaphysics and the world, on the other. When these latter, pivotal propositions are placed within their context, they become a gathering point for our understanding of the text. One of the most striking features of proposition 4.002 is surely the development of an analogy between language and the body or the human organism. This analogy is complex and demands a careful reading. It is of the utmost importance in evaluating later propositions in the Tractatus determining the relation of the world to the limits of language and life. “Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense.” Not knowing what making sense is, we may think that there is a lot we are missing in the world, sense that cries out for expression. This feeling is not entirely mistaken, only it cannot be accounted for in terms of representation or sense. The realm of representation is adequate for every possible sense. Sense is always very much a matter of fact, of the way things are configured. Wittgenstein’s account of representation has explained why we may be tempted to say that something is intrinsically unsayable. Our feeling that there are things that are unsayable arises from our wish to express objects, to capture the things themselves. For Wittgenstein, however, to make sense is always to represent facts, never to capture objects. I can only speak about [objects]: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are. (3.221)

Wittgenstein understands the essence of the proposition, of making sense, as the general propositional form: this is how things stand. Being able to express every sense, then, means being able to describe how things stand, however they stand. Now ‘how’ should be contrasted to ‘what’. Making sense has to do with expressing the structure of facts, not ‘what’ the objects are, that is their form. Form is always presupposed in saying how things stand. Making sense is always representing facts. There is no sense that is inexpressible. But this deflationary view of the realm of sense opens the way for Wittgenstein to establish the distinc-

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tion between making sense and recognizing meaning. It is at this level that the original intuition that the world has meaningfulness beyond what we say about it can be properly understood. “Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced.” Just as the production of sound originates in a state of the body, of its vocal strings, so the production of sense can be said to be dependent on the body of meaning. In contrast to the dualistic line of thinking that separates the body from meaningfulness, Wittgenstein aims to delimit a place within language, a body of meaning. It is in this space of embodied meaningfulness that language and world come together. Wittgenstein’s account of picturing can help us identify this dimension of language as the recognition of form. Form is where the body of language is indistinguishable from the world. Thus body is not what is represented but what underlies the possibility of representation. I assume further that the invocation of body is to be contrasted to what is conscious, to what we do consciously. This implies a split within language: the production of sense belongs to conscious activity, but Wittgenstein emphasizes that it goes on while we are unaware of the conditions that enable it to occur. Wittgenstein’s claim that “Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is” establishes a fundamental contrast between the realm of conscious, directed activity—the capacity of human beings to represent facts— and the realm of form, which is not something that we can construct or control. This dimension of activity was already apparent in the initial discussion of picturing. We make to ourselves pictures of facts. (2.1)1

By calling a picture a “model” (2.12), Wittgenstein further emphasizes that it is something that we construct. The thoughtfulness that has to do with the recognition of form is to be distinguished from the thinking that is the making of sense, that is bound to facts, to our conscious activity of representation. Recognizing form means opening another dimension of language. But what ought we to be attentive to so as to open this dimension, and what are its implications? 1. I have chosen to rely here on Ogden’s translation, which better captures the German: “Wir machen uns Bilder der Tatsachen.”

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According to Wittgenstein, everyday language is the locus in which the split in language is manifest. “Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.” Here he is not thinking of the human organism in the biological or anatomical sense. He does not reduce human sense-producing activity to biological functions, but directs us to the connection between human meaningfulness and the concept of life or the organic. He does not conceive of language as an abstract system of conventions but rather as constitutive of the life of a subject. The concept of life directs us to conceive of language as an activity in which an organism is related to its surroundings. Thinking of life in relation to language means primarily that this activity is presented here not as the work of blind instinct but rather as constituting a sphere of meaning. In other words, the recognition of meaning is the opening of possibilities of living for a subject.2 Viewed in its concrete application, language is inseparable from human activity. The human organism should then be understood as the meaningful surroundings of activity for a subject, a human world. To live in a human world is to be able to recognize meaning, or possibilities of being, just as to act toward a human being depends, for example, on the ability to recognize expressions of sadness, joy, pain, or boredom through their bodily expressions. The recognition of meaning is not the discovery of an empirical connection between a thought and a body.3 Such significance or meaningfulness of the body is an original phenomenon, part of what language is as such.4 Wittgenstein then establishes a connection between the concept of 2. This identification is supported by such propositions as “The world and life are one” (5.621) and “I am my world. (The microcosm.)” (5.63). I will develop these identifications of the world and life in chapters 8 and 9. 3. In his Notebooks Wittgenstein struggles with this notion that the body expresses meaning: “. . . Can I infer my spirit from my physiognomy? Isn’t this relation purely empirical? Does my body really express anything? Is it itself an internal expression of something? Is e.g. an angry face angry in itself or merely because it is empirically connected with bad temper?” (NB, p. 84). Interestingly, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein proposes an analogy between internal properties and facial features: “An internal property of a fact can also be called a feature of that fact (in the sense in which we speak of facial features, for example)” (4.1221). 4. In using the term ‘significant’ I draw on the relation between the German Bedeutung with its philosophical connotations and the more ordinary sense of significance associated with the term. Wittgenstein uses the latter sense, for example, in his Notebooks: “Als Ding unter Dingen ist jedes Ding gleich unbedeutend, als Welt jedes gleichbedeutend” (NB, p. 83). I will return to this claim, which ties significance to having a world.

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life or the organism and everyday language. Usually we think of the use of everyday language as indicating an average existence, a way of taking things merely as familiar, failing to recognize their internal constitution. Wittgenstein points out that it is everyday language that gives us the proper field of application of signs and allows us to recognize meaning. It is only in everyday language that the enormous complexity of meaning in language can be recognized. Rather than set everyday language aside to gain the recognition of meaning, this dimension can be opened only in everyday language, insofar as language is taken as part of the human organism. The everyday is where things can appear meaningful, presenting possibilities for me, becoming part of my world. We may be misled by Wittgenstein’s comparison of language to clothing that does not reveal the real form of the body. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.

However, if we follow the analogy between language and the body throughout this proposition, we perceive that what is beneath the clothing is the enormous complexity covered by tacit understanding, namely, meaning as it appears in the human world. Language does not immediately reveal the form of the world, but this does not mean that it is itself out of order. We must consider language as part of the human organism, in the life or application of those signs: What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly. (3.262)

According to Wittgenstein, the essential feature of human language is the split between the capacity to produce sense, given our means of expression, and the recovery of the object, the body of meaning, that can show through our making of sense. It is not necessary to know meanings, objects, in order to produce sense. This means that the lack of transparency in language has to do with the very nature of the distinction between the activity of representing and the recovery of its conditions. The split is a feature of human language as such: “It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from [everyday language] what the logic of language is.”

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It is tempting, yet in my view misguided, to read Wittgenstein as implying that the problem has to do with everyday language and would be avoided in an ideal language. Let us recall his insistence that “in fact, all the propositions of everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order” (5.5563). The problem is, rather, that this order is not immediately perspicuous. But this lack of immediacy is a feature of every language we construct, including a so-called ideal language, namely a language whose syntactical means of expression would be clearly displayed in the signs. Language in use, language that has a life and is not merely an artificial construct, will always manifest this gap between the making of sense and the recovery of what constitutes our human world. Meaning is not ours to make. Hence the level of significant communication as such is impossible to anticipate, but can only be recovered through what shows itself in language. Our ability to make sense is an intrinsic part of our being in a human world, and that world is accessible through its reflection in language; it must be recognized after the fact. The Tractatus establishes a sharp distinction between facts and objects, between what we can do when we investigate facts, make hypotheses, ask ourselves how things are, and give answers of the form “this is how things are” on the one hand, and the recognition of meaning on the other, the realization of “what things are.” As we have seen, Wittgenstein stresses that it does not make sense to ask questions about the ultimate form of reality. It would be completely arbitrary to give any specific form. (5.554) If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)

The form of the realm of representation is what is given as logical space. It should be kept distinct from the form of objects. Logic indeed determines the form of representation, thus the form of how things are, but it is not constitutive of what things are. Logic is prior to every experience—that something is so. It is prior to the question ‘How?’, not prior to the question ‘What?’ (5.552) The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. (5.557)

This does not mean that the application of logic decides which among all possible elementary propositions are true, but rather that it gives the

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constitution of elementary propositions. Elementary propositions consist of objects, and the form of objects is what spans the possibility of our human world and any world we can humanly imagine. This means that the grammar of reality, what determines the possibility of our world, cannot be given a priori, once and for all, systematically and in advance of our encounter with experience. The grammar of reality must be recognized without anything to go by but what we are willing and unwilling to say in language, in judging the world. My emphasis on recognition as constitutive of meaning therefore accords with this affirmation of ordinary language, of what we already have, and the critique of any metaphysical attempt at grounding meaning, reducing a priori the nature of the possible.5 Wittgenstein repeats this theme, which will become so central to his later thinking, in “Some Remarks on Logical Form”: Now we can only substitute a clear symbolism for the unprecise one by inspecting the phenomena which we want to describe, thus trying to understand their logical multiplicity. That is to say, we can only arrive at a correct analysis by what might be called the logical investigation of the phenomena themselves, i.e. in a certain sense a posteriori, and not by conjecturing about a priori possibilities. One is often tempted to ask from an a priori standpoint: What, after all, can be the forms of atomic propositions, and to answer, e.g. subject, predicate, and relational propositions with two or more terms further, perhaps propositions relating predicates and relations to one another, and so on. But this, I believe, is mere playing with words. An atomic form cannot be foreseen. And it could be surprising if the actual phenomena had nothing more to teach us about their structure.6

It might be helpful to distinguish Wittgenstein’s understanding of the recognition of meaning from Russell’s conception of analysis and of objects that are the end point of such analysis. Wittgenstein would say that analysis must lead us to elementary propositions containing names in immediate combination. This is very different from saying that analysis leads us to logically structured propositions containing ultimate constituents. Wittgenstein’s scheme gets rid of the logical scaffolding to arrive 5. Thus we see once more that the traditional complaint about the Tractatus, namely that Wittgenstein gives no examples of simple objects, is wholly misguided. What there is, objects forming a human world, is not within the scope of the Tractatus and the kind of work the book envisages. 6. SRLF, p. 32.

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at a level of names in immediate combination, incorporating logical structure. Logical structure, as it were, schematically marks the internal relations between propositions which allow us to recognize the object. Russell’s scheme complicates logical structure to arrive at constituents that cannot be further broken down: the most basic building blocks put together with the cement of logic. According to Russell, the discovery of objects involves an ever more complex breaking down of the proposition, whereas Wittgenstein is concerned with perspicuously presenting all propositions that can be shown to be internally connected, and by showing that internal connection, he seeks to bring out the nature of the object. In contrast to a Russellian metaphor of depth correlated with the process of analysis, Wittgenstein, so to speak, forms a surface, a mirror that shows inner connection between propositions. For Wittgenstein, grasping meaning is always a matter of recognizing form, never a discovery that penetrates beneath the surface of language into some hidden depth of logical structure where mysterious objects lie buried. The thoughtfulness associated with the recognition of the body of meaning can be elaborated by associating it with Wittgenstein’s use of ‘showing’ as distinct from ‘saying’. The concept of showing involves a fundamental passivity with respect to meaning. Showing involves something that is already there, which we turn or return to; it is a realm of presence and not a realm of activity that generates projects, anticipations, hypotheses, discoveries, hierarchies, systematization, or enumeration. Showing characterizes our access to the level of form or meaning. Our access to the body of meaning is precisely opposed to our activity of making sense, to our capacity to operate with pictures. It is not a representation but a laying out, or presenting, of the ligaments that hold the body together, thus showing the form of the body. Russell’s conception of analysis requires us to make various assumptions concerning the objects that are the end point of analysis. Once we go beyond what can be recognized in the functioning of everyday language, we need criteria for determining the end point of the process of analysis. It becomes necessary to ground language in some metaphysical outlook. According to Wittgenstein, the ‘showing’ that is characteristic of the recognition of form is linked to the acceptance of the form of everyday language and the rejection of any a priori hypothesizing about the ultimate structure of reality. Wittgenstein’s fundamental distinction between philosophy and the form of scientific work, with its possibili-

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ties of advance and discovery, also explains his distaste for Russell’s construction of the external world and later for Carnap’s Aufbau project. This is also the reason that thinking in terms of meta-languages does not resolve the issues raised by Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘showing’ (as Russell proposes in his introduction to the Tractatus, or Carnap in his Logical Syntax of Language). This approach completely misses Wittgenstein’s intention in introducing and using that term. Showing is not intuition, in the sense of a special recognitional capacity. It does not mean that analysis comes to an end with an intuition of what the world is really like. Rather, it is to be thought of as an acknowledgment of the conditions of saying, which means the complete presence of those conditions. Coming into presence is the way things show.7 One can speak here of presentness, in the sense that nothing can happen in the sphere of conditions. All happenings, all facts are determinations of the conditions (Wittgenstein calls them configurations of objects). This sense of an everlasting present can be the basis for the visual analogy between the recognition of possibilities and showing. Showing depends on the absolute cancellation of any hiddenness, the absence of deep structure. Conditions appear completely; there is no partial achievement or things left for future inquiry. Now we can discern the close connection between the nature of showing and the fundamental importance Wittgenstein attributes to everyday language: In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety. (Our problems are not abstract, but the most concrete that there are.) (5.5563)

The note of urgency in this assertion arises from the perception that such a relation to everyday language is of concern to the subject, is related to the assumption of subjectivity. 7. I put it this way in order to form an initial connection between this discussion and Wittgenstein’s sense that presentness is grace, as when he says, “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” (6.4311).

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Subject and World

8

Subject and World

The mode in which Wittgenstein presents the discovery of what there is, the form of objects, involves a dimension of recognition, acknowledgment, or appropriation of what is given in language. This in turn raises the question of the relation between subject and world. What is it for the subject to assume or avoid the limits that must be recognized in language? Is it possible to think of the subject in terms of the very movement of appropriation and avoidance? In Wittgenstein’s elaboration of the possibility of claiming the world to be my world, appropriation appears as a dimension of ontology. At the outset note a structural feature of Wittgenstein’s account of the subject, which links his appearance to the recovery of what cannot be anticipated: the form of experience. Wittgenstein’s account of the subject starts in 5.54, stops abruptly in 5.55 with a rather long discussion of the relation of logic to its application, and returns to the subject in 5.6. This insertion of matters seemingly unrelated to the question of the subject gives us in fact a crucial clue to Wittgenstein’s approach. The initial discussion concerns how not to speak of the subject, that is, it shows the nonexistence of the thinking subject. It opens with what may be considered a formulation of the general relation of representation: “In the general propositional form propositions occur in other propositions only as bases of truth-operations” (5.54). The disappearance of the thinking subject therefore seems to be closely linked to the proper understanding of the most general form of the proposition, of what can be given in advance of experience. The reappearance of the subject, that is, the way to speak of the subject in philosophy, follows the assertion that the specific forms of elementary propositions cannot be given a priori. Here the re112

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appearance of the subject is closely linked to the understanding that the limits of experience—set by the objects or the specific forms of elementary propositions—cannot be anticipated. Wittgenstein asserts: “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas” (5.631); that is, there is no subject that stands in some external relation to thoughts, ideas, or propositions. I have already explained the basis for this statement in my interpretation of picturing. Indeed, if thinking is the operation of making sense, then sense is not some entity to be grasped by the thinking subject. Rather, what we could call the thinking subject is assumed in the very notion of producing sense. This is why Wittgenstein says that the real form of propositions in psychology such as ‘A believes that p’ or ‘A has the thought p,’ which apparently involve an external relation between a subject and a sense, is actually ‘“p” says p.’ The thinking subject is assumed in what it is for “p” to express the sense p. We can now understand Wittgenstein’s assertion that Russell’s conception of judgment cannot explain why it is impossible to judge nonsense. If we had a proposition whose form was ‘A judges that p,’ then there would be an external relation between the simple A and the complex p, and we would be unable to explain why it is impossible for A to stand in that external relation to, say, an object. There is nothing to explain why A must stand in that relation only to propositions. Only an internal connection between the act of thinking or judging and the constitution of the judgment is capable of explaining why a subject cannot judge what is not sense, what is nonsense. It is significant that in this context Wittgenstein presents us with a preliminary statement of the issue which will come to be known in his later work as the seeing of aspects: To perceive a complex means to perceive that its constituents are related to one another in such and such a way. This no doubt also explains why there are two possible ways of seeing the figure b

b a

a b a

b a

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as a cube; and all similar phenomena. For we really see two different facts. (5.5423)

We should resist the temptation to explain such phenomena by assuming the existence of a subject who can change his attention in relation to a self-same object: if the object does not change, then it must be something in the subject that changes. This line of reasoning falsely assumes an independent subject standing in relation to objects. Wittgenstein, however, argues that what we are tempted to call seeing the same object with different subjective attitudes is precisely seeing different facts. What is grasped is not the object as such but relations of constituents given a certain background of form. The appearance of the subject, then, does not involve the usual way of associating subjectivity and the realm of representation, but rather involves what I shall call the appropriation of the form of experience. This is how I intend to approach the series of propositions that reintroduce the subject as a concern for philosophy (5.6–5.641). Wittgenstein writes: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5.6). Note here the sudden appearance of the fundamental concepts ‘limit’ and ‘world’ and of the possessive pronoun ‘my’ in relating those concepts to the subject. Any interpretation of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the subject must consider his specific use of these concepts. An initial elaboration of the concept of world would introduce some idea of connectedness, of unity, of things taken as a whole. We should distinguish this concept of totality, or world as a limited whole, from various other ideas associated with the concept. Wittgenstein does not use “world” to mean the universe, or nature as a systematic whole obeying physical laws. Such an understanding would think of the world and limits through the form of the factual. He seeks rather to separate the concept of world and limits from the factual, which is always capable of being localized, of being distinguished from other possibilities in the same space. A fact is always this as opposed to that; it is logic, with its eithers and ors, that establishes the separability characteristic of the realm of the factual. This is made clear by proposition 5.61: Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, ‘The world has this in it, and this, but not that.’ For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain

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possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.1

From the perspective of logic, of what can be said or represented, we cannot express what the limits of the world are, we cannot speak of the world as a delimited totality or as a limited whole.2 If limits are conceived in terms of sense-making, it may be tempting to read Wittgenstein’s alignment of subjectivity, world, and limits as presenting a picture of epistemological solipsism. This temptation is both elicited and defeated through the complex network of ambiguities that governs proposition 5.62: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means [meint] is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean [bedeuten] the limits of my world.

At first sight it might appear as if Wittgenstein viewed the subject as captive of his own sense-making, unable ever to break away from the veil of representation. We would thus read him as affirming, in contrast to his later self, the essential privacy of meaning, and we would interpret the parenthetical remark in 5.62 as positing a language which I alone can understand, a private language, or a private ground for language. But this remark should also be read as the claim that it is in language alone that I reach understanding; I understand nothing but language.3 Indeed, Wittgenstein intends here to recast the truth of solipsism: “For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest” (5.62). The solipsist, as it were, ‘means well’ (meinen), but in 1. I note in passing that the last sentence of proposition 5.61 bears some resemblance to proposition 7. Although there are important differences between the formulations, their similarity testifies to the importance of the moment. On this issue see my Chapter 10 below. 2. Significantly, for Frege and Russell logic emerges as the most general science. It does not incorporate the concept of totality. 3. See J. Hintikka, “On Wittgenstein’s ‘Solipsism,’” in Copi and Beard (eds.), Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, pp. 157–162.

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effect his way of expressing himself completely misses the mark; he fails to mean (bedeuten) the limits of the world. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein’s contrast between saying and manifestation might in itself cause a further misreading, as if there were some understanding that went beyond language and, for that reason, could never be shared. Although Wittgenstein indeed recognizes a certain truth to solipsism, a sense of isolation tied to the advent of subjectivity, this must be understood in terms of a dimension of being in language. How, then, can we avoid the aporia formed by the impossibility of saying the limits of language and the need to avoid positing an understanding beyond language? What are the limits of language? It is crucial to note that Wittgenstein speaks of the limits of language as meaning (bedeuten) the limits of the world. This is precisely the reverse of the solipsistic predicament, which turns representation into a screen veiling our access to the real. Our interpretation of Wittgenstein’s differentiation of sense and meaning must be brought to bear on the understanding of limits in language. Limits are recognized in the realm of meaning, where language and objects are brought together rather than separated. The body of meaning emerges at the limits, manifesting the shared origin of subject and world. Wittgenstein’s concept of limit cannot be understood in terms of the representation of the world. From the point of view of representation there is no limit whatsoever. This is the point of Wittgenstein’s analogy between the visual field and the field of experience as such. Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye. (5.633) For the form of the visual field is surely not like this

Eye—

(5.6331)

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This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is at the same time a priori. Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things. (5.634)

Picture and sight are indeed made for each other. One of the consequences of Wittgenstein’s account of representation was the claim that no proposition is a priori. An a priori proposition would be a limit proposition, for it would give a definite and necessary form to the possibility of experience. There is no a priori picture, just as there is no limit to the visual field. Hence the impossibility of locating the subject in the world is not merely the impossibility of recognizing an object in space and time that is a genuine subject. More importantly, it is the impossibility of representing limits to the world, that is, of having a complete and systematic account of its form. Traditionally, since Kant at least, the unity of the subject has been correlated with the unity of the object of experience. Wittgenstein’s account makes the realm of objects intrinsically impossible to anticipate systematically. The subject cannot be given in advance, once and for all, by being correlated with a necessary unity of the manifold of experience. Insofar as we have a concept of limit that is derived from the discovery of objects, these limits will be given as it were a posteriori, or rather, through the temporality proper to the recovery of meaning. Wittgenstein proposes, then, a concept of limit understood in relation to meaning, associated with the form of objects rather than the logic of facts. The limit is what brings out a thing in its essential possibilities of being. Such a concept of limit does not divide a space into two sides as negation does, but opens the space in which a thing is. But if the essence of a thing cannot be determined a priori as a necessary structure of experience, what can determine the limit? What makes us recognize what something is? We can now understand why Wittgenstein introduces the concept of limit in relation to world rather than to facts or objects, for it is the belonging of the thing to a world that determines the limit. In his Notebooks Wittgenstein writes: As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each one equally significant. If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this rep-

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resents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colorless by contrast with it.4

Here Wittgenstein suggests that what we might tend to call a small part of the world—if we think of the world as the totality of facts, say from the perspective of the opening of the Tractatus—can, when invested with significance, be properly called a world in itself. Wittgenstein also notes that such significance might appear from the outside, from the perspective of facts, completely worthless, trivial. The force of a world cannot be experienced from outside. It is all but dismissable. This insight also points to the difficulty of assessing philosophically the place of such a concept as ‘world’, for the very experience of worldhood is liable to be missed. A certain perspective on things may leave it behind, as the opening word of a book, or push it indefinitely ahead, to its closing statements. Moreover, Wittgenstein thinks of a thing such as a stove as something that is capable of gathering a world around it. The thing in itself bears an affinity to the world; or, more precisely, the essential form of the thing appears when it is placed in its world, as a significant appearance compared with which everything else seems colorless. Most importantly, this example, by associating world with significance, shows that the possibility of world depends on the involvement of a subject. It can be said that the concept of world belongs to a unified structure which places a subject in relation to a world. The central notion is that of being in the world, of which the concept of world partakes. Understanding the subject in terms of ‘being in the world’ or ‘being in language’ might be called an existential understanding of subjectivity. What are the essential dimensions of an existential analysis of world and subject? For Wittgenstein this belonging of subject to world is manifested by the possessive pronoun, the world is my world. Appropriation is the central determination of existence, and it is expressed in the claim “the world is my world” as it appears in 5.641, the last in the series of propositions concerned with the subject.5 4. NB, p. 83. 5. Schopenhauer opens The World as Will and Representation with the claim: “‘The world is my representation’; this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being” (vol. 1, p. 3), and adds further that there is another truth “which must be very serious and grave if not terrible to everyone, . . . that a man also can say and must say: ‘The world is my will’” (ibid.,

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Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it. (5.641)

I detect here a sense of relief or even astonishment in rediscovering the self after it was seemingly cast out of the realm of representation: “there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self.” The surprise here is also related to the fact that this understanding is fleeting; it disappears and reappears, as it were. Because of its very structure it must always disappear and be recovered, or appear through the recovery of meaning. A second point of interest is that Wittgenstein uses the term Rede to describe how philosophy speaks of the self. This act of speech, I take it, is to be distinguished from the making of sense. Philosophy has a say that is of concern to the self. Moreover, “what brings the self into philosophy” need not be interpreted as meaning that philosophy is about the self, that the self is its topic in a propositional sense, but rather suggests that the self is brought into the orbit of philosophizing. Hence we should give due attention to the question of the form of expression necessary to philosophy when the self is its concern. In particular, this issue should be kept in mind when reading the end of the Tractatus.6 Perhaps the most significant point in this proposition is that Wittgenstein speaks here of the self, the I, the first person.7 This is a point that is easy to miss, and it is not unrelated to the likelihood of missing the significance of ‘world’ for Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is not speaking of a subject in general but of how I assume meaning in language.8 What is at p. 4). Wittgenstein’s assertion that “The world is my world” (5.641) gives the impression that he both associates himself with and distinguishes himself from Schopenhauer. The association is in the very statement about the world as “my world,” the dissociation in collapsing both claims onto one. 6. “What brings the self into philosophy” can also be read as the claim that one can philosophize with the self, bring oneself to philosophy. Those issues will be taken up in my interpretation of the appearance of the self (the author) at the end of the Tractatus (6.54). 7. This is brought out in Ogden’s translation, which simply gives “I” for the German Ich. 8. We can now come closer to understanding Wittgenstein’s statement in the Preface, in which he addresses the book to the one person who would get pleasure from reading it with understanding. That there is one person every time is a logical, and not a psychological, point.

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stake is not merely the appearance of an abstract transcendental subject, but a connection between the metaphysical subject and the concrete problem of saying “I,” of taking language upon oneself. This idea establishes a contrast between an abstract, objectivized understanding of the sphere of the possible, and the formation of possibility in relation to my life. The pronoun “my” is thus crucial in marking the fact that the range of possibilities always depends on the concrete use “I” make of language. Possibilities are always possibilities of existence for a subject. The subject cannot be given apart from my acknowledgment and denial of what there is. The subject is always given as an “I,” acknowledgment is always in the first person. This sense of individuation is how the truth of solipsism manifests itself.9 In the realm of representation possibilities exist independently of the involvement of a subject. It is only by opening the gap between representation and meaning that a thematics of appropriation can be developed: that one can be said to own experience and not merely to be surrounded by facts. Only in the sphere of meaning can the first person be introduced as the possibility of assuming that world, or of falling out of attunement with it. “I am my world” means, then, that I find meaning in the world, meaning not determined by my active mastery of sense. The question “who am I?” must be answered by way of the question “what is there?” or, more precisely, by my capacity to assume or avoid such meaningfulness.10 As Wittgenstein writes in his Notebooks: “I have to judge the 9. This interpretation makes sense of certain remarks in the Notebooks, such as: “There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others” (NB, p. 49). Indeed, I appear through the way in which I relate to the intelligence of language, call it the world soul. 10. It should be clear that although such a conception of the body of meaning derives from Schopenhauer’s understanding of the world as will, it does not give the same primacy to my body as he does. Indeed, for Wittgenstein there is no privileged position to my body, but only to the body of meaning in language. Proposition 5.631 can be seen as a direct critique of Schopenhauer: “If I wrote a book called The World as I Found It, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinated to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book” (5.631). This can be read as isolating the subject by identifying it with the parts of my body which obey my will. I think, however, that Wittgenstein’s point here is that if I came to the world from somewhere outside it, I would have to include in my report of the world the phenomenon that parts of my

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world, to measure things.”11 This presents a concept of experience and its limits which is bound up with the advent of the subject. Experience is judgmental by its very nature, that is, it requires a subject’s involvement to make it manifest, and that subject is to be thought of as exercising judgment (not as being determined by pre-existing sense). Judgment must be taken in the most radical way. The emphasis is on the need for an encounter to create experience (whereas mere facts need no recognition). That appropriation is involved in having a world implies that there is always the possibility of loss. Loss of world is itself a dimension of the world as well as of the subject. As always in the Tractatus, this possibility should not be elaborated psychologically but as a dimension proper to language, to the subject that inhabits language. Where is that dimension manifested in the clearest way? What is the symptom in language that allows us to recognize such negativity and its significance in the fullest way? Logical negation, which always produces a division of reality into two sides, cannot provide the required understanding of the relation of limit and negativity. But what is negativity beyond logical negation? Wittgenstein raises this issue of limits and negativity in the preface of the Tractatus: Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather— not to thought but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be non-sense.

What is particularly significant in this statement is the claim that both sense and nonsense belong to language. It could be argued that when Wittgenstein speaks of nonsense as belonging to language, he uses a thin conception of language associated merely with the presence of linguistic signs arranged according to superficially correct syntax. Were we to body obey my will. But this would make them part of the report and not matters of special significance. From that vantage point my body will find its place among things, and this would therefore show that in an important sense there is no subject. 11. NB, p. 82.

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take the full-blown view of language as signs that express a sense, then clearly nonsense would not be part of language. This is undeniable, it is even tautological. Clearly nonsense is not some kind of content of language. But this is not to say that the empty manipulation of signs is not related to the level of sense. This issue is analogous to Wittgenstein’s statement that tautologies and contradictions belong to language, for they also constitute a case where the syntax allows for constructions that defeat their own attempt to make sense and result in senselessness. In the case of nonsense, we might say that the very demand made on you by significant communication is connected internally with the possibility of nonsense.

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Ethics in Language

9

Ethics in Language

I have claimed that the motto of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—“. . . and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words”—is intended to convey the infinite difficulty of expressing the ethical point of the book. The infinite difficulty of expression is the other side of the utter simplicity of the truth it aims to convey. Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity, but a sign of otherness or transcendence. This means that the truth to be expressed is of the order of a revelation, or at least concerns the way a religious understanding of revelation translates into the order of language. Monk reports that Wittgenstein considered for the motto of his Philosophical Investigations one such utterly simple truth: Bishop Butler’s “Everything is what it is and not another thing.”1 This statement is already quoted in the Notebooks and can serve to introduce us to the ethical point of the Tractatus, for we encounter a transcribed version of it in the propositions concerned with the issue of value.2 After opening his elaboration of that issue with the statement that “All propositions are of equal value” (6.4), Wittgenstein writes: The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the 1. R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 451. 2. NB, p. 84.

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whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. (6.41)

There is something odd about the writing here; it sounds empty and repetitive. Not only is the claim “everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen” empty, tautological, but it is followed by an implied wish to deny, despite all, this tautology: “in it no value exists— and if it did exist, it would have no value.” We may interpret the writing as recreating the urge to find, in fact, absolute significance, combined with the sense of the utter futility of such a quest. The writing expresses the feeling that even if we were to receive what we wished for, it would turn out to be something that would fail to satisfy our original desire. It is as if, precisely at the limit where what one says is empty and tautological, the dissonant urge itself came to the fore, beyond content. What is it that makes our desire so out of joint with its aim? What is the real source of this problematic condition of desire? “Ethics is transcendental” (6.421). Ethics is essentially concerned with what is higher. If something had value, it would stand out, be significant in itself. Value is the transcendence beyond the level of the equal, which is why Wittgenstein starts from the claim: “All propositions are of equal value” (6.4). As is now clear, this means that they are equally valueless, or valueless because equal, and indeed follows from the understanding that a proposition always exists as one amongst many possibilities in the same space. It is always contingent, that is, it represents a fact against the background of equally possible alternatives. It cannot therefore be intrinsically higher or significant. It is impossible to state something that is nonaccidental: “So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher” (6.42). One could therefore say that when something is of value, it presents itself to be other, or higher, than it is in fact. This is why Bishop Butler’s statement expresses a fundamental tension for ethics: how in a world governed by such a principle is ethics possible at all? This question is surely applicable to the world called forth at the opening of the Tractatus, the world that is the totality of facts. That the very possibility of questioning the starting point arises here indicates that the ethical mo-

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ment will involve a profound shift of perspective. It prefigures the end of the book, when all that has been said will be revoked. Wittgenstein contrasts the ethical with what can be said, but this does not mean that ethics is not manifested in and through language, or that there is no condition of language that manifests the ethical, but simply that no propositional content could express it. The making of sense that is described in the activity of picturing has nothing to do with transcendence. Yet Wittgenstein does relate the question of transcendence to the question of sense, as when he writes, “To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning (Sinn) of life.”3 So what is that sense that cannot be given a propositional content? In the Introduction I mentioned that in “A Lecture on Ethics” Wittgenstein illustrates this condition of the valuelesness of facts by means of the figure of an omniscient being who writes a book containing a complete description of the world: What I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment . . . all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet’s words: “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad. If for instance in our world book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts and facts but no Ethics.4 3. NB, p. 74. 4. LE, pp. 6–7.

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My first reason for quoting this passage at length is to counter from the outset the argument that Wittgenstein establishes a distinction, so popular among his logical-positivist followers, between factual statements and the expression of emotions, and views the latter as constituting the actual essence of ethical statements.5 Emotional states, insofar as they are described as psychological states of mind, exist exactly at the same level as facts in the external world. This does not mean that the ethical does not have an affective dimension; indeed, I will show that affects are essential to it. But such affects cannot be separated from the dimensions of language as such. They are tied to the assumption of the limits of language, to our being in language. Secondly, the great book of facts, as I called it, reveals the contrast between the perspective of facts and the mode in which we exist in a meaningful environment—in a world. Meaningfulness is a dimension of our very existence in language, not something external to it. It is not a subjective or psychological phenomenon. My interpretation of Wittgenstein’s account of meaningfulness is intended to provide a way of thinking about the significance of things apart from propositional content, that is, apart from the factuality of what can be said. Such significance should not be thought of in terms of the miraculous, the outstanding, or the extraordinary. The miraculous is an event that in itself has absolute significance, that stands absolutely higher than anything else. Significance, for Wittgenstein, is ordinary experience presenting a face of meaningfulness. “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant, as a world, each one equally significant.”6 This statement implies that a certain sense of equality appears in a condition of significance as well as insignificance. The equality of insignificance is of the one amongst the many; the equality of significance is of that which forms a whole, a world. Significance is correlative with the concept of world. Hence there is no thing that is significant amongst a plurality of insignificant things. Whereas the sensicality of a proposition is always a matter of fact, significance makes a world of difference. It is not one part 5. “The supposititious sentences of metaphysics, of the philosophy of values, of ethics (in so far as it is treated as a normative discipline and not as a psycho-sociological investigation of facts) are pseudo-sentences; they have no logical content, but are only expressions of feeling which in turn stimulate feelings and volitional tendencies on the part of the hearer.” R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, p. 278. 6. NB, p. 83.

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of the world that has of itself absolute value in itself or is the ground for significance as such. It is, rather, the world as a whole that is illumined with significance, that waxes and wanes for us. That kind of significance, associated with having a world, is never partial, which is why it seems at times so remote, so inaccessible. This account of the fundamental dimension of value relates to the account of the subject I have so far elaborated. The subject is associated with the assuming of possibilities. It is not to be identified with some object in the world, but always with possibilities of existence revealed in language. This does not mean that to be a subject is only to be an authentic subject who has assumed the limits of language, but rather, that to be a subject is essentially to assume one’s utmost possibilities or to avoid them; the subject is essentially happy or unhappy.7 While the acknowledgment of meaning is the fundamental normative dimension of existence, the fundamental relation to value, it still needs to be related to our understanding of morality, in particular to concepts such as action, will, law, reward, and punishment. Wittgenstein offers an elaboration of such relations at 6.422: When an ethical law of the form, ‘Thou shalt . . .’, is laid down, one’s first thought is, ‘And what if I do not do it?’ It is clear, however, that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms. So our question about the consequences of an action must be unimportant.—At least those consequences should not be events. For there must be something right about the question we posed. There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself. (And it is also clear that the reward must be something pleasant and the punishment something unpleasant.) (6.422)

This proposition relates to various traditional positions in ethics. It clearly rejects any simple consequentialist position that would understand the rightness of an act in terms of the goodness of its consequences. To understand the ethical will in terms of consequences re7. This association of the subject with the appropriation or avoidance of possibilities of existence shows the affinity between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s thinking. The latter writes: “In being-ahead-of-oneself as the being toward one’s ownmost potentiality-of-being lies the existential and ontological condition of the possibility of being free for authentic existentiell possibilities. It is the potentiality-for-being for the sake of which Dasein always is as it factically is.” Being and Time, p. 180.

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quires a logical connection between the ethical will and what it can effect in the world. Wittgenstein emphatically denies such a connection to events or facts: The world is independent of my will. (6.373) Even if all that we wish for were to happen, still this would only be a favor granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connection between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed physical connection itself is surely not something that we could will. (6.374)

We could view the will as a kind of psychological cause and thus calculate its effects as part of a general law, but this would be of no interest to ethics: It is impossible to speak about the will insofar as it is the subject of ethical attributes. And the will as a phenomenon is of interest only to psychology. (6.423)

This approach, which denies any necessary connection between the will and what it effects in the world and sees the will as finding reward in the very action rather than its consequences, may tempt us to read Wittgenstein’s ethics as Kantian in its outlines, as grounding the ethical in the power of an unconditional law of self-determination. But this reading seems doubtful, if only because the very concept of an unconditional law is problematic for Wittgenstein, as shown by his understanding of the necessity of logic and its relation to the concept of law. Wittgenstein stresses that “Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility” (6.375). Given his view of the nature of logic, this means that all necessity is conditional, that is, it derives from the very structure of the realm of representation. There is no contentful necessity; all necessity derives from the recognition of structural relations in the sphere of representation: The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it. They have no ‘subject-matter’. They presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connection with the world. It is clear that something about

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the world must be indicated by the fact that certain combinations of symbols—whose essence involves the possession of a determinate character—are tautologies. This contains the decisive point. We have said that some things are arbitrary in the symbols that we use and that some things are not. In logic it is only the latter that express: but that means that logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself. If we know the logical syntax of any sign-language, then we have already been given all the propositions of logic. (6.124)

Necessity, then, must be reduced to an understanding of how the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself. But this necessity does not lie in things. Logic, for Wittgenstein, is not a ground.8 In denying that there are logical laws, Wittgenstein is claiming that logical necessity is always conditional. Conditionality means here that the necessary relations between propositions derive from the form of our means of representing reality. One could argue that since these are the only means of representation we have, there is no sense in saying that necessity is conditioned by our modes of representation. But I would reply that the Tractatus aims to turn us to the recognition of meaning in the object apart from the form imposed on facts by our means of representation. 8. It is fruitful in this connection to think of Wittgenstein’s understanding of logic in relation to Schopenhauer’s treatment of the principle of sufficient reason as expressed in the following statement: “The principle of sufficient reason in all its forms is the sole principle and sole support of all necessity. For necessity has no true and clear meaning except that of the inevitability of the consequent with the positing of the ground. Accordingly, every necessity is conditioned; absolute or unconditioned necessity is therefore a contradictio in adjecto. For to be necessary can never mean anything but to follow from a given ground.” On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, p. 225. On the surface, Wittgenstein disagrees with this assessment when he claims: “Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility” (6.375). The principle of sufficient reason itself seems to be relegated to a secondary status: “Laws like the principle of sufficient reason, etc. are about the net and not about what the net describes” (6.35). But I think that we can go beyond this apparent disagreement. Wittgenstein might indeed think of the principle of sufficient reason as having no privileged status when he thinks of it, say, as the principle that there is causality in nature. But at a deeper level there is a clear parallel between his understanding of logic and Schopenhauer’s claim that all necessity is only conditional necessity. Indeed, for Schopenhauer the principle of sufficient reason is the determining principle of the very realm of representation. In that sense it functions precisely in the way that logic does for Wittgenstein.

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This in no way means going beyond language, but recognizing through language the forms of the objects that constitute our world. In Chapter 1, in my account of the opening intuition of the Tractatus, I claimed that one can be turned to the world apart from logic. That intuition has gone through many refinements, in particular by identifying logic with the form of our representation of the world, the form of our making sense. But as I have argued, we can also recognize, through our making sense, a meaning that is not ours to make, that is not structured by our modes of representation. It is in that sense that logic must not be thought of as a ground; its necessity does not determine the form of what there is. Insofar as logic is the condition for making sense, it can be called transcendental (6.13). But logic is not itself a contentful ground or foundation. Logic is what makes thinking in terms of grounds possible at all. Thinking in terms of grounds means thinking as it is tied to justification, to the very idea of lawfulness. The scope of the logical thus includes all that is lawful: “The exploration of logic means the exploration of everything that is subject to law. And outside logic everything is accidental” (6.3). Wittgenstein elaborates this understanding of necessity by considering the proper way to explain the necessity that is deemed to characterize science. We do not have an a priori belief in a law of conservation, but rather a priori knowledge of the possibility of a logical form. (6.33) All such propositions, including the principle of sufficient reason, the laws of continuity in nature and of least effort in nature, etc. etc.— all these are a priori insights about the forms in which the propositions of science can be cast. (6.34) Mechanics is an attempt to construct according to a single plan all the true propositions that we need for the description of the world. (6.343)

Wittgenstein emphasizes that confusion can arise from treating such insights into forms of descriptions (which we choose) as providing substantive explanations for the necessity of our world’s being what it is. This illusion is typical of what Wittgenstein calls the modern conception of the world:

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The whole modern conception of the world is founded (zugrunde) on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. (6.371) Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both are wrong: Though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained. (6.372)

Challenging the modern conception of the world opens us up to the world beyond justification and ground. Nonetheless, despite his criticism of the modern world view, Wittgenstein claims that in a certain sense both the ancient and the modern views are right. The latter is wrong in the assumption that everything demands a ground and has a ground in the laws of nature, but it is right insofar as it does not posit anything beyond these laws that may serve as a further, deeper ground. There is no ground beyond science, but there is a possibility of apprehending the world apart from thinking in terms of grounds, thus beyond logic and the conditions of lawfulness. There is a possibility of relating to experience beyond lawfulness, to open to it in another way. We can now see how problematic it would be to attribute to Wittgenstein a Kantian conception of ethics. For Kant’s categorical imperative expresses a connection between law and the unconditioned, whereas Wittgenstein denies the very meaningfulness of the concept of unconditional law. We are, then, faced with a peculiar problem. Wittgenstein rejects any empirical or psychological underpinning of ethics. He insists on retaining the absoluteness or transcendence associated with the ethical. But he also rejects the idea of a categorical imperative, at least in the sense of a law from which one can derive all ethical obligations. To clarify his position we must try to elaborate further the position of the ethical subject with respect to language. Wittgenstein’s account aims in the first place at shifting the position of the ethical will with respect to representation. In general, our conception of willing depends on the priority of representation, first laying out possibilities and then determining oneself to act through the choice of one such possibility. Wittgenstein’s challenge to the conception of the thinking subject will also involve a drastic repudiation of any view of the willing subject that depends on the priority of representation—and, in

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particular, of the conception of the will as a capacity to choose a course of action after representing to itself a range of possibilities—and the associated view of free will as liberum arbitrium indiferentiae.9 Wittgenstein denies that the freedom of the will is to be thought of as a possibility of determining oneself to choose one way rather than another. The future is essentially unknown: We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Superstition is nothing but the belief in the causal nexus. (5.1361) The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference. (5.1362)

Wittgenstein does not say that the freedom of the will is an illusion that derives from our lack of knowledge of the future. Since the future is not in the space of possible knowledge for us, it is not the object of justified choice. But this does not mean that he is advocating causal determinism; indeed, he identifies the belief in a causal determination with superstition. Moreover, by claiming that future actions are essentially unknown, he is not expressing skepticism concerning the laws of nature. He acknowledges the regularity expressed by a law of nature. Yet there is a further dimension of our relation to the world, and it is in its light that we must think of the freedom of the will. From that perspective, what lies in the future is meaning insofar as I have to take it upon myself. The problem of knowledge about the future lies in the radical independence of that sphere of meaning. Thus the problem of the ethical will lies in the necessity of appropriating meaning, of judging, of making the world mine. Wittgenstein addresses the problem of the independence of future 9. For Schopenhauer the realization of the ethical dimension requires going beyond the sphere of representation. The problematic understanding of willing is that which is subordinated to representation. Schopenhauer links the issue of representation and the incorrect conception of will as follows: “The maintenance of an empirical freedom of will, a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, is very closely connected with the assertion that places man’s inner nature in a soul that is originally a knowing, indeed really an abstract thinking entity, and only in consequence thereof a willing entity” (The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 292); and further, “the decision of one’s own will is undetermined only for the spectator, one’s own intellect, and therefore only relatively and subjectively, namely for the subject of knowing.” Ibid., p. 291.

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events in the context of asserting the independence of elementary propositions. What is at stake is entering into an order of significance closed upon itself.10 Exercising the ethical will involves entering into a world. Only insofar as the future is not in a space of knowledge is it possible to speak of the assumption of meaning, the entry into a sphere of significance. Willing is conceived through the very entering into a space of significance that structures one’s deeds. The opening of possibilities of being is the fundamental act of will; it is the basis of all normativity and of actions undertaken in that sphere of meaning. One might say, then, that the primary ethical dimension has to do with inhabiting language, with acknowledging its conditions, with opening the space for action. The fundamental ethical act is the act of assuming significance, the manifestation of the subject through the sphere of significance, its possibilities and its demands. The correlate of that act, in respect of the subject, is the world rather than a particular fact in the world. If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can only alter the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. (6.43)

From the perspective of the opening of the Tractatus, in which the world is characterized as the totality of facts, it is hard to see how the limits of the world could be altered without altering the facts. But here we must shift away from that picture of our relation to the world. The exercise of the will (not necessarily what we would think of as any specific act of will) coincides with the complete alteration of the world involved in entering a sphere of meaningfulness, and Wittgenstein also associates this alteration with an affective change. This affective dimension must be un10. In thinking of the ethical in terms of the assumption of significance or meaning, it is imperative not to revert to a contemplative understanding of meaningfulness. As I emphasized, the assumption of meaning has to be considered at the level of language as part of the human organism, that is, as a sphere of action and life. There is no prior understanding of the structure of language followed by a decision to act upon such a representation. This order of things would necessarily assume that a representation of a purpose or a content is prior to the act of willing; it would make the act of willing something ‘sayable.’ This problematic model of the will can only be avoided if meaning appears in coordination with action.

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derstood in relation to the existence of the subject in language, or in the world, rather than psychologically. It is in this light that I understand Wittgenstein’s parenthetical remark “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” (6.421). I do not think that Wittgenstein recommends an aesthetic detachment as a true ethical standpoint; rather, he claims that the source or origin of those realms is one. Indeed, he does not say that ethics and aesthetics are “identical” but speaks of them as being one (sind Eins). Their common source can be understood by adding language to them. Affects can have a fundamental place in ethics if we understand their internal connection to such concepts as language, subject, and world. The feeling Wittgenstein speaks of, that of the happy man and his happy world, is the feeling that accompanies the accession to meaning. It is not a phenomenon distinct from language but an affect pertaining to being in language. In the early version of 6.43, in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks, this relation between feeling, world, and sense is very clear: “The world must so to speak wax and wane as a whole. As if by accession or loss of sense [Sinnes]”.11 The appearance of affect is crucial to the earlier discussion of the reward associated with the ethical act, for such pleasure can be spoken of as pertaining to the ethical only if it is associated with being in a meaningful world. This pleasure is not in any sense the kind that derives from the satisfaction of desire by some state of affairs or other. I want to call this affect a ‘mood’ because of its association with the world rather than with any particular thing. A mood is different from what we ordinarily call a feeling. It is not reducible to a psychological event taking place inside an individual, a subjective state. Nor is it necessarily attached to the causal influence of a particular thing. A mood can come from nowhere in particular, can pervade the world. It is not a filter through which we color the world, but rather something that invades us. Hence Wittgenstein’s assertion that the world of the happy man is a happy world challenges our ordinary way of thinking about feeling. The mood is correlative to the world as such. It reveals the subject’s intimacy with the world, or the emergence of the subject from the world. The possibility of moods is the possibility of claiming “I am my world.” Being attuned to the emergence of meaning can thus be described as the condition in which the world puts us in a happy mood. 11. NB, p. 73, my emphasis.

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The alteration of the world and the affective dimension associated with the assumption of limits must be distinguished from another experience, which Wittgenstein calls the world coming to an end. Those are not independent matters but are internally related. One could think of the relation between the meaningful appearance of a world and the world coming to an end as two sides of the limit. This requires an explanation. I have claimed that conceiving of the limit through the object allows us to avoid the difficulty posed by formulating the limit by means of an assertion, something that falls within the province of logic. Since any such formulation will have a negation that is sensical and therefore possible, it could not function as a genuine limit. The negation would lie on the other side of the limit, where there can be nothing. The form of the object, on the other hand, includes all possibilities, and can thus provide a limit that truly determines what there is without positing something beyond it. Yet we must not assume that because there is nothing on the other side of the limit—because the limit is, as it were, one-sided—that nothingness has no power over our relation to what there is. It is precisely for the purpose of elaborating the force of that negativity or nothingness that Wittgenstein introduces the notion of the coming to an end of the world.12 In order to begin with the elaboration of this other experience, or this other face of experience, of the absolute limit of the possible, Wittgenstein provides a parallel with the limit of life: death. So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end. (6.431) Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits. (6.4311)

Just as Wittgenstein’s earlier claim that “The world and life are one” established the connection between language and life, so too his thinking about mortality concerns dimensions that pertain to language. 12. This formulation is intended to evoke the famous encounter between Carnap and Heidegger concerning the force of the nothing, or whether it means anything to assert that the nothing nothings. Later on I suggest what position Wittgenstein might have taken in this encounter by considering his remark on Heidegger in his discussions with members of the Vienna Circle.

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In what sense does the nature of our relation to the absolute limit as such, to death, determine our relation to what there is? Is that relation itself formative of life, of experience? If we read Wittgenstein’s assertion that death is not an event in life to mean that there is no sense in speaking of the relation to death as structuring the events of life, then death would be wholly external to life. But suppose Wittgenstein wants to explain the limit of that totality which is the world by reference to my relation to my death. I have claimed earlier that the notion of world is tied essentially to the way in which a subject is made manifest by appropriating meaning. Such appropriation of meaning is an existential determination tying subject and world. Thus the notion of world cannot be understood as a contentful concept. On the basis of the analogy between our relation to life as a whole and our relation to the world as a whole, we should then say that there is no concept of completeness or human flourishing or virtue that determines the proper relation to life as a whole. Or to put it differently, death is the only form of completion of human life. Thus no preconceived meaning or goal can direct a person in relation to life as a whole. With death, the possibilities that formed my world do not alter but come to an end. Such possibilities are mine and do not survive my death. Possibilities are essentially dependent on my taking language upon myself; they are always fraught with the possibility that nothing may happen any more. The possible is to be understood not as an objective space external to the subject, but as something which always contains within its horizon the possibility that nothing be possible, that of my death. In this case, the possibility of having possibilities, of having a world, is internally related to the possibility of losing a world. Moreover, the awareness of that ultimate possibility of human life is the awareness of life as essentially enigmatic or as always demanding meaning. This awareness colors life with a sense of incompleteness, or an essential lack. Thus we can say that it is this awareness of the limit that turns us onto life as something that demands meaning, something that could be called a riddle. This is what drives us to recover meaning, to find significance. Thinking of death as the limit of life is thus intrinsically tied to the enigmatic nature of life or experience and to the assumption of meaning. This is elaborated in Wittgenstein’s criticism of the futility of resorting to the idea of the immortality of the soul:

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Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (6.4312)

Insofar as a certain sense of limitation colors experience with incompleteness, thus presenting it as a riddle, then merely thinking of the continuation of the existence of the soul as it is solves nothing. The problem with the conception of the immortality of the soul is that it takes death to be completely external to meaningful life and thus in principle eliminable for the human soul, if not for the body. This denial of the condition of finitude fails to solve the problem; it does not accomplish its purpose. But as we saw above, Wittgenstein draws a further distinction between infinite temporal duration and timelessness which provides another way of facing that condition: If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. (6.4311)

‘Living in the present’ expresses Wittgenstein’s sense of what it means to alter the limits of the world. It is to have present the conditions in which one’s living takes place, to be in an environment of meaning. It is the assumption of the form of experience that faces the threat of possibilities coming to an end. This forms the internal connection between the concept of the world’s coming to an end and that of the alteration of the world. The condition of grace or happiness which Wittgenstein also describes as living in the present is not a matter of intuition or a wordless feeling of being one with the world. It must be understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s acceptance of everyday language as the true locus of such presentness or grace. Everyday language is language that is significant in itself, as the site of sense and meaningfulness. This prefigures Wittgenstein’s claim that The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

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(Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?). (6.521)

We are now able to understand why it is that, in claiming that everyday language is in perfect logical order, Wittgenstein introduces for the first time a note of urgency or an ethical dimension into his discourse: “Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are.” The very possibility of entering a significant world thus depends on the experience of limitation as such. There is an inner connection between the alteration of the limits of the world that constitutes the condition of presence and the experience of the absolute limits of life. Just as the feeling of presence was interpreted as the assumption of language, the description of the experience of absolute limits, at the subjective-existential level, has an ontological-linguistic correlate. There is another experience, or another aspect to the experience of significance elaborated in the Tractatus, which may be called the religious side of the ethical, or in Wittgenstein’s words, the mystical. This is what Wittgenstein calls “feeling the world as a limited whole.” To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical. (6.45)

Viewing the world as a limited whole at first evokes the image of being able to stand, as it were, outside the world and survey it as a whole. This image could be related to the opening of the Tractatus, which creates the sense that we have all facts laid out in front of us. But is that what Wittgenstein means? By adding the qualification “limited” to the idea of viewing the world as a whole, is he merely reiterating that everything is to be taken together, or is he addressing the perspective of the finite, thus reconceiving the metaphysico-religious idea of the world seen “sub specie aeterni”? Does limitation emphasize here the qualification of totality or of partiality? Or does it show a way of thinking them together, that is, of thinking ‘beings as a whole’ from the perspective of the finite? Wittgenstein’s previous discussion of the relation between limits and death essentially connected the concept of limitation with that of finitude. At proposition 6.45, the sense of limitation as finitude is fur-

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ther emphasized by the shift from viewing to feeling. ‘Anschaung’, which is translated here as ‘viewing’, also has connotations, at least since Kant, of intuition, thus of what is given or what gives itself. Playing on that double meaning makes clear the shift from the activity of viewing to the passivity of feeling. Associating the sense of the world with feeling removes Wittgenstein even further from the classical metaphysician and his way of conceptualizing the world as a whole. This is also a shift in the place of the subject: to view something as a whole does indeed demand an external perspective on the thing viewed, the object being present to you, while to feel limits emphasizes the limitation you will experience in relation to the world as a whole.13 It expresses the sense of limitation that the world places on you when you are in the midst of things. This is a different feeling from the feeling of the happy world, which Wittgenstein mentions in 6.43. As I argued, there is an inner connection between these two types of affects, for the possibility of a significant world depends on the experience of the world as a limited whole.14 Wittgenstein’s thinking on ethics is essentially religious. Its central concern is that of transcendence. In “Culture and Value” he remarks: “What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.”15 In the Tractatus the connection between ethics and religion must be seen through the relation of the experience of the appearance of the form of a significant world and the ‘experience’ of the very existence of a significant world. It is this last experience that Wittgenstein calls mystical: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (6.44). To feel the world as a limited whole is to be affected by the very existence of the world—that there is a world rather than nothing. It is in this sense that limitation pertains not just to the position of the subject in the world but also to the world as a whole. There is that which makes 13. Feeling does not preclude being in the midst of things, experiencing the whole that surrounds us. But in this case limitation is then no longer taken in the spatial visual sense, as contours or borderlines of the world, but rather in the sense that the whole that one is part of is itself finite. To think of the world as finite is to think that there is a difference between Being and beings. We can then say that there is a sense in which we can conceive of the emergence of beings, that is, of creation. 14. They are related in the way that the beautiful can be said to be related to the sublime. 15. CV, p. 3.

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itself manifest beyond beings, but this excess of being can only be characterized through the feeling of the existence of the world as such, not in relation to something or other. The limitation of the world as such can then be thought of as the ‘gap’ between beings and world. What is in excess to what there is can only be thought of as the very existence of the world. The original experience of the very possibility of a significant world is characterized in Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” in terms of the sense of wonder at the very existence of the world, or alternatively, at the very existence of language: I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: It is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not a proposition in language, is the existence of language itself.16

The source of significance, the transcendence involved in significance as such, can be related to the concept of a miracle. But this is not a miracle that occurs at one time in a particular place in the world. There is no burning bush. Rather, the only sense that can be given to this miraculousness is related to the existence of significance altogether. The existence of a meaningful world, or, what comes to the same, the existence of language as such, is to be considered a miracle. It is in this sense that the Tractatus can be regarded as dealing with creation itself. For when it comes to this dimension, one does not feel the happiness associated with the recognition of what things are, with the showing of significance, but rather one’s experience concerns the very existence of a significant world rather than nothing. But how do we become aware of the existence of language, in language? What does the existence of significance contrast with? In contrast to what does the world appear as a limited whole? One could say that the world exists in contrast to chaos or, speaking in terms of language, that it exists in contrast to nonsense. Let us return to the relation formed between life as a whole coming to an end and the awareness of the world as a whole. I have claimed that the awareness of limitation reveals a movement of avoidance, of flight 16. LE, p. 11.

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from this inner limitation. The limits of language, or of the world, are not merely inert borderlines but are essentially where the movement of avoidance and recovery takes place. This movement of avoidance is at the very heart of the ethical; it is a fundamental drive. In relation to language as such it is the destruction of the conditions of meaningfulness, the drive to nonsense. It is against that background of chaos in language that we can think of the revelation of the very existence of language or of significance. Thus the ultimate expression of the ethical demands thoughtfulness in relation to the appearance of nonsense. The showing of what there is was interpreted through the assumption of ordinary conditions of meaning, but the feeling of the existence of language will manifest itself only through the destruction of the condition of meaningfulness, in the drive to nonsense. How is nonsense linked to the expression of the ethical? When language attempts to express the absolute ground of evaluation (the possibility of the absolute elevation of something above facts)— when it attempts to claim that something is infinitely more worthy than it is in fact—it attempts to say something that absolutely escapes signification. This kind of speech will always miss the mark, for it constitutes a vain attempt to present the transcendence of absolute value by means of something that can be said, a fact. Presenting something through the appearance of something else is one way of characterizing what a metaphor or simile is. In his “Lecture on Ethics” Wittgenstein diagnoses our ethical language as inherently tending to the simile. Our understanding of the ethical provides us with an account of the generation of similes (call them pictures) and at the same time explains that there is nothing behind them. A figure can be viewed at the most basic level as a translation from one space to another. But what ethical language manifests is a movement of translation to which no literal meaning would correspond. The similes used are essentially empty. Recognizing that fact brings translation or movement as such to the fore. Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by mean of a simile I must be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find

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that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense.17

The effort to generate replacements in the attempt to hold on to some figure of meaning is what Wittgenstein thinks of as the generation of nonsense. Such nonsense reveals the intrinsically problematic position of the human will with respect to the finding of value, what I have called the condition in which desire is out of joint with its object. To avoid the Wittgensteinian understanding of limits as limitation would be to place something beyond the limits of facts, something we would feel could never be said directly but must be expressed by means of a simile. Such a simile operates as a defense to hide the condition of limitation or finitude. This is why we can be gripped by a picture or a simile (Wittgenstein will further elaborate this psychology in his later thinking about pictures). There is therefore an excess in language, a generation of noise disguised as significant communication, in attempts to produce an absolute evaluation. But this excess is in itself significant, for it is a sign of the ethical manifesting itself wrongly. To recognize nonsense as such is to be able to acknowledge this condition instead of reacting against it, for this is the only condition in which the very existence of language manifests itself. This is why Wittgenstein regards such a drive to nonsense in language with the utmost seriousness and includes himself among those moved by such attempts: My whole tendency, and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion, was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.18

We can better understand Wittgenstein’s concept of the mystical by noting that in 6.522 Wittgenstein speak of it in terms of revelation: “There 17. LE, p. 10. 18. LE, pp. 11–12.

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are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”19 Wittgenstein’s use of the passive form, ‘Make themselves manifest’, stands in the starkest contrast with his initial description of our activity of sense-making as making pictures to ourselves. Manifestation, or revelation, should be distinguished from the active making of pictures, but also from the dimension of showing.20 What this distinction implies in the first place is that we cannot do anything to bring about the experience of the mystical (as opposed to discovering an answer to a question, or actively seeking it). Of course, showing is not of something that we produce either: we make sense, but showing is of something that is already there as the horizon of form of our active engagement with things. But even showing is distinct from the passivity of manifestation. It is through suffering from nonsense that we can experience manifestation. We acknowledge meaning but suffer from nonsense. Manifestation and showing form what might be called the two sides of the event of ‘coming into presence’ of meaning. Showing and manifestation depend on each other. The showing of experience involves the manifestation of world; the truth in language demands the truth of language. The return from nonsense is essential to the way in which recovering the limits of experience is associated with happiness. This relation between manifestation and nonsense makes it clear that manifestation always involves a dimension in which the failure to signify turns into a sign in itself. Therefore, strictly speaking, revelation involves an affect of pain or anxiety, deriving from failure, which is the affect that is associated with the experience of limitation as such. Although in the Tractatus itself Wittgenstein does not speak of anxiety as a revelation of limitation as such, in his conversations with members of the Vienna Circle he proposes the following interpretation of Heideg19. Ogden’s translation of this passage—“There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical”—conveys more accurately Wittgenstein’s use of the locution “Es gibt,” which does not assume that some thing is revealed. The translation of Pears and McGuinness, with its reference to things that make themselves manifest, makes the ending most problematic. Significantly, the locution “Es gibt” will later be used systematically by Heidegger for very similar purposes. 20. In German the distinction is between ‘zeigt sich’ and ‘zeigt.’ It is important to recognize the dimension of manifestation or revelation in what shows itself, yet it would be better to retain, as Ogden does in translating “zeigt sich” by “shows itself,” the association with ‘showing.’ This reinforces the sense that what is shown is not ours to make.

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ger’s understanding of anxiety with reference to the language we have used to discuss the Tractatus: I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This running-up-against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up-against Paradox). This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics. I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about Ethics— whether there be knowledge, whether there be values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In Ethics one is always making the attempt to say something that does not concern the essence of the matter and never can concern it. It is a priori certain that whatever one might offer as a definition of the Good, it is always simply a misunderstanding to think that it corresponds in expression to the authentic matter one actually means (Moore). Yet the tendency represented by the runningup-against points to something. St. Augustine already knew this when he said: What, you wretch, so you want to avoid talking nonsense? Talk some nonsense, it makes no difference!21

Insofar as that anxiety appears in the Tractatus, it will be associated with the failure to signify, the awareness of the repeated generation of nonsense. There will essentially be a moment of frustration or withholding of satisfaction associated with this affect. That moment is indeed mentioned in proposition 6.54, which leads us to realize that philosophical teaching essentially provokes dissatisfaction. Thus as we work our way to the last propositions of the book, we are confronted with the question of how to attune ourselves to this manifestation. How can a book turn us toward that event? How can it be so pointed as to puncture our constant demand for meaning? Such a book demands a relation to language that is more fundamental than is our being guided by established meanings. It must work its way toward the possibility of an event that itself exceeds the means of expression. This is the event of the Tractatus. 21. WVC, p. 69. See E. Friedlander, “Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein: Much Ado About Nothing,” in A. Biletzky and A. Matar, eds., The Story of Analytic Philosophy.

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A Demanding Silence

An intriguing aspect of the ending of the Tractatus is its development of variations on the theme of questioning and response. To bring out how insistent is this elaboration of questioning and response, I put together the various instances where Wittgenstein raises that issue: [Or] is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not the eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problem of natural science that is required.) (6.4312) The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution. (6.4321) When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. (6.5) Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (6.51) We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. (6.52) 145

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The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?) (6.521)

This emphasis on the theme of question and answer is striking. Wittgenstein uses a number of terms when raising that issue—Ratsel, Problem, Aufgabe; Losung, Frage; Antwort, Zweifel. The various terms may seem to support the claim that the question does not exist, but this does not explain why he returns to the theme so many times. It seems, rather, that this theme should be seen in the context of what is probably the most evident feature of the book’s end, its enigmatic concluding sentences. The end of the Tractatus, with its demand to throw away the ladder, leaves us astonished. It seems, then, that Wittgenstein’s constant return to the theme of questioning is an attempt to separate this astonishment and the enigma of the end from our usual modes of understanding a question, a problem, a doubt. In his discussions with members of the Vienna Circle as well as in the “Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein speaks of the kind of astonishment that is not expressible as a question: Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it.1

Astonishment at the existence of the world is not a specific question to which an answer could be found. Wittgenstein precludes this way of addressing the issue: When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it. (6.5)

To put such astonishment in the form of a question would be to make it into a specific problem that demands an answer. But astonishment is not a question. It is internally related to what I called the assumption of language. Indeed, that possibility of acknowledgment presupposes a loss, 1. WVC, p. 68.

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the questionability of experience as a whole, and the astonishment that accompanies recognition of the nonsensicality of attempted answers. The alleged solution to such a condition points us once more to existence in language, in its ordinariness. Accepting the ordinary as a standard is suggested by Wittgenstein’s statement that “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem” (6.521). Astonishment has no object but the world, or the very existence of language. Metaphysics can be seen as an attempt to react to such astonishment by providing an answer, a thematic view of the world as a whole. Thus to recognize the nonsensicality of metaphysics opens the moment of astonishment. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus exemplifies that the turning to the world cannot be sustained by any concept. The world is a place of nondetermination. It is inherently questionable or enigmatic. The end of the Tractatus presents in the most vivid form the sense of the tension arising from the pressure to think the world as a whole. In such a limit state, language brings us into the proximity of what is not a question but an enigma. How does the Tractatus as a whole presents us with the enigmatic? An enigmatic text is not a riddle for which one needs to seek a solution. It is a text whose difficulty implicates the reader by demanding that he transform his mode of approach. In other words, such a book, beyond its manifest content, has a dimension in which the very act of reading, the relation of reader and text, exemplifies something about the concerns of the work. Its concerns are exemplified in concreto, here and now, in the act of reading itself. The reader’s own reactions, especially his difficulties, are in themselves evidence of what the text is about. Hence there is a certain parallel between the experience of reading the Tractatus and the experience of the world, or of the ethical that it directs us to. At the end of the book we can consider most clearly how the experience of reading is linked to the experience of the world. (“He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”) Astonishment has no answer, but it can provoke a response to a demand that is almost empty—a demand to recover language as such. The famous last sentence of the Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” can be read as precisely such a demand, as the ethical imperative in language. The very form of that sentence—the demand to be silent about what we cannot speak of—is at first sight puz-

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zling, for if something cannot be done there is no point in prohibiting it. The demand seems redundant, especially in the light of Wittgenstein’s earlier statement at 5.61: “We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.” Hence, at the end, it is clear that something more is involved. The sense of redundancy is generated by misconstruing the opposition of speech and silence. It would indeed be tautological to say that sense cannot be made beyond the bounds of sense, but Wittgenstein does not state: “What we cannot say, we must not say.” He uses the term “sprechen” (speaking) rather than “sagen” (saying), and thus opposes speech and silence. He demands silence. What is at stake here is, then, an actual intervention with speech rather than the abstract opposition of the sayable and the unsayable. Moreover, the opposite of silence is not necessarily speaking with sense but, rather, making noise. Speaking without sense is one way of being noisy. The ending of the Tractatus should therefore be read in conjunction with the epigraph of the book, which places the act of expression against a background of noise: “. . . and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.” The implication is that the noise of empty talk, whether it be nonsense or mere mindlessness, conceals something. To be silent means primarily not to fall prey to the rumbling and roaring of rumor. Silence is what we need in order to be attentive to what there is, to the showing of truth. But why should it be difficult to accept language? Why the tendency to cover up language with noise? It is the simultaneous recognition of the groundlessness of meaning and of the dependence of the very being of the subject on the assumption of meaning that generates anxiety, and the concomitant tendency to conceal that anxiety by seeking to ground meaning systematically in metaphysics. We can now form a connection between proposition 7, with its demand for silence, and proposition 6.53, which addresses the correct method of philosophy and describes the formative experience of philosophy as that of being robbed of such ultimate meaning. Language is drawn into meaninglessness, in the very attempt to cover its own groundlessness: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural sci-

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ence—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.

Thus being denied the illusion of meaning produces anxiety or makes manifest the anxiety at the heart of our being in language. This is what establishes the underlying mood of the book’s ending and shows how the demand to maintain oneself resolutely within this anxiety might indeed be conceived as an imperative. This posture is demanded in the face of the urge to run up against the limits of language. The dissatisfaction that the other person would evince by being shown the meaninglessness of the terms he uses would cause him to redouble his efforts, until he came to recognize the urge in that repetition itself. Recognizing the significance of that moment is the primary condition of philosophical learning. The imperative, the ‘must’ of the last sentence, which must be kept distinct from, yet related to, the familiar understanding of the ethical ‘ought,’ has to be read in conjunction with the sense of astonishment I have elaborated. The ‘answer’ to the impossible ‘question’ is a response to a voice that commands meaning as such. It does not command this or that but is a demand to maintain oneself within language. In his remarks on Heidegger to the Vienna Circle Wittgenstein cited Augustine’s saying with reference to this impulse to run up against the limits of language: “What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!”2 The context here is unclear, but years later Wittgenstein returned to this very remark of Augustine in a conversation with Maurice Drury. In response to Drury’s assertion that “a professor of philosophy had no right to keep silent concerning such an important subject [as religion]” Wittgenstein commented: You are saying something like St. Augustine says here. ‘Et vae . . .’ But this translation in your edition misses the point entirely. It reads, ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee seeing that those who say most are dumb.’ It should be translated ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of 2. WVC, p. 69.

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nonsense.’ ‘Loquaces’ is a term of contempt. I won’t refuse to talk to you about God or about religion.3

It would seem that nothing could be easier than to be silent, and that a demand for silence would be superfluous. But such an easy silence would not address the anxiety or the sense that the limits of language place a demand on the subject. If we decide in advance that what is important is the silence, we might just as well sit back and avoid nonsense by not speaking of anything important. The attempt to avoid nonsense by remaining silent, Wittgenstein argues, is swinish behavior. The recognition of significance always involves returning from the temptation of nonsense. Wittgenstein views the very urge to nonsense as significant or as manifesting the ethical dimension. Indeed, what is imperative is not what one says, but one’s ability to recognize this disintegration of language. For human beings, silence manifests itself in the form of a demand. This is not the Kantian imperative arising from the division between nature and reason, but rather, it is the sign that the source of the significance of speech manifests itself only through the drive to nonsense. The imperative in language cannot be heard apart from the temptation to nonsense, to noise. This is precisely why being silent is possible only as an imperative.4 The imperative to listen in silence is the demand to do away with the noisy elements of nonsense that surround us, but the imperative form precisely means that silence is ever to be achieved through overcoming the temptation to noise. We cannot listen to pure silence.5 The propositions of the Tractatus can serve as elucidations. What is it that is elucidated and what particular function do these propositions serve when used as elucidations? Wittgenstein characterizes elucidations in 3.263: The meanings of primitive signs can be explained by means of elucidations. Elucidations are propositions that contain the primitive signs. 3. R. Rhees, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, pp. 90–91. 4. Listening has always been a favorite philosophical figure for the appearance of the ethical imperative, the voice of conscience. 5. This will develop into the voices of the Philosophical Investigations—between temptation and return, ever manifesting the imperative of silence or the need to give philosophy peace.

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So they can only be understood if the meanings of those signs are already known.

Elucidations appear in the process of clarification involved in analysis. Analysis presents a primitive term in a context that makes its use perspicuous. Such a work assumes from the start an understanding of the meaning of signs, although in a confused form. It is in that sense that Wittgenstein writes: Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)

This claim concerning the nature of a philosophical work must be contrasted, on the one hand, to Wittgenstein’s description of the strictly correct method in philosophy in 6.53, and on the other, to the elucidatory nature of the Tractatus. The strictly correct method in philosophy raises the question of the relation between elucidation and demonstrating to someone that he has failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. An elucidation operates in a context where meaning appears cloudy and indistinct and must be made perspicuous. The demonstration of nonsense occurs when all our attempts at clarification have failed to provide a meaning to some term we have used. But this demonstration is produced by means of elucidating meaningful terms. It is precisely by clarifying the functioning of our terms that we can realize that we have missed our aim, we have failed to provide meaning. A connection is thus established between the work of elucidation and the demonstration of nonsense. But this also makes clear the contrast between such work, which Wittgenstein calls the strictly correct method in philosophy, and the work of the Tractatus itself. If the Tractatus does not exemplify the strictly correct method, how does it differ from it? It could be seen as presenting a case in which a term—here, the term that opened the book, ‘the world’—has not been given meaning, for all propositions that attempted to produce such a meaning have turned out to be nonsense. But the peculiar thing is that it is precisely by virtue of that

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failure that the Tractatus is an elucidation. The elucidation is no longer one of meaning: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical.” It is this recognition of nonsense that provides the elucidation—that at the heart of language is a place of nonmeaning. It requires us to recognize such a place in the midst of our dealings with meaning. The Tractatus is an elucidation of that which can be no meaning. It perspicuously presents an empty place. This is a task that is intrinsically contradictory; it can succeed only by bringing us close to the failure or disintegration of language in such a way as to illuminate or provide an elucidation. How can nonmeaning be elucidated? I have indicated the relation that Wittgenstein forms between the drive to metaphysics, the quest for absolute value, and the apparent generation of similes or figures. Those figures strictly speaking stand for nothing. They are nonsensical attempts to say more than can be said. That excess beyond what can be said is what lends to such utterances the appearance of figures. As long as we remain gripped by such figures we do not recognize their nonsensicality. But can there be a figure that is able to make manifest its very emptiness, that it is a figure of nothing? The Tractatus contains such a figure, namely the figure of the ladder at the end of the book. This is where the thought of nonsense and the question of the figurative come together. The first thing to note about the ladder is that it is a figure. We have encountered other figures in the Tractatus: to speak of the proposition as a picture is a figure of sorts, as is Wittgenstein’s use of the human organism to characterize everyday language. But the fact that this figure is placed here, at the limit of what philosophy can do, is itself suggestive and evokes various other mythical moments in philosophy. The figure of the ladder does not relate to a specific moment in the book, to a certain claim or argument. It is a figure for the book itself and for our mode of reading it. Moreover, it makes the issue of achieving the proper relation to the world dependent on the relation we bear to the text itself. One might say that it presents an analogy between our relation to the text and our relation to the world. The elaboration of the analogy precludes grasping the Tractatus as a closed totality, as something wholly self-sufficient that we can encompass in our reading, for at the last moment of the attempted closure

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everything falls apart. Hence the ladder is a figure for the world as that which eludes us; it is a figure for the recognition of the very absence of sense in our relation to the world. However, the ladder also presents the whole text as a figure of sorts, showing it to be an attempt that misses its mark, a generation of an excess of meaning in language in an attempt to elucidate the world. It reveals the work of the Tractatus as the creation of an immense myth. The Tractatus does not merely include a figure for what it is to read it. The ladder is a figure that presents that work itself as a figure for nothing. Think of it this way: the Tractatus is shown, by means of the figure of the ladder, to be illusion rather than thought; although in itself nonsense, it presents itself as something other than it is. Now such an illusion, far from being a deceitful mask that hides the truth, emerges as profoundly revelatory. The presentation of truth by means of a displacement from literal meaning is what I understand to be a successful figure. I mentioned in my introduction the similarity between the Tractatus and the impossible book of ethics. What are the implications of this similarity, and of the fact that the apocalyptic book is clearly a book of fantasy? Did Wittgenstein aim to write such a book but was simply unable to produce the intensity of explosion that would destroy all other books? Or, as I think Wittgenstein implies, is the thought of writing a book with the power to destroy all other books itself an illusion? But how does the figure of the ladder fit in this comparison? Throwing away the ladder could also be said to be something of a fantasy, at least if it is to be understood as solving once and for all the problems of philosophy (see the preface). For why should the last two propositions be excluded from the threat of nonsensicality when they too belong to the book and must be thrown away? That would mean that we must overcome the fantasy of throwing metaphysics away, once and for all, like a ladder. The metaphysical urge has to be recognized and deconstructed time and again. This might be one reason why the Tractatus is not an example of the strictly correct method in philosophy (see 6.54) but does characterize the need for that method. There is no place where we could stand to contemplate such a scene of destruction. The wish for the ultimate silence is as misleading as the wish for the omniscient perspective on all that is the case. *

*

*

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Meaning may have been lost, but does that leave us with nothing? Maybe it is precisely when no thoughts are left that the simple presence of the one who writes is revealed, followed by the awareness of myself, the implicated reader. The figure of a ladder as a figure for reading allows this shift of registers. If the ladder leads us anywhere, it is from our immersion in the text to the point where we can raise the question of our relation to the text. It allows us to understand that our relation to the work as a whole presents an analogue of our relation to the world and to another person, thus bringing to the fore author, reader, and text. At the end of the Tractatus, it is speech rather than thought that is withheld. The dimension of speech was barely apparent in the previous considerations. This is therefore the place to inquire what properly belongs to speech as such, and how speech relates to the other moments of language disclosed by the text. What are the conditions of speech? I have contrasted speech and saying, and also silence and noise. I now want to think of speech as essentially a matter of address. Speech is something that is given and accepted, withheld or denied among subjects. Speech reveals a moment which is essential to ethics and which has been strangely absent from Wittgenstein’s considerations up to now: the presence of another human being as essential to the opening of the domain of the ethical. That speech is unavailable here, at the end, means that we have reached the limit of the relation to another person, the limit that reveals something essential about that relation. This is also the limit on the intervention on the part of Wittgenstein himself.6 It is significant that this moment occurs within a scene of education which starts with 6.53 and deals with how to respond to someone who comes to philosophy.7 Here the teacher himself appears in person, and 6. This way of thematizing the end makes it a moment of solitude, even in the presence of another human being. Many interpretations that consider the end of the book in the context of the problem of the relation to others tend to emphasize a return to communality, to a shared language (see, for example, J. Floyd, “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”; T. Ricketts, “Pictures, Logic and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus”). This approach ignores the way in which agreement in judgment depends upon the moments of utter isolation, works against the threat of nonsensicality. 7. Wittgenstein speaks of method in the context of the teaching of philosophy, thus using the term ‘method’ in the traditional philosophical way (see, for example, Kant’s understanding of the doctrine of method). The separation between the strictly correct method in philosophy and the work of the Tractatus should not be identified with the claim that the Tractatus is not a textbook (Preface).

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the limits of his capacity to intervene are determined. In these last propositions Wittgenstein brings together the ethical, the nature of philosophical teaching and learning, as well as the literary space spanned between author, reader, and text. The moment we face, as a limit moment, is not a communication of content based on understanding but an encounter pure and simple. The appearance of the reader can be thought of through a peculiar temporal determination of the possibility of coming to terms with the work. Consider the contrast between the description of the reader’s position at the beginning and at the end: Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts.—So it is not a textbook.—Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it. (Preface, p. 3) [A]nyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.). (6.54)

A first striking difference between these two passages is that whereas the Preface denies that the Tractatus is a textbook, namely a text that can be used as a ladder to advance step by step, the end suggests that it must be treated as a textbook in order to ultimately learn from it beyond what is, strictly speaking, teachable. This must be related to the claim I made in the first chapter: that the work has a structure of return, and that the place we return to is the world. And we do not need a ladder to reach the world.8 We nevertheless need the fantasy of climbing a ladder that leads us to some external theoretical perspective on the world and of failing in this attempt, precisely in order to be eventually returned to the world. In throwing away the ladder we do not throw away something that has served its purpose in bringing us to a different place than the one we started from. We throw it away because we have realized something about our urge to construct ladders. But that insight itself cannot be achieved without working through the fantasy of the ladder. 8. “I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me” (CV, p. 7).

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The second striking difference between the two passages, related to the first, concerns the temporal dimension that is evoked. In the Preface Wittgenstein emphasizes the ‘already had’ of truth: the reader must already possess what the book strives toward in order to be able to read it with understanding. The latter proposition indicates a future moment, after all that could have been done has been done. Understanding will occur ‘eventually,’ after the fact of reading. The time lag between the completion of reading and the moment of realization expressed in the ‘eventually’ can be read in conjunction with the temporality of the ‘already had.’ For, if in respect to the linear reading of the book realization can only be late, then whoever understands already has in mind the thoughts expressed here, is pregnant with the possibility of understanding. Throwing away the ladder is not an action dictated by the reading, but a distinct moment temporally separated from such reading; hence the time gap between reading and recognition. This idea shifts the burden of meaningfulness onto the reader. Throwing away the ladder involves a decisiveness that is not dictated by the reading. Decisiveness reveals my position as a reader with respect to what was read.9 It is in this gap that the very existence of a reader, by way of his resoluteness in throwing away the ladder, becomes the issue. We still have not explained the appearance of the author, of Wittgenstein in person, standing apart from his propositions.10 “Anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical” (my emphasis). It is tempting to misread this shift to mean that Wittgenstein holds some key that has been withheld from us in the writing, that there is some information that he knows but has not conveyed in his propositions, especially in the light of the opening remarks of the preface: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself 9. Such decisiveness is not distinct from the facing and assuming of possibilities on the part of the reader himself, in his own place. It is to be distinguished from Diamond’s idea of not ‘chickening out,’ which, I take it, still assumes the possibility of getting rid of metaphysics absolutely. (See “Throwing Away the Ladder,” in The Realistic Spirit). 10. Mounce points at this shift only in order to deny its significance: “Note that he speaks not so much of our understanding what he says as of our understanding him. He is suggesting, in other words, that even if we cannot, strictly speaking, grasp the sense of what he says, we can certainly grasp what he is getting at in saying it.” See Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction, p. 101.

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already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts” (Preface, p. 3). Why else is the author mentioned if not to indicate that he holds some knowledge that has been denied to all those who did not share the same thoughts themselves before reading the text? One is tempted to place Wittgenstein in the position of the subject who is supposed to know. Moreover, the numbering of the last proposition, 7, would seem to place him in the position of the author of that world, the one who holds all the answers, in silence. Yet it should be clear by now that Wittgenstein does not take his authorship as deriving its authority from the place of transcendence occupied by the divinity. The point is not that Wittgenstein possesses some knowledge that is hidden, withheld from us, for in the end there is nothing; and this is precisely what turns the reader towards the author. His attraction as a master derives solely from his ability to make this nothingness manifest. This is also what I see as the source of both the fascination and the paralysis provoked by the end. Wittgenstein’s statement that whoever understands him will eventually reject his propositions as nonsensical sounds strange. If we were to attribute to him some form of esoteric knowledge, we would expect him to say that whoever rejects his propositions as nonsensical will understand him beyond what he said. The formulation chosen by Wittgenstein indicates that the relation one forms to the teacher provides the support for the resolve to eventually reject the propositions. If the recognition of the nonsensicality of the very language we use is at stake, there must be someone else who supports that understanding as our language disintegrates. It is this condition that necessitates the appearance of the first person. In his conversation with the Vienna Circle Wittgenstein is reported to have said: At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person: I think that this is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first person. For me a theory is without value. A theory gives me nothing.11

The appearance of the first person at the end of the “Lecture on Ethics” or at the end of the Tractatus does not mean that we have reached a mo11. WVC, p. 117.

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ment of sincerity, as opposed to the deceit of all that has gone before; nor can it be attributed to Wittgenstein’s wish to express his personal belief, for it appears precisely when all views are put aside. Rather, the necessity of the appearance of the first person is linked with the disintegration of meaning as such. Put differently, when we throw away the ladder, we are confronted with the question of what we can stand on (until we realize that we have been brought back to earth). What can support us in that realization? In particular, if the realization is something of an abyss for the reader, what is necessary at this point is the presence of another human being—not to help the subject to understand, but to support the realization. The condition is one in which the reader is individuated through facing limits. It is in relation to the book’s power to isolate the reader at the end that Wittgenstein writes in the preface: “Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read it with understanding.”12 That the book is aimed at one person does not mean that Wittgenstein had no ambition for his work to make an impact; nor does it indicate his doubt in the possibility of finding one reader who might understand such a difficult book. Rather, it is essential to the book’s turn of thought that it always be aimed at one person, in turn. 12. I have modified the translation to fit the sense that what is at stake is not the understanding of the book’s content but reading it with understanding.

Part Two

Signs of Sense

Debates Concerning the Tractatus

11

On Some Central Debates Concerning the Tractatus

In presenting my interpretation of the Tractatus I tried to stay as close as possible to the movement of the text itself. This meant foregoing any comparison between my interpretation and the central interpretative positions concerning the Tractatus. Here I would like to remedy this lack to some extent, without making a systematic attempt to present the various interpretative debates concerning the Tractatus but simply placing my interpretation in relation to certain exemplary positions. A further aim of this second part is to form broad connections between the different topics of the Tractatus. While my exposition of the various topics will follow more or less their order of exposition in the book, I will also try to indicate their interdependence. Thus this chapter presents connections between the various issues in the Tractatus in a more schematic, perspicuous, and condensed way than in the main body of the text above.

1. Facts, Objects, and the World The structure of my interpretation depends on maintaining a threefold distinction between the various perspectives opened by the Tractatus: to separate as well as to relate the perspectives of facts, of objects, and of the world. Each of these terms introduces a set of concepts that enables its elucidation. Thus, for example, facts will be associated with an elaboration of logical, inferential relations, with the notion of structure, with how things are. It is from this perspective that our making of sense, of what can be said, will be primarily elaborated. Facts are importantly said 161

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to be valueless. The perspective of objects gives us a grasp of the notion of realized form, or of real possibilities. The recovery of objects is the recognition of meaning and significance in language. It is from this perspective that the force and the point of Wittgenstein’s notion of showing, and its contrast with saying, become apparent. The perspective opened by the term ‘world’ is accompanied by an elaboration of the concept of limits, and it introduces an understanding of the subject as existing in language. It is from this perspective that we understand Wittgenstein’s use of the concept of revelation or manifestation (in contrast both to showing and to saying) and its relation to the drive to nonsense. It is also this perspective that raises the question of our relation as readers to the text of the Tractatus as a whole and to its injunction to throw away the ladder. This very schematic division of the main concepts of the Tractatus can, I think, indicate my initial disagreement with various central interpretations of the Tractatus. Most interpreters, when considering the relation between the grasping of facts and the recognition of objects, agree that facts are precisely what is straightforwardly accessible, they are what is said in language. There is far less agreement among interpreters about our access to objects, a notion that is thoroughly problematized in the Tractatus. There is no agreement as to what objects are, or even if we can ever know them. Some interpreters tend to associate them with a particular kind of things (for instance, J. and M. Hintikka think of them as objects of acquaintance); others, such as D. Pears, view the postulation of objects as the result of an a priori argument concerning the necessary conditions for language, and think of such objects as unlike anything we are acquainted with. In my view, the first question to ask is what is at stake in the revelation of objects. Why would the revelation of objects be something that is of fundamental value for Wittgenstein? Alternatively, we could ask what is problematic in treating our access to the world merely in terms of facts. The problem arises towards the end of the Tractatus, when we realize that a world of facts is a world without value. By focusing on facts as the “real” constituents of our world, we are led to place all value outside the world. We end up facing a stark contrast between a world of facts and a transcendent source of value, as well as the apparently insurmountable problem of relating the one to the other. That contrast leaves no room for a conception of experience that is in itself valuable.

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The stark contrast between facts and transcendent value is in part due to the problematic elaboration of the perspective of the objects. A distinct feature of my interpretation is that it links the recognition of objects to the opening of significance, to a dimension of value. The recognition of objects is the revelation of the real possibilities of experience. This claim certainly requires a reconception of our understanding of value. In particular, it places great emphasis on the idea that the fundamental condition of ‘willing’ is the recognition of real possibilities for the will and for action. It is this identification of objects with what is significant for a subject that is ultimately at stake in the decision to think of objects as something that can and must be revealed in language. It is primarily for that reason that I assume that objects cannot be thought of merely as necessary, yet unknown, logical requirements of language. Having said that, it is clear also that if objects are not merely what is signified in language but are the source of significance, the access to them cannot be straightforward. Hence the various interpretations that make such objects into objects of acquaintance seem to me problematic insofar as they do not provide an account of how the recovery of the object has any value. In attempting to problematize the access to objects while retaining their relation to our mode of making sense, I have interpreted such objects as providing us with the conditions of the sense we make. This approach is, I think, in line with Wittgenstein’s later emphasis on the notion of grammar as giving us the condition of possibility of phenomena. The perspective of the object thus forms one of the central lines of continuity between the early and the later Wittgenstein. As opposed to facts and objects, the third perspective, that of the world, is one of the most neglected in interpretations of the Tractatus. The world is seldom viewed as a concept that needs elaboration, or that brings with it a whole grammar of terms that clarify it (such as the notions of limits, of the ‘I’, of affects pertaining to its appearance or veiling). As against the intense effort of interpretation devoted to such terms as facts and objects, the world is often seen merely as some kind of sum of those (taking, as it were, the opening claim of the book—“The world is all that is the case”—as the central characterization of the notion of world).1 This can lead to identify the world as it is presented at the be1. An indication of that neglect is that the term ‘world’ does not even appear in the index of the central interpretations of the Tractatus.

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ginning of the book with the world that appears as a limited whole at the end.2 Such an identification leaves us unable to account for the relation of the world to the ethical. It remains unclear how the totality of facts can be accessible to feeling, or why such a totality should be of such significance. But there is also a danger in separating the world of the beginning from that of the end, or differentiating too sharply the world of facts from a mystical experience of totality. In this case the world appearing at the end would be thought of as a mysterious object of mystical experience, and we would be tempted to appeal to Wittgenstein’s doctrine of unsayability to conceal the unclarity of such a mysterious relation to the world. Both interpretations—those that treat the world as a sum total of facts, and those that treat it as some mystical whole—reify this concept and make of it a graspable totality, an object of contemplation, as if one could have various attitudes toward that object, or various pictures of the world as a whole. This approach implies a subject that stands apart from the world of facts and can change mysteriously his attitudes to facts. But what such a change of attitude towards facts can be is mostly left unexplained. For a fact is just plainly . . . a fact. My interpretation seeks to elaborate the notion of ‘world’ as part of understanding what it is for a subject to be in the world or in language— what I call an existential elaboration of the world. This approach enables the concept of world to be related both to the subject and to an affective dimension that pertains to the subject’s assumption or avoidance of limits. The elaboration of these existential dimensions of the subject depends on the above-mentioned distinction between facts and objects. Hence a shift in the relation to the world as a whole is not a matter of subjective attitudes but is made possible by a distinction that lies at the very heart of language itself.3 2. Thus E. Anscombe writes concerning the appearance of ‘world’ toward the end of the book: “The world ‘as a limited whole’ is not suddenly introduced here as a new topic. We encounter the world conceived as a whole—as all that is the case—and as limited—namely by being all that is the case—at the very outset of the book; the feeling of the world as a whole appears in the remark at 1.2: ‘The world splits up into facts’, for it is only of a whole that we can say it splits up.” An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 169. 3. It is this neglect of the existential dimensions of ‘world’ that explains why many interpreters fail to sense the affinities of Wittgenstein’s early thought with that of Heidegger, an

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2. Form and Structure To elaborate in more detail the difference between my interpretation and central readings of the Tractatus, let us first consider the concept of form, which is crucial to our understanding of all the issues in the book. The concept of form must be elaborated primarily in contrast to that of structure. That distinction has puzzled many commentators of the Tractatus, but most commentators agree that the distinction between form and structure is related to Wittgenstein’s understanding of possibility. In his “Critical Notice on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” F. Ramsey related the distinction between form and structure to the distinction between possibility and actuality. Relying on Wittgenstein’s claim that “form is the possibility of structure,” he writes: “The only point which I can see in the distinction between structure and form, is that the insertion of ‘possibility’ may include the case in which the alleged fact whose form we are considering is not a fact, so that we can talk of the form of the fact aRb, whether or not aRb is true, provided

affinity I try to indicate in my interpretation. Indeed, the central concept in the elaboration of the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time is precisely that of ‘being-in-the world.’ The intricacy of that analysis of the phenomenon of world, and in particular the relation Heidegger establishes between the appropriation of possibilities and affective dimensions pertaining to being-in-theworld as such can be fruitfully compared with Wittgenstein’s analysis. J. Edwards does propose a reading of Wittgenstein with Heidegger, but his reading focuses on analogies between the thinking of the later Wittgenstein and that of Heidegger. The Tractatus is considered in contrast to the later view: “The Tractarian account of the nature of the proposition as world-representation, as a picture of reality, leads in that book to the discovery of the metaphysical self, the ‘limit of the world’ (5.362) which is the necessary condition of any such representation. From there it is an easy path to the idea that this ‘godhead,’ this self-conscious will to world-representation that originally makes linguistic meaning by connecting names to simple objects, also makes, through its own self-created ‘attitude’ (Notebooks, p. 87), the ethical meaning that the world as a whole has for the happy or unhappy human being (Tractatus, 6.43). The Tractarian metaphysical self is the ultimate narcissist: utterly independent of the body and the world, . . . Such a self floats free from the world it surveys and whose meaning it creates . . .” The Authority of Language, pp. 192–193. This ‘activist’ characterization of the self in the Tractatus clearly stands in stark contrast to a Heideggerian sensibility, which construes the subject as openness to meaning that is given in the world. But once the subject is properly construed through the existential possibility of appropriation of meaning, it is possible to sense the affinities of Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s accounts.

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it is logically possible.”4 The implication is that a structure is merely an actualized form, or form is a possible structure. There is no real distinction in nature between form and structure, but only with respect to actual existence. According to Ramsey, form is associated with a possibility, whereas a structure is an actualized form.5 So why not just distinguish possible structures from actual structures? I argue that the claim that form is the possibility of structure does not mean that form is a possible structure, but rather that form conditions all possible structures. When Wittgenstein writes “Form is the possibility of structure,” he is not denying that we can speak of possible structures. Indeed, possibility is as structured as actuality. The central difference is that form is the manifestation of the whole space of possibilities, thus the condition of all possible structures. Form, thought of as the condition of possibility of facts, is a substantive and powerful notion. In particular, when the notion of form relates to our understanding of the object, it determines the distinction between the internal properties of an object and its factual or material properties. I have attempted to map this distinction into the form-structure distinction by thinking of internal properties, the form, as giving us what the object is, and material properties as being determined by the structure of combination of objects, by how things are arranged. In that pair the most substantive notion is that of form, whereas structure is the mere way things are configured. Such configurations have the form of logical space, that is, the form of facts. Several interpretations of the notion of form and its relation to the understanding of the object reverse that relation and make the notion of form something rather thin and insubstantial. This is the result of misreading how Wittgenstein thinks of the relation of internal and external properties, which makes them into two separate set of properties, the first giving a bare form and the second filling it with content. For example, P. M. S. Hacker writes that 4. F. Ramsey, “A Critical Notice of L. Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” in J. V. Canfield, ed., The Philosophy of Wittgenstein: A Fifteen Volume Collection, vol. 1, p. 35. 5. Black endorses a position close to Ramsey’s when he writes that “It is doubtful whether it [the form-structure distinction] is needed.” A Companion to Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus,’ p. 66. His explanation makes it clear how he came to this conclusion: “one would expect that a fact has a structure and form, while a possible state of affairs has only form.” Ibid., p. 66. Pears works with a similar conception of the form-structure distinction. He writes, for instance: “the form of a fact is a possibility projected into the sentence that depicts it” The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 26, my emphasis.

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The forms of an object are its internal or formal properties . . . In addition to its formal properties an object has external properties. The form of an object is its possibility of occurring in the various states of affairs in which it can occur . . . its form is thus determined by the sum of its formal properties, for it is they that determine with what kind of other objects it can combine to constitute a fact. This is what constitutes its ontological type. The contingent concatenations into which a specific object does as a matter of fact enter are the external properties of the object.6

Construing the form-content distinction as a distinction between kinds of properties leads Hacker to identify the form of objects with bare syntactical properties devoid of substantial meaning. This, as I will argue later on, is the source of many problems in his interpretation. I have attempted to construct my understanding of the distinction between saying and showing on the basis of the distinction between structure and form. Indeed, the impossibility of saying, or the need to show form, means precisely that form is not equated with a specific fact or proposition but rather with a whole space of propositions internally related to each other. It is the recognition of the internal relation that constitutes the recognition of form that cannot be said. Wittgenstein’s claim that form can only be shown and not said becomes clear when we realize that the term ‘form’ expresses the whole space of possibilities. Saying is always a fact, a structure. Thus misreading the use of the term ‘form’ can lead to a misinterpretation of the ineffability of form, for example, by identifying it with the ineffability of the mystical. To relate to form is precisely to take into account in language use all the possibilities that determine the space of form. The awareness of form is thus the incorporation of possibilities into one’s use of language. It is for this reason that the concept of form plays a role in our understanding of the subject, or determines a dimension of subjectivity. Hence it is far from being a merely technical or logical notion.

3. Objects and Simplicity The question of the nature of the object and its simplicity cannot, I think, be separated from a more general assessment of Wittgenstein’s aim and task in the Tractatus. Our understanding of objects affects such 6. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion, pp. 19–20.

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issues as Wittgenstein’s supposed realism, his understanding of the relation between language and world, and his understanding of the place of everyday language. The question of the nature of the object is made particularly difficult because of the lack of any examples of objects in the Tractatus. This very lack can be interpreted as suggesting that objects are to be identified with theoretical posits that might never be discovered. Thus Russell writes in his introduction to the Tractatus: “It is not contended by Wittgenstein that we can actually isolate the simple or have empirical knowledge of it. It is a logical necessity demanded by theory, like an electron.”7 Among contemporary interpreters, D. Pears elaborates this approach most forcefully: “[Wittgenstein] argued a priori from the existence of factual sentences with senses to the existence of an underlying grid of elementary possibilities, with simple objects at the nodal points.”8 Pears’s fundamental starting point is to bring together Wittgenstein’s understanding of language and Russell’s logical atomism. Yet Pears wants a logical atomism without Russell’s requirement of acquaintance as a determination of the end point of analysis. The criterion of simplicity he attributes to Wittgenstein is that “a thing is simple, and so what he calls ‘an object’, if and only if, its nature does not generate any necessary connections between a sentence in which it is named and other sentences belonging to the same level.”9 Pears thus relates the understanding of the object to the claim that elementary propositions are logically independent of each other. This leads him to attribute to Wittgenstein the claim that “the objects should be entirely devoid of internal complexity.” But how is such an understanding compatible with Wittgenstein’s statement that objects contain the possibility of all situations (2.014)? In Pears’s account it is hard to see how an object can be said to have form, or how possibilities of combination are part of the nature of that object. Pears does indeed acknowledge that the object has various possibilities of combination inherent to it, but he fails to think of those as being in any way reflected in language. The claim that the object contains its possibilities of combination becomes a dogmatic metaphysical assertion, since nothing in language re7. B. Russell, Introduction to the Tractatus, p. xiii. 8. D. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 64. 9. Ibid.

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flects those possibilities. The way in which Pears conceives of the simplicity of the object makes it a totally inert point whose sole significance is to mark the end of analysis. It is unclear how the logical dependencies of facts are in any way related to the possibilities of the object. But Wittgenstein seems to think of the object in much more substantial terms. Objects make up the substance of the world (2.021). They contain all the material from which logical elaboration gives us whatever facts there are. Conceiving of their form as the condition of facts provides, I think, a better understanding of the substantial role they play in Wittgenstein’s account. Pears’s approach to objects can explain why Wittgenstein does not give any examples of simple objects. Such objects are introduced as an priori requirement; they must exist if sense is to be possible, but we might not ever be able to specify what they are. Yet Wittgenstein’s silence on this matter could be accounted for in a different way. Insofar as it is part of the task of the Tractatus to turn us onto language, onto the proper attention to language, which means precisely the attention to the objects which embody for us significant possibility, it would be self-defeating to provide examples of objects, as if these could be derived theoretically. The recognition of the object is something that cannot be separated from the application of logic to specific situations—from our use of language.10 Pears’s approach does accord to some extent with Wittgenstein’s dislike for a priori theorizing about the form of reality. It precludes any attempt to give a substantive answer to the question of what there must be if there be sense. But the question is whether the postulation of the very existence of such mysterious simple objects is not itself another form of problematic a priorism. The issue for Wittgenstein is, I think, how to avoid opening a gap between signification as it appears through lan10. Pears describes logical form as immanent to factual discourse: “The system of the Tractatus is built on an idea that is the exact opposite of Russell’s idea: the forms revealed by logic are embedded in the one and only world of facts, and therefore, in the language that we use to describe it. If Russell’s view is Platonic, this view is approximately Aristotelian. Logic is immanent in factual discourse from the very beginning, and it emerges when we take factual sentences and combine them in various truth-functional ways.” The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 23. But Pears thinks of the immanence of logic only on the sentential level, and overlooks the possibility that the form of objects is immanent to our discourse. He writes later on in a footnote: “But of course, Wittgenstein’s forms, unlike Aristotle’s, are sentential. It is only his view of their source that is Aristotelian.” Ibid., p. 29.

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guage, and the world. A theory of objects that makes them essentially distinct from any meaning we can relate to will necessarily appeal to some mysterious relation that somehow forms itself between objects and language. In this reading, the Tractatus would be committed to making substantive metaphysical claims about the relation between language and world, which would make the final gesture of throwing away the ladder something done in bad faith. Deciding the question concerning the possibility of revealing the objects thus depends on how we interpret Wittgenstein’s attitude to ordinary language. Pears’s approach would make objects as distant from familiar meaning as possible: “the surprising thing is not just that the user of the sentence does not know its analysis, but, rather, that he has no idea what kind of thing would be mentioned in its analysis, and might even find that he was not familiar with that ultimate kind of thing when he was told what it was.”11 The main difficulty I see in arguing that objects are wholly mysterious and unfamiliar is that they cannot then be viewed as worth recovering. Objects are, so to speak, taken out of circulation; they do not form an important part of the picture and task of the Tractatus. This view stands in contrast to the understanding that the recognition of objects is the recognition of the significance of the sense we make. This is why it is not enough to assert the mere necessity for objects to exist, but also the possibility of recognizing objects in relation to the familiar sense we make, in everyday language. Pears’s approach forms a connection between a certain understanding of simplicity and the idea that objects are unlike all that we are familiar with. Wittgenstein’s a priori requirement, that objects should be entirely devoid of internal complexity, drove his analysis of factual discourse beyond the terminus that satisfied Russell. Objects might turn out to be things no philosopher had ever suggested as the ultimate targets of reference. Indeed, they would have to be new and strange, because noth11. Ibid., p. 69. Pears senses that Wittgenstein also says different things about the objects but interprets them as a matter of inclination that is then repressed in the full fledged view of the Tractatus: “In the Notebooks Wittgenstein evidently feels misgivings about this extreme view of logical analysis, and he says things that betray a strong inclination to pull back the terminus to a point that is not so remote from the consciousness of ordinary speakers.” Ibid., p. 69.

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ing with which we are familiar could get past his total embargo on internal structure.12

But this move might result from misunderstanding simplicity. We can hardly imagine what an object lacking any complexity could be. But once we see that the simplicity of the object is compatible with its having internal properties, we need not make such a sharp distinction between the object and the possibilities revealed in everyday language. Pears’s interpretation of what the simplicity of the object means derives from a misreading of Wittgenstein’s concept of form. Pears’s picture of analyzed language is that of an underlying grid with utterly simple and unfamiliar objects occurring as nodal points. This picture seems at variance with Wittgenstein’s description of elementary propositions as direct connections of objects (like links of a chain). Pears’s description may be an accurate account of how things appear from the perspective of facts, but once we shift to the perspective of objects, the logical grid is precisely incorporated so as to bring out the form, the internal properties of the objects. This is why a state of affairs consists solely of objects. Hence there is a need for an analysis that brings out the logical relations of dependence between propositions, and a showing or recognition of the internal network of possibilities that characterize the object for us. Pears’s approach to the issue of simple objects can be contrasted to another approach in the secondary literature, which I label the “acquaintance approach.” It is inspired by bringing together Russell’s account of acquaintance with Wittgenstein’s understanding of objects. According to this approach, simple objects can be identified with a certain category of things. Those things must be such as to exist necessarily. They cannot be ordinary material objects, since supposedly their existence is always contingent. A good candidate for such a category of simples whose existence cannot be doubted are objects of acquaintance. The identification of simples with objects of acquaintance introduces external epistemological concerns into the argument of the Tractatus, such as: what kinds of things in our world are truly partless? Are elements in our visual field undecomposable? Is that a characteristic of sense data in general? Is the perception of sense data evident? Are sense data necessarily existing? Such investigations do not seem compatible 12. Ibid., p. 68.

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with Wittgenstein’s criticism of any a priori theorization as to what the ultimate elements of experience must be. Moreover, these considerations seem to miss something that is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s positions, both early and late, namely, that we discover what something is through our use of terms in language. Failing to identify objects through language, as the conditions of the sense we make, we start uncritically with whatever objects we seem to know and then separate them into complex and simple objects. Such a division does not accord with Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘object’ in the Tractatus. As I have pointed out, Wittgenstein writes “Objects are simple” (2.02). He thus sees simplicity as constitutive of the very notion of the object (just as he takes complexity to be constitutive of the notion of the fact). A further problem with taking objects to be objects of acquaintance is that it makes it difficult to understand how objects contain possibilities of combination, that is, that knowing an object is knowing possibility and not just what is actual. Acquaintance seems to provide us primarily with what is actual, since it requires an immediate relation to the object. Starting from actual acquaintance leads us to think of possibilities as being constructed on the basis of actual data. Thus possibility is always a matter of logical operations on what is actually given. Possibility always involves logical structure and cannot be seen as embedded in the nature of the object. An exception to this idea that acquaintance gives us what is actual is advanced by M. Hintikka and J. Hintikka in Investigating Wittgenstein. They argue that our acquaintance with the object also involves an acquaintance with forms: “Wittgenstein not only countenanced logical forms of simple objects but placed a considerable emphasis on them . . . In the Tractatus the forms of simple objects govern the way in which these objects can be combined with each other. The form of an object is what is true of it a priori.”13 The authors then develop a complex and interesting argument for identifying simples with objects of acquaintance primarily as a consequence of what they call the ineffability of semantics in the Tractatus. Thus they do not start with epistemology but rather with a thesis concerning language in the Tractatus. We cannot raise questions about the existence or nonexistence of objects, because the re13. J. Hintikka and M. Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, pp. 53–54.

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lation of naming is ineffable, “the existence of a simple object is shown by the fact that its name is used in the language” (p. 47).14 Identifying the objects of the Tractatus with objects of acquaintance derives from the thesis of ineffability of the name-object relation. Indeed, even given such an ineffability, we can still say “what the object at the receiving end of the relation is like” (p. 50). Hence the question raised by M. Hintikka and J. Hintikka is, which kinds of objects are such that we cannot raise questions as to their naming? They seek an answer in Wittgenstein’s background: The sense data out of which Russell constructs the external world exhibit a similarly perplexing ambivalence between the phenomenal and the objective. On the one hand, they are the data which sense give us, hence subject to all the vagaries of sense perception. On the other hand, they are not a part of one’s psychological process of sense-perception . . . They are the objects of perception, part of the perceptual contents, not an aspect of the act of perceiving. Hence they exhibit the same ambivalence as do Wittgenstein’s objects.

Although I am in complete agreement with the idea that Wittgenstein does not provide a substantive account of the name-object relation in the Tractatus, I distinguish the claim of the ineffability of that relation from the claim I make that depicting depends on the identity of form in picture and reality. Once this identity is acknowledged there is, I think, even less temptation to think of simple objects as a specific subset of things. They can be identified precisely with the form of depiction that is to be recovered beyond the form of our means of representation.15 It might be argued that in the account provided by J. and M. Hintikka, the revelation of the form of objects is brought close enough to a general 14. J. Hintikka and M. Hintikka elaborate Wittgenstein’s use of the concept of showing primarily in relation to the ineffability of semantics. But I would think of it primarily in relation to the uncovering of form, thus primarily in relation to the revelation of the internal relations that constitute the object or determine the symbol. But in that case there is no further issue of determining the reference of the symbol. The identity of form between language and world is the starting point of the account of picturing. 15. This move is supported by correlating Wittgenstein’s practice with phenomenology, as well as broadening the concept of phenomenology to the description of “the range of possibilities that an object allows.” Investigating Wittgenstein, p. 150. In this sense of phenomenology, there is no need to invoke acquaintance as the primary mode of relating to objects. Phenomenology would be the description of the conditions of possibility that constitute what a thing is.

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idea of phenomenology to dispense with the need to insist on the specialized use of acquaintance, as they do. If anything remains from the idea of acquaintance in relation to objects, it should be sought in the understanding that objects are shown. To know an object is to show its form as it appears through language. Showing, like acquaintance, refers us to a certain nondiscursive recognition, but it is a term that is freed from all connections to sensibility. It is used solely to characterize our capacity for recognizing the internal relations that constitute the forms of objects, or for recognizing the meaning of the sense we make. The Hintikkas also propose a link between Wittgenstein’s notion of showing and the view that the objects of the Tractatus are objects of acquaintance. But their understanding of showing is primarily related to the semantic dimension of the relation between name and object—to the need for an act of pointing or ostension: According to Russell’s sometime theory, there are in our language only two logically proper names for particular objects other than oneself, to wit, ‘this’ and ‘that’. If so, Russellian objects of acquaintance are introduced by displaying them and pointing to them, that is by showing them. This is a perfect precedent of Wittgenstein’s mystical sounding doctrine of showing in contradistinction to saying. It seems to us unmistakable that this Russellian idea was in fact one of the models on which Wittgenstein’s notion of showing was based . . . Thus the gist of Wittgenstein’s seemingly delphic doctrine of showing turns out to be a sober corollary to a semantics based on acquaintance.16

I prefer, however, to think of the notion of showing primarily in terms of the grammatical dimension, since it is in that dimension that the internal relations that constitute the object are revealed. There then remains no further task of assigning any meaning to the terms, since the form shown in language is the form of objects. J. and M. Hintikka also develop a notion of ‘mirroring’, which they contrast to ‘picturing’ and which indeed seems to capture the idea that internal properties are reflected in language. But I see no reason to distinguish it from the notion of showing, which they use to indicate the semantic dimension. In 4.121, for example, the terms “mirrored,” “reflected,” “express itself,” “show,” and “display” are used interchangeably. The approach I find closest to the one I adopted in this book, and 16. Ibid., p. 64.

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which can be labeled ‘contextualist’, is the one presented by H. Ishiguro in “Use and Reference of Names.”17 Ishiguro views objects as wholly determined by the propositional contexts in which the name of the object occurs: “In the Tractatus Wittgenstein is anxious to stress that we cannot see how the name refers to an object except by understanding the role it plays in propositions.” Instead of stressing the primacy of the “vertical” dimension of naming as the key to understanding Wittgenstein’s notion of the object, Ishiguro focuses on the “horizontal” dimension, on the various propositional contexts in which the name occurs, as the determinants of signification. Objects viewed in this way are related to the notion of form and are said to possess internal properties determined by the propositional contexts in which the names appear. Ishiguro makes this point perfectly clear in discussing Wittgenstein’s notion of elucidation: “The elucidations make us see what the object is by showing its internal properties. By making us grasp the kind of object which is in question they make us see in what sort of state of affairs the object could occur. What kind of propositions the elucidations are depends on the nature of the particular object in question.”18 This interpretation has the merit of bringing out the relation between the understanding of the object and the recognition of form, itself exhibited by the internal connection between a series of propositions. Ishiguro fails to make the distinction that I think is operative in the Tractatus between ‘being a representative’ (vertreten) and meaning (bedeuten), which makes her interpretation vulnerable to certain criticisms advanced by Pears. He objects to Ishiguro’s position on the ground that Wittgenstein speaks of objects having signs as their representatives, which he reads as meaning that the object is independently existing and must be referred to in language. But I argue that the relation of representativeness is not a relation of reference. Thus one can maintain both that objects must have names as their representatives, and that the form of the object is revealed by the propositional context in which the name appears. It is the meaning that is thus revealed, and such meaning involves the recognition, through linguistic contexts, of the form of the object.19 17. A similar approach is advanced in B. McGuinness, “The So-called Realism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.,” pp. 60–74. 18. H. Ishiguro, “Use and Reference of Names,” p. 107. 19. Similarly, Pears argues against Ishiguro’s interpretation that Wittgenstein allows for a determination of an object through a definite description. Thus an object cannot be correlative

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4. Pictures A proper understanding of Wittgenstein’s so-called “picture theory” is a fundamental crossroads in grasping the significance of the Tractatus as a whole. In my account I aim to address a fundamental interpretative problem which I see as forcing false issues on the Tractatus. This is the attempt to think of the book as an effort to provide a thick, substantive account of the relation between language and reality. The first question, then, is whether we have in the Tractatus a theory of picturing.20 E. Anscombe presents the problem of the Tractatus as follows: “It is clear enough . . . that the principal theme of the book is the connection between language, or thought, and reality. The main thesis about this is that sentences, or their mental counterpart, are pictures of facts.”21 Similarly, P. M. S. Hacker writes: Philosophy, as practiced in the Tractatus, has one overarching goal—to render an account of the essence of the world . . . the overarching goal is pursued by searching for the essential nature of the proposition. Once this is revealed, all lesser philosophical problems will solve themselves. The key to the search is the notion of depiction . . . The Picture Theory of the Proposition contains Wittgenstein’s answer.22

to all the sensical contexts in which its name appears, since the object is identified by certain contingent, factual properties that it actually possesses. This criticism also seems to me misguided. Indeed, there is no problem in saying things about the object, attributing to it properties through a description, but this does not reveal what the object is, it does not reveal its form. Thus a definite description cannot give us a grasp of what the object is. 20. The view that the Tractatus provides a substantive theory of the relation between language and world originates in Russell’s Introduction to the work: “The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein’s theory” (p. x). What allows Russell to speak, for example, of a fundamental thesis concerning picturing is his focus on the agreement of structure between the picture and reality. Thus he ignores Wittgenstein’s claim that there must be at bottom an identity of form between language and reality. More precisely, Russell seems to use form and structure interchangeably. 21. E. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 19. 22. “The Rise and Fall of the Picture Theory,” in I. Block, ed., Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein.

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I view this notion—that providing an account of the relation of language and world is a central task of the Tractatus—as inimical to our grasp of the other issues of the book, for it obliges us to think of the realm of language as essentially distinct from that of reality. According to that view, certain forms of metaphysical realism can be attributed to Wittgenstein. Alternatively, Wittgenstein is presented as a linguistic idealist. In that idealist picture, securing the relation between language and the world becomes the essential task of the metaphysical subject (through a theory of projection). Consequently, such an account of picturing colors our understanding of the subject, and ultimately of the ethical point of the Tractatus as a whole. The problems encountered with the account of picturing are related to the misunderstandings I have noted with regard to Wittgenstein’s notion of form. A proper grasp of his use of form makes us realize that at the deepest level language and world are one. One might ask what point there is then in an account of picturing if an identity of form of language and world is assumed from the start. If that is the case, what is there to explain? Indeed, if it is correct that no substantial theory of the relation of language and world is at stake, then the whole point of the account of picturing is precisely to make us realize that we discover our world through language; that form conditions our making of sense and it has to be recovered to reveal the possibilities of our world. Thus what is at stake in properly describing picturing is not a theoretical project but rather an attempt to lay the ground for an ethical imperative in language. The emphasis on identity of form of language and world brings out the equiprimordiality of language, of a world of objects and of the subject. What there is reveals itself through language, and it is in language that the subject finds itself in the world. Such an approach to the account of picturing allows us to view it as directing us to a task of recovering meaning rather than as providing a theoretical framework of the working of language. It thus sheds light on our understanding of the task of the Tractatus as a whole. This deflation of the account of picturing is in line with the understanding that the Tractatus cannot be a substantial bit of theorizing, precisely because at the end Wittgenstein demands that we throw away the ladder. It is significant that many accounts that seek for a substantive answer to the question of the relation of language to reality fail to take this claim of identity of form seriously. Thus in P. M. S. Hacker’s Insight and Illusion

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we are told that a metaphysical conception of the harmony between language and reality is implicit in the Tractatus. He even contrasts such a conception with Wittgenstein’s later view in which everything happens at the level of grammar.23 D. F. Pears similarly avoids the claim of identity and opens a gap between objects and language: “[Wittgenstein’s] view was that a form is the possibility of a certain combination of objects, and he thought that these possibilities are taken up and expressed by language, not by acquaintance and naming but by the kind of osmosis that he describes in the picture theory.”24 This comment reveals that part of the problem in Pears’s account of picturing derives from his misinterpretation of the notion of form. Pears thinks of form as a possible structure, rather than as the possibility of structure. Thus even if an identity of form is acknowledged at the basis of representation, there is still a need to coordinate the possibilities of objects with possibilities in language by means of a substantive relation.25 If, on the other hand, we were to take form as a whole space of possibility, then the identity of form would not need to be supplemented by a further correlation between language and world.26 23. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (2nd. ed.), pp. 116–118. 24. D. F. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 116. 25. “If a structure is going to count as a picture, it is not enough that it should realize a certain possibility—every structure does that: it must also be related in a certain way to what it depicts. It follows that pictorial form is partly derivative and partly intrinsic. An example will make the two aspects of pictorial form clear, taking the intrinsic first. A fleck of paint is put on a canvas at a certain point, and that realizes a possibility which, of course, existed before it was realized, namely the possibility that the point chosen on the canvas should be that color. But if the possibility is going to count as a pictorial form, it must be linked to the possibility that in the scene depicted the point that is correlated with this bit of the canvas should be that color too. That is the derivative aspect of pictorial form.” Ibid., p. 130. Remaining with the analogy to painting, and also thinking of the history of modern art, I would suggest that form, insofar as it has to do with the possibility of a picture, is something like color itself, rather than a particular color, possible or actual. There is then no relation between picture and world but only identity of form. 26. In his “Pictures, Logic and the Limits of Sense,” Thomas Ricketts refers to many of the central terms I distinguish in my interpretation of the account of picturing. Yet he also avoids the strict understanding of the identity of form between picture and world. He claims that there is a need for a coordination of the possibility of combination of objects with those of names: “There is for a language only the single rule that projects the sentences of that language onto reality, onto states of affairs (see 4.0141). The rule does this by coordinating names and the ways that names can form sentences with objects and the ways that objects can form states of

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One possible way of acknowledging Wittgenstein’s claim about the identity of pictorial form of picture and world while avoiding its consequences is to think of it as providing only very general, merely formal conditions of identity. Thus form is dissociated from objects. It does not provide an understanding of what a thing is. Hacker’s understanding of form, which I described above, leads to such a reading: To know the meaning of . . . a simple name is to know what object is its meaning. To know an object is to know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs, i.e. its internal properties . . . The logical syntax of a name must mirror the form of the object which it names. For names too have both form and content. Their content is their meaning. Their form is their logico-syntactical combinatorial possibilities.27

I note that Wittgenstein does not say that a name has form and content, as if these were two separate elements that are put together to form a name. He writes, “An expression is the mark of a form and a content” affairs. The coordinations spoken of in the 2.15’s are thus thick, nonextensional correlations made by the rule of projection for a language. It is these thick correlations that constitute sentences as models of reality, that give names feelers so that sentences composed of those names are laid like measuring sticks against reality” (p. 75). Ricketts recognizes that there is also a shared form between the picture and reality, but thinks there is a need for a further projection rule so that the specific combinatorial properties of names can match those of objects. This results from the fact that alternative arrangements could equally well represent a certain arrangement of objects. For example: “We can specify a general rule that projects arrangements of blocks on the scene of the accident by assigning blocks to cars and stipulating that the relative spatial positions of the blocks are to represent that the cars they name at the time of the accident had the same relative spatial positions . . . Although this rule of projection is salient, it is not the only one. We might use an arrangement of blocks to represent cars to stand in the mirror image of this arrangement” (ibid.). This example of a permutation that retains the isomorphism of structure seems to demand the introduction of an additional act of projection into the account of picturing, thus the postulation of a thinking subject that must essentially exist for picturing to work. That subject must do something for the picture to represent. But is that the case? We can appreciate the problem in Ricketts’s account if we avoid thinking of one picture representing reality and rather conceive of a specific language, a notation. It is in the context of such a notation or system of signs that Wittgenstein introduces the notion of projection. It is indeed possible to think of a notation in which a certain arrangement should be read as a mirror image of the arrangement of things in the world, but this just means that form is reflected in that notation differently than in other more “straightforward” notations. There is still complete identity of form and no need for a further act of correlation. 27. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (2nd. ed.), p. 20.

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(3.31). Furthermore, for Wittgenstein content means propositional content, rather than the object which is the meaning of a name. (See, for example, 3.13: “‘The content of a proposition’ means the content of a proposition that has sense.”) I take it then that when Wittgenstein stresses that an expression is the mark of a form and a content, he means that the expression, insofar as it is part of a proposition that states a fact, functions to give us a content. It marks a form when it is considered in relation to other propositions, when its internal properties are brought out. This is precisely similar to the case of objects that are said to be form and content. Insofar as they occur in facts they determine content, that is, material properties. Insofar as we know them as possibilities of combination, they determine a form. So the form that is at stake in 3.31 is precisely the form of the object, and not a merely syntactical form to which the meaning of the object is to be added. Since Hacker’s interpretation makes no connection between the pictorial form and uncovering the form of objects, it requires that we assume a further relation between names in the picture and objects in the world. The merely formal signs must be filled with content. This leads to what I see as a problematic distinction imposed on Wittgenstein’s account between a syntax which is ‘merely formal’, that is, empty of content, and a semantics that fills it with content. P. M. S. Hacker identifies Wittgenstein’s use of the notion of projection with establishing meaning for names: Understanding a proposition requires . . . knowledge of the correlation between its constituent names and the objects they name. This will be the case either if I have endowed the name-signs with a Bedeutung by correlating them through a mental act with elements in my experience, or alternatively if they have been explained to me by means of elucidations . . . Either way a mechanism of a psychological nature is generated to project lines of projection onto the world.28

Thus the harmony Hacker invokes between language and world is ultimately secured by the subject, who injects meaning into empty formal structures. As he puts it in the first edition of Insight and Illusion: The view that the skeleton of language only takes on flesh and blood through occult mechanisms—that the logical syntax, which is a priori 28. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (1st. ed.), p. 51, my emphasis.

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determined, is given a semantic dimension by means of a hypothetical psychological process which the natural science of psychology must investigate—is implicit in the Notebooks. Only in thought do signs become symbols, for it is only in thought that a method of projection is supplied.29

In the second edition we find the same idea expressed in connection with a transcendental willing subject rather than an empirical subject: That such configurations in thought or language, actually represent (and do not merely contain the possibility of representing (TLP 3.13) is a function of the will, of the metaphysical self . . . It is a mental act (albeit of a transcendental self, not of the self that is studied by psychology) that injects meaning or significance into signs, whether in thought or in language. One might call this conception ‘The Doctrine of the Linguistic Soul’, for it is the soul that is the fountainhead of language or representation.30

Hacker’s position on form, pictures, and projection thus leads him to grant a very substantive role to the subject in securing the functioning of language.31 While the activity of injecting meaning into signs cannot be identified with any empirically recognizable process, it remains nevertheless the case that the transcendental self is necessary for language to acquire meaning. The Tractatus turns out to contain a thick transcendental psychology of the faculties. A tension arises between such a substantive theorizing and Wittgenstein’s clear stricture against the possibility of sensically asserting any such theory. Any commitment to such 29. Ibid., p. 47. 30. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (2nd. ed.), p. 75. 31. Hacker develops his understanding of the subject, as the subject that supplies meanings to empty signs, into an interpretation of solipsism: “Anything which I can understand as language must, as it were, have a substance as well as an appearance. The appearance is the propositional sign, spoken or written. The substance is the mental accompaniment. The substance of language must be supplied by me. ‘Things acquire “Bedeutung” only in relation to my will’ is not an ethical principle, but a semantic one. This thin semantic route to linguistic solipsism, i.e. the identification of language with my language, is paralleled by a semantic route to the metalinguistic soul as the analogue of the metaphysical self. For the self which thinks the method of projection cannot, so it might seem, be captured by the language it creates. The metalinguistic soul, is, as it were, the blind spot upon the retinal image to which nothing in the visual image corresponds.” Insight and Illusion (1st. ed.), pp. 76–77.

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theorizing will create a serious problem when attempting at the end to throw away the ladder.32 There is a further reason to oppose this conception of the subject as the source of meaning when one attempts to relate Wittgenstein’s views in the Tractatus with his later criticism of mentalism. Indeed, the supposed reliance on a mental act to secure the relation between thought and the world seems to such interpreters as Hacker to stand in stark contrast with Wittgenstein’s later critique of mentalism. Hans-Johann Glock, apparently adopting Hacker’s view of the matter, writes: “[The Tractatus] remains wedded to the doctrine that it is the mind which gives meaning to language by breathing life into sounds and inscriptions that would otherwise be dead . . . Wittgenstein [later] criticized the view that thinking is a mental process which accompanies speech and endows it with meaning.”33 It is indeed possible that the early Wittgenstein upheld doctrines that were so strongly opposed to his later views, but I think that we should seek a more nuanced account of the distinction between the various periods of Wittgenstein’s philosophizing. My interpretation of picturing and in particular of projection as the reflection of the space of form in the logical space of signs is intended to avoid these assumptions about mental acts that accompany our use of signs. Thus it also allows us to recognize the affinities between Wittgenstein’s early and late thinking, despite appearances to the contrary.

5. Logical Syntax In developing Wittgenstein’s understanding of the relation between making sense and recognizing meaning I have claimed that there is an 32. When discussing Hacker’s account in “Wittgenstein and Idealism,” Bernard Williams is fully aware of this tension and expresses the sense that the apparent discovery of the transcendental self must be recognized as provisional: “The sense in which [the subject] is a limit, also means that at the limit, it is nothing at all.” Quoting 5.64, Williams adds: “Indeed, granted this, I find puzzling why Wittgenstein can say (5.641) that there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. But I take this to mean that philosophy can talk about it the only way in which by the end of the Tractatus, we find that philosophy can talk about anything: that is to say, not with sense.” B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 146. 33. Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 358.

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essential element of passivity in our relation to meaning. Meaning is not ours to make, it is not arbitrarily determined, but rather something to assume or recognize in language. The question of discerning what is ours to make and what we must recognize in language is elaborated in Wittgenstein’s distinction between the sign and the symbol. Hence interpretations that emphasize human control over the generation of meaning will in general avoid recognizing particular features of the symbolic order. This is, I think, typical of Carnap’s adoption of the Tractatus in his Logical Syntax of Language. Carnap explicitly thinks of the Tractatus as a source of inspiration for his view: It is Wittgenstein who first exhibited the close connection between the logic of science (or “philosophy,” as he calls it) and syntax. In particular, he made clear the formal nature of logic and emphasized the fact that the rules and proofs of syntax should have no reference to the meaning of symbols . . . Wittgenstein’s view is represented, and has been further developed by the Vienna Circle, and in this part of the book I owe a great deal to his ideas. If I am right, the position here maintained is in general agreement with his, but goes beyond it in certain important respects.34

Although Carnap’s account in The Logical Syntax of Language is not properly speaking an interpretation of the Tractatus, a consideration of the problems in Carnap’s development of Wittgenstein’s thought can lead to valuable insights about the central aims of the Tractatus. An important aspect of Carnap’s account in The Logical Syntax of Language is the complete freedom he allows in the postulation of the rules of syntax and the consequent determination of meaning on the basis of such postulation: “let any postulates and any rules of inference be chosen arbitrarily; then this choice, whatever it may be, will determine what meaning is to be assigned to the fundamental logical symbols.”35 Thus for Carnap it is our choice of rules of syntax that determines what our fundamental terms mean. This stands in sharp contrast to what I see as Wittgenstein’s view, according to which symbols are not determinable arbitrarily but rather are the reflection of our use of signs, 34. R. Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, p. 282. 35. Ibid., p. xv.

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that is, they reflect the form of objects in our use of language. Signs indeed contain much that is arbitrary, but such arbitrariness disappears as one brings out the symbolic form. Even as one considers the form of our means of representation, it is in no way conventional. One could say that the form of representation is determined by the understanding of the possibility of representation as such. This is elaborated in Wittgenstein’s account of picturing, particularly in the idea that the form of representation must be identical with the form of facts. There is no significant conventionalism in Wittgenstein’s understanding of language. This point may elucidate the difference between Wittgenstein’s claim that logic is not part of the constitution of reality and the position taken by the positivists. Carnap writes in his “Intellectual Autobiography”: For me personally, Wittgenstein was perhaps the philosopher who, besides Russell and Frege, had the greatest influence on my thinking. The most important insight I gained from his work was the conception that the truth of logical statements is based only on their logical structure and on the meaning of the terms. Logical statements are true under all conceivable circumstances; thus their truth is independent of the contingent facts of the world. On the other hand, it follows that these statements do not say anything about the world and thus have no factual content.36

In the Logical Syntax of Language Carnap takes this insight to mean that the logic of a language is to be identified with syntax and that it is conventional. Whereas Wittgenstein, as I understand him, uses that insight to point to a perspective on the world apart from logic. Carnap indeed would readily adopt a distinction between the logical and the factual, but for Wittgenstein the critical distinction is the one between facts in logical space and objects. The turn to the object is part of the legacy of the Tractatus that positivism could not accept, for it is related to the appearance of nonlogical internal relations between propositions, something akin to the traditional notion of the synthetic a priori. This central distinction between Wittgenstein and Carnap is also related to another crucial point of difference in their views concerning the possibility of a meta-perspective on language. Indeed, in Carnap’s view, 36. R. Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, p. 25.

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the essential freedom of syntax is possible precisely because we can determine a standpoint from which all those different languages can be described: The sentences, definitions, and rules of the syntax of a language are concerned with the forms of that language. But, now, how are these sentences, definitions, and rules themselves to be correctly expressed? Is a kind of super-language necessary for the purpose? And again, a third language to explain the syntax of this super language and so on to infinity? Or is it possible to formulate the syntax of a language within that language itself? . . . We shall see later that without any danger of contradictions or antinomies emerging it is possible to express the syntax of a language in that language itself, to an extent which is conditioned by the wealth of means of expression of the language in question.37

That possibility seems to constitute Carnap’s solution to the problem posed by Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing. Carnap finds it inadmissible that logical form cannot be said. He thus elaborates on Russell’s suggestion, that every language has, as Mr. Wittgenstein says, a structure concerning which, in the language, nothing can be said, but that there may be another language dealing with the structure of the first language, and having itself a new structure, and that to this hierarchy of languages there may be no limit. Mr. Wittgenstein would of course reply that his whole theory is applicable unchanged to the totality of such languages. The only retort would be to deny that there is any such totality.38

By claiming that the description of the syntax of a language can be expressed in that language itself, Carnap believes he avoids the regress that worries Russell. But both Carnap and Russell miss Wittgenstein’s deepest intentions—that form is not the postulation of rules for the use of signs but rather something that must be recovered through the recognition of internal relations between the various propositions we use. Wittgenstein’s notion of showing emphasizes that meaning is revealed through language, and that we can never control the appearance of such meaning but are required to be attentive to it. The idea of a meta-language is thus revealed to be allied with a conception of the control of 37. R. Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, p. 3. 38. B. Russell, Introduction to the Tractatus, p. xxii.

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meaning, with the possibility of anticipating meaning by making it the result of human conventions that are completely surveyable and describable. It is in this difference of sensibility between Carnap or Russell and Wittgenstein that one must locate the real force and point of Wittgenstein’s use of the notion of showing, his emphasis on what expresses itself in language and is not ours to construct or control. A further issue arises from Russell and Carnap’s attempts to address the say-show distinction in the Tractatus. It concerns the place accorded to everyday language in Wittgenstein’s thought. If, indeed, the distinction between the sign and the symbol is a distinction primarily between what is arbitrary in language, what is up to us to determine, and what reveals itself through language—what shows itself or is mirrored in language—then I think it is significant that The Logical Syntax of Language presents us with a conception of language in which the possibility of stipulating rules of syntax is taken to an extreme. This stands in stark contrast to Wittgenstein’s notion that form reveals itself in language. It also can be contrasted with the necessity of accepting language, which I see as the first step in Wittgenstein’s lifelong turn to everyday language.

6. Everyday Language Everyday language certainly occupies a central place in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, but can the seeds of that conception already be discerned in the Tractatus? Part of what hinders us from attributing to Wittgenstein the affirmation of everyday language is that he invokes the need to devise a logically adequate notation to remedy the defects of ordinary language. Understanding this idea hinges on making the proper distinction between sign and symbol, as well as between the logical space of representation and the space or form of objects. As I have argued, Russell has misunderstood Wittgenstein’s position on both those issues. It is not surprising then for him to conclude that the elaboration of a logically perfect language (as opposed to a notation) is what Wittgenstein requires to remedy the logical defects of everyday language: In order to understand Mr. Wittgenstein’s book, it is necessary to realize what is the problem with which he is concerned. In the part of his theory which deals with symbolism he is concerned with the condi-

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tions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language . . . He is concerned with the conditions for accurate symbolism, i.e. form symbolisms in which a sentence ‘means’ something quite definite. In practice, language is more or less vague, so what we assert is never quite precise . . . Mr. Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language—not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfills this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.39

The first thing to note is Russell’s assertion that the problem of language has to do with the level of meaning, with the sign’s capacity to mean anything at all. This is quite different from Wittgenstein’s emphasis, which is that the defects of ordinary language are a matter of notation, not a question of the capacity of language to signify at all. Russell’s problem is to devise a language that can secure signification, which for him means a complete devaluation of ordinary language. Wittgenstein’s problem is to make the signification inherent in ordinary language perspicuous, whatever it is. As he puts it in the Notebooks: “My method is not to sunder the hard from the soft, but to see the hardness of the soft.”40 In his “Critical Notice,” F. Ramsey points out that Russell’s assumption that Wittgenstein’s theory is concerned with the construction of a logically perfect language “is not an infallible guide to Mr. Wittgenstein’s meaning,” and that “in general [Wittgenstein] seems to maintain that his doctrines apply to ordinary languages in spite of appearance of the contrary.”41 But Ramsey himself might not have grasped the role that ordinary language plays for Wittgenstein. It is one thing to claim that the doctrine of the Tractatus applies to ordinary languages, and another to see something like language in its everydayness as a standard of significance. Moreover, Ramsey speaks of ordinary languages (in the plural), apparently referring to such languages as English, French, Hebrew, etc. But Wittgenstein uses the term in the singular, showing that he is concerned with the everyday or the ordinary in language as such. The affirmation of everyday language, at this stage of Wittgenstein’s think39. Ibid., p. x. 40. NB, p. 44. 41. F. Ramsey, “Critical Notice of L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” in I. M. Copi and R. W. Beard, eds., Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 34.

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ing, is tantamount to the affirmation of language as it stands, in contrast to attempts to devise a perfect language or to discover a ground of meaning that would secure the proper functioning of language. The possibility of affirming language as it stands depends on recognizing the impossibility of a mistake at the symbolic level, that is, the impossibility of what is usually called a category mistake. In her discussion of nonsense, Cora Diamond has shown extremely convincingly how the very notion of a category mistake is confused.42 Her claim that there is no informative nonsense, although mainly made in relation to the interpretation of the ending of the Tractatus, is crucially relevant to the question of the affirmation of everyday language.43 For what stands in the way of such an affirmation is precisely the notion that we have to take care of logical defects at the symbolic level. The intuition that there are no logical defects in language is expressed early on in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks, when he writes that “Logic must take care of itself.” Such a claim is, I take it, equivalent to the claim that we cannot make mistakes in logic (5.473). That is, logic is not ours either to use correctly or to use incorrectly—it takes care of itself. Yet Wittgenstein’s claim here could still be taken to refer only to the system of truth-functional and quantificational logic, to what I have called the logic of facts, which is how Pears reads it: Logic is a self-contained system which can be validated only from within. Its formulae, therefore, must be completely different from factual sentences, which have to measure up to something outside themselves, the contingent layout of the world . . . If logical formulae are tautologies, logic really does take care of itself, because tautologies do not depend on anything that happen in the world. They are not hostages to contingency.44

There is of course a clear contrast between statements of facts (all that can be said) and tautologies. But I take it that Wittgenstein extends the insight that logic takes care of itself to the very form of signification as well, to the identity of form between the symbol and the object. Indeed, that insight appears in the Notebooks in the context of the discussion of signification, or of the relation of sign and thing. “Once more: logic must 42. See C. Diamond, “On What Nonsense Might Be,” in The Realistic Spirit. 43. Ibid. 44. D. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 22.

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take care of itself. A possible sign must also be capable of signifying. Everything that is possible at all, is also legitimate. Let us remember the explanation why “Socrates is Plato” is nonsense. That is, because we have not made an arbitrary specification, NOT because a sign is, shall we say, illegitimate in itself.”45 This passage is repeated almost identically in the Tractatus at 5.473. It is then followed by the claim that “In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.” It is clear from the context that this remark elucidates something important about signification. It is precisely signification, that is, meaning, that takes care of itself. There is an inherent aboutness in language, an intentionality that does not depend on our intentions but rather takes care of itself. The Tractatus does not mean to determine what the world must be like for language to be possible. But the attempts made by various commentators to provide a self-evident ground of language testify that Wittgenstein’s insight that language takes care of itself has not been understood. These attempts—which have involved, for instance, characterizing a priori what the simple objects must be—run counter to Wittgenstein’s imperative to recognize the meaning inherent in everyday language, to recognize what takes care of itself. This is why Wittgenstein follows 5.473 with a remark on Russell’s introduction of the notion of self-evidence into logic: “Self-evidence, which Russell talked about so much, can become dispensable in logic, only because language itself prevents every logical mistake” (5.4731).

7. Realism or Idealism The assumptions made concerning the nature of simple objects, the nature of picturing, and in general the relation between language and world determine to a large extent whether a given interpretation conceives of Wittgenstein’s position as, broadly speaking, realist or idealist. D. Pears presents Wittgenstein’s position as essentially realist: “The Tractatus is basically realistic in the following sense: language enjoys certain options on the surface, but deeper down it is founded on the intrinsic nature of objects, which is not our creation but is set over against us in mysterious independence.”46 The mysterious independence of the 45. NB, p. 2. 46. D. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 8.

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object, hence the realism Pears attributes to the Tractatus, results in part from the inability to appreciate the fact that the form of objects is indeed mirrored in language. Pears’s emphasis on inferential relations as the sole component of form does make it wholly mysterious how precisely objects are operative in determining what can be done in language, or what the limits of language are. Interpretations that take Wittgenstein’s view in the Tractatus to be realist usually contrast it unfavorably with his later philosophical sensibility. Thus Pears presents Wittgenstein as a clear case of what he calls “uncritical realism”: nothing is said about the way in which we manage to go on using a name correctly after its original attachment to an object. The assumption is that, if that problem arises, the nature of the object will take care of it . . . Our minds contribute nothing positive at this point and there is no admixture of intellectual labor. Now the objects of the Tractatus are the only ultimate constituents of the world, and so this account of the way in which they acquire and keep their name is intended as a general explanation of the attachment of language to the world. It is wholly un-Kantian, a clear paradigm of uncritical realism.47

Pears argues that in the name-object relationship, “the object is the dominant partner in the relationship, and its inherent possibilities decide whether the name thereafter represents it.”48 But it is hard to square this statement with his earlier claims. For one thing, if the object is entirely devoid of internal features, how can language trace its inherent possibilities? Moreover, if the object is entirely unfamiliar, as Pears would propose, one can hardly imagine how the “human” side of that relationship ever manages to follow the dominant partner. In these conditions it is not surprising that Pears regards Wittgenstein’s realism as uncritical, and the relation between names and objects as a kind of mysterious “osmosis.” Considering the affinities of Wittgenstein’s and Schopenhauer’s thinking can shed light on the former’s relation to idealism. Those affinities are treated in D. Wiener’s Genius and Talent. He argues that “the Tractatus 47. Ibid., p. 9. 48. Ibid., p. 111.

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accepts Schopenhauer’s ‘world as representation’, but rejects the ‘world as will’”:49 The argument of the Tractatus can be neatly mapped onto The World as Will and Representation. The limits of my language mean the limit of the world as my representation. There is no secret passageway from the world as representation to the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will is a nonsensical effort to speak about the thing-in-itself; only the first book should have been written; the second should have been passed over in silence.50

Such a diagnosis of the nature of Wittgenstein’s achievement overlooks that he establishes a fundamental distinction between the form of representation (which is the form of facts) and the form of objects. Trying to grasp the thing-in-itself is indeed a nonsensical effort. But Schopenhauer allows for relating to the world as will through identifying with the objectification of the will in appearance. It is in that sense that Wittgenstein directs us to meaning beyond the form of representation, or conceives of the subject through identification with such meaning. This calls for identifying with the appearance of meaning in the world, beyond the structuring effects of the subject of representation, beyond what Schopenhauer would think of as the realm of the principle of sufficient reason. It is the appearance of groundless meaning and our essential passivity in respect to that meaning that allows, in Wittgenstein’s view, for the transcendence of representation. A problematic form of idealism appears, I think, in Hacker’s understanding of what Wittgenstein inherited from Schopenhauer. He too sees the influence as restricted to the structuring activity of the transcendental subject and identifies Wittgenstein’s understanding of the truth in solipsism with Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism: Wittgenstein’s solipsism was inspired by Schopenhauer’s doctrines of transcendental idealism. These he adapted to his own peculiar transcendental form of ‘theoretical egoism’ . . . They express a doctrine which I shall call Transcendental Solipsism. They involve a belief in the transcendental ideality of time (and presumably space), a rather perverse interpretation of the Kantian doctrine of the unity of apper49. D. Weiner, Genius and Talent, p. 11. 50. Ibid., p. 72.

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ception together with the acceptance of Schopenhauer’s quasi-reification of the unity of consciousness, and other related and obscure theories about ethics, the will, aesthetics, and religion. Wittgenstein’s originality in the matter lies in his attempt to dovetail these doctrines into the sophisticated account of representation with which most of the Tractatus is concerned.51

By adopting only the first part of Schopenhauer’s idealism one finds oneself affirming something like the transcendental egoism that is always a danger for an idealistic position. But the ethical standpoint involves going beyond the specular predicament of the transcendental subject. It involves the essential passivity of the subject in relation to the appropriation of meaning, which is registered in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks in such claims as: In order to live happy I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means. I am thus, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear to be dependent. That is to say: “I am doing the will of God.”52

The acknowledgment of the presence of that alien will makes the very recognition of the body of meaning a recognition of life or will beyond the perspective of representation. It is only the renunciation of control of the world by means of representation that opens an ethical perspective in our relation to meaning. I would therefore like my interpretation to avoid both idealism and realism. What I want to avoid in the realist picture is the notion that objects are independent of language, that they exist on their own, and that language in some way must correspond to them. Objects, I would argue, are given through language, indeed through the fundamental identity of language and world at the level of form. But, as against the idealist picture, I would also like to avoid making the object a product of our structuring subjectivity. What I emphasize, following Wittgenstein, is the way in which the object cannot be anticipated; that is, the object is given only through our recognition of the internal relations in language. The recognition of objects, of meaning, rather than its projection or determination, is viewed as the central feature of subjectivity. Instead of metaphysical realism, I attribute to Wittgenstein what 51. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (2nd. ed.), pp. 99–100. 52. NB, p. 76.

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C. Diamond calls a realistic spirit. Its highest achievement is the openness of the human subject to experience that cannot be anticipated, openness in the face of the drive to impose false necessities on experience. Instead of an idealistic position, I attribute to Wittgenstein the notion that truth of solipsism involves the recognition that true subjectivity depends precisely on assuming the impersonal limits of experience, that is, in being realistic in the sense described above. One could say that the realistic spirit and the truth in solipsism are one.

8. Solipsism and the Subject Wittgenstein’s conception of the subject is often discussed in relation to his remarks on solipsism. Traditionally, the force of the solipsistic position depended to a large extent on a broadly empiricist picture of sensation and acquaintance. It is such a picture that enables the world to be identified with my experience. This brings out the difficulty in assessing Wittgenstein’s idea that there is a truth in solipsism, for he is concerned with limits as given by language. This makes it difficult to place an ‘I’ in relation to the limits of language.53 Language seems essentially to have limits that are impersonal. This recognition leads D. Pears to claim that Wittgenstein introduced solipsism in the Tractatus “as a failed attempt to impose a personal limit on language. It is true that language is limited, but only in a general, impersonal way: anything we can say is a truth function of elementary sentences mirroring arrangements of objects.”54 The problem with dismissing solipsism is that Wittgenstein clearly claims that there is a truth in it. How can we express that truth in relation to language? One possible response to this problem is to take the objects of the Tractatus to be indeed objects of acquaintance. Thus we can rehearse the solipsistic predicament even in the midst of language by thinking of our relation to the objects that are the ground of the possibility of representation. We could then interpret Wittgenstein as advancing something like the claim that a speaker of language is acquainted only with the contents of his own mind and therefore has something like a private language. This interpretation is based on reading 5.62 as claim53. Thus the desire to adhere to the traditional account of solipsism might lead interpreters to misread Wittgenstein’s account of objects, that is, precisely to view them as sense data. 54. D. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 153.

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ing that I alone understand my language. As J. Hintikka has pointed out in “On Wittgenstein’s ‘Solipsism,’” this reading seems to result from an ambiguity in the German text.55 It probably should be read as saying that it is in language alone that I reach understanding. Acknowledging that there is only one language can lead to an alternative interpretation of what Wittgenstein means by the truth of solipsism. Thus Mounce writes: “There is, as it were, a truth behind solipsism, but it cannot be stated and solipsism is the confused result of trying to do so. The truth is not that I alone am real but that I have a point of view of the world which is without neighbors.” This last claim, properly understood, amounts to saying that “there is no language but language and therefore no conception of the world other than the one that language gives.”56 Thus the very idea of neighbors is revealed to be nonsensical. It remains to be explained in what way this is the truth ‘behind solipsism’; for according to that interpretation, the truth ‘behind’ solipsism could also be the truth ‘behind’ realism or ‘behind’ any position. According to this interpretation, nothing would justify Wittgenstein’s attempt to express the truth of solipsism in terms of the world being my world.57 An alternative understanding of the relation between solipsism and acquaintance which does not depend on the assumption of private meaning is given by J. Hintikka and M. Hintikka in their Investigating Wittgenstein. They think of the objects of acquaintance as the ground of shared meaning in language, but at the same time as objects that must be given to the subject, that thus can be said to be mine: “If we construe Tractarian objects as objects of acquaintance, the only objects I have are the objects of my acquaintance. And if these objects define the world, then the world cannot but be my world. Hence Wittgenstein’s qualified solipsism becomes not only understandable but positively predictable on this interpretation.58” Such a reading can apparently be supported by Wittgenstein’s references to the visual field in his account of the subject. But this would be using a figure to make a literal claim about Wittgenstein’s ontology. Just as the figure of the picture in Wittgenstein’s discus55. Mind, 67, pp. 88–91. 56. H. O. Mounce, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, pp. 91–92. 57. Hacker’s elaboration of solipsism in relation to a transcendental subject suffers from similar problems, for there is no clear sense in which that transcendental subject can be identified with an “I.” 58. J. Hintikka and M. Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, pp. 65–66.

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sion of representation is not to be identified with a visual picture, so the use of the visual field to elaborate the concept of limits does not imply only the field of our senses.59 Moreover, J. and M. Hintikkas’ account raises the following problem: our understanding of the perspective on experience which can be called ‘mine’ depends on how we elaborate the notion of limits. In the first place, it depends on whether we think of such limits in terms of facts or objects. Thus if we try to speak of limit in terms of facts, it will be all the facts that I, as an empirical self, have encountered in my life; facts that define the limit or my perspective on experience. It of course makes sense to speak of someone else’s perspective in that way. But this is precisely the reason that it is problematic to identify those limits with the limits of the world. If, on the other hand, we think of the limits of language in terms of the grammar of the objects given to us, if we construe acquaintance in a broader phenomenological sense, then to have experience is to recognize possibilities. But this implies that the limits are not determined by the facts I have encountered. The limit becomes a wholly impersonal one, and it no longer makes sense to speak of the limit as intrinsically my perspective on experience. I have emphasized repeatedly that it is that latter notion of limit that comes into play in Wittgenstein’s discussion as he speaks of the limits of my language meaning the limits of my world. (5.6) In her “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” J. Floyd presents an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of solipsism which seems to me in many ways extremely accurate. She particularly emphasizes his anti-apriorism: “Any attempt to completely fix or demarcate the form of the so-called ‘elementary propositions’ without allowing for the full role of the ‘and so on’ fails, ending in nonsense . . . genuine ‘logical syntax’ is a matter of use.”60 Solipsism turns out, for Floyd, to be the last defense of apriorism: “The appeal to my meaning, to a private mental act or self-conscious perception of an intention, is just one more attempt to lay down general 59. D. Pears has convincingly criticized the reading of Wittgenstein’s treatment of solipsism as supporting the identification of objects with objects of acquaintance by pointing at the uses Wittgenstein makes of the visual field. The important thing is that it serves as a figure not merely for the total field of the solipsist’s senses, but for the question of the limits of language as such. 60. J. Floyd, “The Uncaptive Eye: Solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” p. 10 (Draft).

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conditions on meaning.” She thus views all of Wittgenstein’s elaboration of specific topics, including his discussion of solipsism, entirely dialectically. While I fully agree with Floyd’s assessment of Wittgenstein’s antiapriorism, it seems to me that he does aim to point at a truth of solipsism. I attempt to show how both the anti-apriorism, the sense that meaning in the world cannot be determined in advance, and the sense that the world is my world can be brought together. This requires interpreting the appearance of the individual subject by means of the idea of the appropriation of meaning. This makes subjectivity, the possibility of attaining authentic selfhood, correlative precisely with the attunement to meaning that is not determinable in advance of experience, but nevertheless provides the form or limits of experience. It is significant that Floyd interprets the ethics of the Tractatus as “primarily concerned with the personal as opposed to the public or the theoretical.”61 Basing herself in part on Wittgenstein’s biography and on his diary entries from the period of the writing of the Tractatus, she recognizes in his life a fundamental struggle with loneliness. She takes this personal dimension as evidence that there is “a kind of solipsism haunting the Tractatus. But it is a personal, not a transcendental or metaphysical one.” Floyd thinks of Wittgenstein’s response to this sense of isolation in the following terms: “I believe that one ‘deep need’ Wittgenstein saw wrongly gratified in idealism and solipsism was a wish for a total absorption in the world and in life, in the feeling of there being no space, no gaps, between the language I understand, the world I contemplate, and the life which I live.”62 This formulation captures something essential in Wittgenstein’s understanding of the release from metaphysics. Nevertheless, I think that conceiving this absorption in the world merely as a personal attitude to life fails to take into account that Wittgenstein also thinks of it through his understanding of language, as the recognition of meaning in the world. And such meaning, the condition of experience, is wholly impersonal. The identification with meaning in the world can sustain authentic self-understanding only if it is nonpersonal, that is, only if it constitutes an identification with the limits of meaning as such.

61. Ibid., p. 27. 62. Ibid.

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Floyd’s interpretation leaves no room for the possibility of such identification, because she does not think it possible to make sense of the notion of the limits of language in the Tractatus. She argues that any concept of limit imposes an a priori structure on the world, and thus goes against Wittgenstein’s innermost convictions. My elaboration of the realm of objects and of the form of objects is intended precisely to enable us to think of limitation without identifying it with the a priori and the systematic.

9. Ethics Many of the problems of interpretation concerning the place of the subject in the Tractatus affect the account given of the ethical. Thus Wittgenstein’s claim that facts do not provide the ground for value is taken to mean that values are to be identified with the attitudes of a subject towards the facts.63 H. O. Mounce, for example, writes: “The facts do not solve ethical problems; they can only give rise to them. The solutions are found in the attitudes one adopts towards the facts. But Wittgenstein means all the facts, psychological as well as physical.”64 This position gives rise to many questions. In what sense do facts give rise to problems at all? If we take seriously the idea that a fact is merely the configuration of things, no essential problem seems to arise from things being configured in such and such a way rather than another. Facts, one might say, do not solve any ethical problems, but precisely for the same reason they do not give rise to them either. If a fact could give rise to an ethical problem, it could also solve it. Wittgenstein writes that “The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution” (6.4321). But I take it that setting the problem does not mean giving rise to the problem. Facts are in that sense entirely indifferent to what is higher. A further question raised by Mounce’s account is: what is an attitude 63. This is often perceived as a problematic dead end of the Tractatus’ conception of ethics. Thus, for example, P. Johnston writes: “Here Wittgenstein’s investigation comes to a dead-end; unable to discover the basis of action in the facts, he is forced to look elsewhere. Thus in the Notebooks he considers the notion of the will and treats this as the origin of our actions. However, since the world is motivationally inert he transports the will to beyond the world . . . Thus, ethically speaking, what our actions are taken to reflect is the transcendental relation of world and will—something of which one literally cannot speak.” Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy, p. 78. 64. H. O. Mounce, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, an Introduction, p. 97.

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toward the world, and in what sense is it not part of psychology? How can we understand the act of a subject involving a shift of attitude toward the world? What does such a shift include? If we speak of an empirical self, then such a shift is just another psychological fact in the world. But psychological facts are supposed to be part of what one changes one’s attitude toward. Conversely, if it is the transcendental subject which is shifting its point of view on the world, how can such a subject relate to the essentially personal dimension of ethics? How can such a metaphysical subject be said to be happy or unhappy? Consistent with his position, Mounce rejects as a mere analogy the affective dimension that is explicit in Wittgenstein’s understanding of the will and its relation to the world: “We must be careful, however, not to misread Wittgenstein’s analogy. In speaking of the world of the happy man, he is of course referring obliquely to a common phenomenon. The man with a happy temperament looks on the bright side, accepts the very fact that throw the unhappy man into despondency. It is important to see, however, that this is merely an analogy.”65 The assumption that speaking of the happiness and unhappiness of the subject is merely an analogy is a symptom of the difficulty in explaining what exactly a shift of attitudes amounts to, and in what sense affects that seem to be always psychologically determined can have anything to do with a transcendental subject that stands outside the world. But for Wittgenstein such affects are surely real, for he relates them to the reward and punishment that pertain to the ethical (6.422). There is indeed a serious problem in elaborating the relation of pleasure and pain to Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics. For pleasure and pain seem to be essentially related to particular aims of our empirically determined will. Wittgenstein clearly does not hold the position that identifies the goodness of an action with its consequences understood in terms of providing pleasure and removing pain, since he speaks of the will as altering the world as a whole. Mounce’s problem then starts with his juxtaposition of a world of fact against a transcendent subject and leads to the impossibility of explaining the nature of a relation to the world as a whole which involves an affective dimension. This can be overcome only by construing the subject as essentially in a world. The fundamental affects that pertain to the sub65. Ibid., p. 96.

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ject are then determined by the dimension of this being in the world. My attempt to consider a psychology that has to do with the very existence in the world or in language is intended to merge both the individual perspective and the universality of language, as well as allow for an affective dimension as an essential dimension of existence in language. The subject is not outside the world but is essentially determined through assuming the limits of the world. However, in order for such an account to be possible at all, it is necessary to replace the talk about a shift in attitude with an elaboration of how language contains within itself the duality of perspectives that can explain our task of assuming meaning. I have done this by systematically distinguishing between the perspective of facts and that of objects. What is at stake in ethics, then, is not a shift of attitude, a shift that assumes that in some unexplained way we see or interpret the facts differently; rather, the subject is understood as essentially related to the movement between perspectives opened by language itself. The perspective of facts is indeed valueless, but that of the object gives us the form of our world, of our possibilities of existence. This is not a matter of our attitude but rather of what there is. Our attitude can at most be described as one of acknowledgment or avoidance of those possibilities. To speak of a psychology of our very existence in language might seem extremely problematic. Indeed, what are the manifestations of such a psychology? What are feelings or affects that pertain to the world as a whole, or to language as a whole? As I have argued, a central component of that psychology, against which the recovery of meaning truly appears as the entrance into a significant world, is the urge to nonsense. That is, the generation of nonsense is not a mere mistake but the manifestation of a fundamental human urge to avoid the conditions of language. The last parts of my interpretation concern the manifestation of that drive. This conception of the ethical might seem rather remote from anything pertaining to ethics. Indeed, I think that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein directs us to something that is more fundamental than what we usually think of when we construe the ethical as a particular domain of philosophy. This is an attempt to locate the source of value in the very place where we uncover the limits of language, that is, where we recognize through language what there is. It is a perspective that locates the fundamental normative dimension in the revelation of the meaningful-

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ness of phenomena. This connection of ethics with ontology, or with being in language as such, can be thought as being founded on an imperative of meaningfulness. The claim that Wittgenstein’s ethics is essentially religious can to some extent justify basing ethics on the imperative to meaning. This is a feature of P. Shields’s interpretation, in which he attempts to link Wittgenstein’s concern with drawing limits to language and his concern with ethics. The broad outlines of this interpretation construe Wittgenstein’s injunction to accept the arbitrariness of grammar as an ethical or even religious injunction, as ‘doing the will of God’. Shields quotes the passage cited above from Wittgenstein’s Notebooks: In order to live happy I must be in agreement with the world . . . And that is what ‘being happy’ means. I am thus, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear to be dependent. That is to say: ‘I am doing the will of God.’66

Shields relates this form of ‘amor fati’ to the acceptance of the arbitrariness of grammar in language. Although I agree with the general direction of his interpretation, I think nevertheless that it must be supplemented with an account of how logical form in the Tractatus comes to have such a significance. Indeed, Shields’s interpretation of the ungroundedness of grammar accords well with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but less obviously with the Tractatus. Much needs to be said as to how we find in the Tractatus the access to that level of reality which we need to accept. My attempt to think of objects as being revealed apart from the form of justification pertaining to the logic of facts means to convey that what is revealed is something like the ungroundedness of meaning. We stand beyond justification, accepting what is given, for the sphere of justification is precisely that determined by the logic of facts. Acceptance of the object thus goes beyond the demand for justification and proof. Contrary to Shields, I think that such an acceptance is essentially the acceptance of everyday language. Indeed, part of what is involved in acknowledgment and avoidance of meaning must include an elaboration of our relation to everyday language. For what needs to be acknowledged must be, in a sense, in plain view. This is precisely why, as Shields himself emphasizes, the problem is a problem of 66. NB, p. 76.

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will rather than knowledge. To avoid making the recovery of meaning a problem of knowledge, we must not open a gap between language as it is and another ground of meaning which we do not yet have or know. This is how the idea of groundlesness in language relates to the affirmation of the everydayness of language. With regard to Wittgenstein’s account of the ethical, it is necessary to address his understanding of what cannot be said, which is too often reduced to a simple dichotomy between what can be said and what can only be shown. While all agree that Wittgenstein thinks of the unsayable in two central contexts, that of the logical and that of the ethical, how both these notions can be encompassed in one account is largely left unclear. As I understand it, this is where there is a need for a third notion, that of manifestation.67 Manifestation reveals to us primarily our very existence in language or the very existence of language for a subject. It is intrinsically related to the recognition of the significance of nonsense. The notion of manifestation must be distinguished from that of the showing of form. Confusing showing and manifestation can lead to various misreadings of how the ineffability of logic relates to ethics in the Tractatus. Thus identifying the unsayability of the ethical with Wittgenstein’s sense that objects can only be shown can lead to a claim such as the one presented by J. and M. Hintikka in their Investigating Wittgenstein: some of Wittgenstein’s pronouncements on ethics and aesthetics . . . can be understood on the basis of the idea that the objects of the Tractatus are objects of acquaintance in Russell’s sense, conjoined with 67. The following passage by P. R. Shields is an example of how the tripartite distinction between saying, showing, and manifestation is reduced to the dichotomy between saying and showing: “Wittgenstein’s reasoning for treating logic and ethics along similar lines begins with the supposition that the world is composed entirely of facts, . . . and he proceeds to point out that what is ‘non-accidental,’ which would include both logical necessity and ethical value, is united in being not of the world. When Wittgenstein asserts that ‘what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence,’ he is not carelessly introducing an ambiguity between two kinds of ‘must,’ but drawing a limit which shows the unity of a logical and an ethical demand.” Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 11. In Glock’s A Wittgenstein Dictionary we find the same lack of distinction between showing and manifestation: “The Tractatus has indeed two parts, a logical one . . . and a mystical one . . . The real significance of the saying-showing distinction lies in the fact that it holds the two together by proscribing both propositions about the essence of symbolic representation and mystical pronouncements about the realm of value” (p. 330).

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a theory of value not unlike what is expressed in the famous last chapter of Moore’s Principia Ethica, . . . If these immediate objects of Moorean valuable experiences—the emotional cousins of Russell’s and Moore’s sense-data—are among Wittgenstein’s objects in the Tractatus, it will literally be true that the world (the totality of objects) of a person who has valuable experiences is different from that of a person who does not. This is precisely what Wittgenstein says of the difference between a happy and an unhappy person.68

It is symptomatic that here the world is identified with the sum of objects, so that there might be objects of valuable experience in the world of the happy man which do not exist in the world of the unhappy man. This interpretation fails to account for Wittgenstein’s idea that for the unhappy man the world as a whole seems to lose significance, whereas the happy man’s world gains significance: “The world must so to speak wax and wane as a whole. As if by accession or loss of sense.”69 The idea that the existence of nonsense and of a drive to nonsense is significant should be distinguished from the idea that nonsense in itself conveys some meaning. Here I fully agree with Diamond’s interpretation that nothing can be said or shown in nonsense (using both terms strictly as I use them in my interpretation). But something is made manifest by the existence of nonsense, and it is this manifestation that is at stake at the end of the Tractatus.

10. The Significance of Nonsense Broadly speaking, interpreters take two kinds of approaches to Wittgenstein’s demand to throw away the ladder, that is, the demand to recognize the nonsensicality of the Tractatus itself. The first assumes that although the picture of the world, of language, of the subject, and of value presented in the body of the text is strictly speaking unsayable, this unsayability is due to certain “technical” limitations of language.70 The complex structure of reality supposedly presented by the text is nevertheless grasped by the reader of the Tractatus, although it cannot be 68. J. Hintikka and M. Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, p. 68. 69. NB, p. 73. 70. J. Conant divides the interpretations of that kind into four groups. See “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense,” in T. Cohen, P. Guyer, and H. Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason, p. 198.

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said.71 The second approach denies emphatically that anything can be shown by means of nonsense; it denies any distinction between illuminating nonsense and plain rubbish. In particular, it denies that we retain anything of the supposed picture of the world presented in the Tractatus after throwing away the ladder. Hacker’s interpretation of the Tractatus would seem to be in line with the first approach to the final act of the Tractatus. He writes: “Wittgenstein was quite correct and consistent; the Tractatus does indeed consist largely of pseudo-propositions. Of course, what Wittgenstein meant by these remarks (like what the solipsist means (TLP, 5.62)) is, in his view, quite correct, only it cannot be said. Apparently what someone means or intends by a remark can be grasped even though the sentence uttered is strictly speaking nonsense.”72 The test as to whether the Tractatus is viewed as illuminating nonsense is the extent to which the interpreter attributes to the work substantive theses (which cannot be stated) about the working of language or the constitution of the world. In Hacker’s case, the doctrine of the metaphysical subject that projects meaning into empty signs is precisely such a substantive bit of theorizing. This is something that cannot be consistently rejected at the end, for the interpretation is committed to its truth. If we want to throw away the ladder, we must construct an interpretation that does not leave behind any theoretical commitments. The interpretation must lead us beyond the book without any remainder. Hacker therefore appears to be in an inconsistent position when he writes: “The Tractatus itself, though a manifestation of our natural disposition to metaphysics, is a justifiable undertaking which has been fully discharged. It is not a prolegomenon to any future metaphysics, but the swan song of metaphysics.” If indeed the Tractatus provides a correct point of view on the world that can only be indicated but not said, then why should it be given up and discharged? Alternatively, if the Tractatus is a manifestation of our natural disposition to metaphysics, in what sense is it a justifiable undertaking? 71. D. Pears, for instance, writes: “When Wittgenstein excludes the solipsist’s claim from factual discourse, he implies that it literally lacks sense, but he does not imply that it is rubbish. On the contrary, he allows that among the theses of metaphysics, all of which are literally senseless, there are some that are acceptable for a deeper and more interesting reason than they make successful claims to factual truth.” The False Prison, vol. 1, p. 164. 72. P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (2nd. ed.), p. 26.

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The second approach to the question of the nonsensicality of the Tractatus is mainly elaborated in a series of essays by C. Diamond and J. Conant concerning the method of the Tractatus. In his “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense” Conant writes: “If one argues . . . as I have, that the Tractatus undercuts a distinction between kinds of nonsense, then one will be forced to embrace what might, at first, appear to be an intolerable conclusion: namely, that when Wittgenstein says ‘nonsense’ he means plain nonsense, and when he says ‘throw the ladder away’ he means throw it away.”73 But the main problem encountered by this “austere” reading of the Tractatus is to explain what possible value the Tractatus could have. This predicament is expressed by Cora Diamond: I believe that the Tractatus takes what you might call an austere view of nonsense. Nonsense is nonsense . . . And yet I do not believe that Wittgenstein’s consigning of ethical talk to the realm of nonsense should be likened to that of the positivists. But that leaves me with the task of explaining how one can distinguish Wittgenstein’s view of ethics from that of the logical positivists, without giving up the ascription to him of what I have called an austere view of nonsense.74

Although I am inclined to some form of the austere view of nonsense, I differ from both Conant and Diamond in my understanding of the relation of nonsense to the method and ethical point of the Tractatus. The Tractatus, I argue, points us to a task of the recovery of meaning, but certainly not in order to dwell upon the meaning of the work itself, of the distinctions presented in it. Rather, it opens onto the meaning embodied in our use of language. Thus the Tractatus points beyond itself, but this “beyond” is in no way a realm of unsayable things that we grasp in silence. It is rather the scene of our lives and of our everyday use of language. Furthermore, I think that my interpretation would support the claim that from the perspective of the end the work should be treated as utterly nonsensical. But this claim must be understood in relation to thinking of the Tractatus as a whole. It is only when we try to grasp what 73. Ibid., p. 198. Conant’s understanding that one should not distinguish between kinds of nonsense, i.e. between mere rubbish and nonsense that is in some way important, elaborates on Cora Diamond’s extremely convincing treatment of those issues in her “Throwing Away the Ladder,” “Frege and Nonsense,” and “What Nonsense Might Be.” See her The Realistic Spirit. 74. C. Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus,” in R. Heinrich and H. Vetter, eds., Bilder der Philosophie, p. 60.

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the work as a whole aims to do that we can see it disintegrating into nonsense. It is only by subordinating all that is treated in that work to its overall aim that the drive to nonsense manifests itself. There is no piecemeal nonsense in the Tractatus. This or that sentence taken by itself is not nonsensical. The work shows itself to be nonsense only when it tries to express or elucidate the world as a whole. It then proves that it elucidates nothing.75 I would further say that the very recognition that language disintegrates in such a condition is itself of the utmost significance. It points to something, and to indicate that is itself part of the point of the Tractatus. Such a manifestation is internally related to our being directed by the work to language as it stands. The recovery of the ordinary scene of language is a return from the urge to nonsense. Conant assumes that it is necessary to read the Tractatus carefully despite its being at the end revealed as utter nonsense. In his reading the Tractatus is an illusion that is fleshed out and slowly unraveled: “the only procedure that will prove genuinely elucidatory is one that attempts to enter into the philosopher’s illusion of understanding and explode it from within.” The implication then is that “we are no longer tempted to such theses ourselves—that we throw them away.”76 For Conant, in reading the Tractatus we start with a thesis which

75. I remark in this context how deep certain misinterpretations of the Tractatus can be. I have evoked the expression ‘the Nothing nothings’ to characterize the appearance of the drive to nonsense, to form a connection between Carnap’s famous attack on Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics” and Wittgenstein’s concerns in the Tractatus. The irony is, of course, that Carnap takes himself to be the inheritor of Wittgenstein’s view, and this fuels his attack on Heidegger. Whereas I think that Wittgenstein is in fact very close on this issue to Heidegger, as witness his remark to the Vienna Circle on Heidegger quoted above. 76. J. Conant, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense,” p. 218. In the light of this description of the aim of philosophical teaching, I note the following: in the first place, the therapeutic method suggested seems to me to fit better Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, where certain illusions are addressed locally, rather than as part of one totalizing movement. I do not see that there are any such therapeutic achievements on the way of reading the Tractatus. Both the issue of nonsense and the recognition that in our reading we are drawn into nonsense come together toward the end of the book. It would seem that a good form of therapy would at the end make us loosen our grip on what has long been unattractive. This eventually does happen, but only because the end of the Tractatus is such a serious and ultimate effort of expression. Moreover, it seems that the Tractatus is not an example of a certain point of view that can be adopted and which is brought to its patent nonsensical conclusions. It seems to be an effort to relate each and every philosophical problem to a whole presented by the text.

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expresses the fundamental (illusory) beliefs of the philosopher, and we slowly unravel it until we end up with nonsense. But the Tractatus strikes me more as a work that strives to express the highest beliefs of the philosopher, and in so doing precisely touches upon the limits of expression. It expresses the fact that such limits are reached. If this is indeed an illusion, then the force of the problem is that we are speaking of an illusion that is constitutive of what is highest in human nature. The point is not that we are no longer tempted to advance such theses ourselves, but rather that we understand this temptation as internal to our existence in language. To throw it away is to throw away something belonging to human nature. The Tractatus leads the reader to the limits of language. To bear witness to this tendency of the human mind is not just to present a piece of nonsense, but to present one’s highest beliefs so that they culminate in the recognition of the drive to nonsense. It is significant that Conant speaks of the drive to metaphysics as something that the philosopher (that is, the metaphysician) and not Wittgenstein himself is drawn to, as if Wittgenstein were in some way beyond that temptation, released from it; as if it belonged to the past of the Tractatus rather than to the very attempt at writing that constitutes this book. My emphasis on the idea that the Tractatus is a truly enigmatic text, a “running against paradox” as Wittgenstein, quoting Kierkegaard, puts it, means precisely that we must recognize both that it constitutes Wittgenstein’s highest effort of expression, and that it disintegrates into nonsense when it touches upon the extreme. This idea is related to the distinction suggested by Conant, and which I also find myself inclined to make, between understanding the propositions of the book and understanding the author: The distinction implicitly drawn in section 6.54 of the Tractatus between understanding the propositions in the book (which we are not asked to do) and understanding the author of the book (which we are asked to do) depends on this idea that although we cannot understand what an utterer of nonsense says, we can understand the utterer—i.e., enter into the point of view from which this piece of nonsense appears to say something . . . The goal here is not to grasp what the other says, but to make his impulse to these particular words humanly intelligible to oneself.77 77. J. Conant, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense,” p. 218.

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Conant does not see the use of the first person at the end as the appearance of Wittgenstein’s own voice. He sees it as determining a shift from the supposed understanding of the propositions to the understanding of the utterer of nonsense. But who is the utterer of nonsense? I take it that here Wittgenstein occupies an exemplary position, he speaks for himself. The Tractatus is, one might say, Wittgenstein’s self-analysis. This is what Wittgenstein expresses in the “Lecture on Ethics,” when he includes himself among those who run up against the limits of language: “My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run up against the boundaries of language.” He further stresses in his conversations with members of the Vienna Circle that speaking in the first person in that lecture was something essential. I read this as meaning that what is expressed is a tendency of the human mind which cannot be denied or left behind, and which is exemplified by the Tractatus. It is only against nonsense that significance is achieved. It is in that sense that Wittgenstein can claim: “This running up against the limits of language is Ethics” (WVC, p. 68). Peace in philosophy is achieved in the midst of that struggle, not by avoiding it.78 A different way of making this point is to recall what Wittgenstein says in his letter to Ficker I quoted in the Introduction. There he writes that his book delimits the ethical from within. C. Diamond interprets this claim as follows: “Working from the inside of what can be said, we see that in the totality of what can be said, nothing is ethical. And this is indeed put explicitly by Wittgenstein. He says that it is impossible for there to be ethical propositions; ethics cannot be put into words.”79 This claim is surely correct, but does it represent what Wittgenstein means by delimiting ethics from within? It merely follows from the traditional distinction between facts and values, together with Wittgenstein’s understanding that to say something is always to represent a fact. In my reading, to delimit the ethical is to bring understanding to the limits of language. We must truly work through the Tractatus as a whole to reach that limit condition. In order to give content to Wittgenstein’s intuitions concerning ethics, 78. I find that Stanley Cavell’s treatment of skepticism expresses this sense that the inner struggle between metaphysics and the release from metaphysics are part of our human constitution. 79. C. Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of the Tractatus,” p. 60.

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Diamond writes of certain views she is inclined to attribute to Wittgenstein. She contrasts the characteristic position on ethics in the Englishspeaking tradition, according to which ethics is a particular branch of philosophy with a specific content, with Wittgenstein’s view that there are no ethical propositions: Just as logic is not, for Wittgenstein, a particular subject, with its own body of truths, but penetrates all thought, so ethics has no particular subject matter; rather an ethical spirit, an attitude to the world and life, can penetrate any thought or talk. Wittgenstein, like some other writers, speaks of two different as it were attitudes to the world as a whole; he refers to them as that of the happy and that of the unhappy. The happy and the unhappy as it were inhabit different worlds.80

But if indeed ethics pervades all of language, then language must itself be accounted for in such a way that it can bear such significance. There must be a perspective opened by language itself through which we can recognize the significance of our world. In Diamond’s account, language is elaborated primarily in relation to the perspective of facts. We find her thus having recourse, like Mounce, to the problematic idea that the attitudes of a subject “as it were” change the world. Diamond gives another account of what she is inclined to say concerning Wittgenstein’s ethics by considering the idea of the independence of the world from the individual will. She views Wittgenstein’s remarks on suicide toward the end of the Notebooks as pointing to a conception of the ethical that demands to accept what there is in the world, and thus its highest prohibition is suicide.81 But we need to elaborate precisely in what sense the world is alien to the individual will. What is it that the individual has to accept? Can we accept anything but what is meaningful? If meaning or language is not at stake in this attitude of acceptance, we are in danger of falling into a problematic psychological understanding of imaginary identification. But if it is meaning in language that has to be acknowledged, then language must 80. Ibid., p. 61. 81. “If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it, it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to comprehend the nature of vapors. Or is even suicide in itself neither good nor evil?” (NB, p. 91).

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be indeed described in such a way as to open such a perspective on meaning. Having said that, it is important to emphasize that Diamond distinguishes what she is inclined to say from what she ultimately says. She acknowledges that there is no way to translate such inclinations as were presented in these two accounts of ethics above into terms that will not fall into nonsense. Analyzing later in the essay the locution “I am inclined to say . . .” in the context of uttering sentences that appear to be ethical but are recognized as nonsense, she writes: “Words like ‘This is what I am inclined to say,’ used to frame such sentences, may thus mark both that they are recognized by the utterer as nonsense, and that that recognition does not involve their losing their attractiveness, their capacity to make us feel that they express the sense we want to make.”82This is opposed to metaphysical propositions whose attractiveness vanishes with the recognition of nonsense. Diamond, it seems, attempts to keep together both the expression of fundamental beliefs and the recognition that such an attempt is doomed to nonsensicality. Thus one might say that she distinguishes between different kinds of nonsense in relation to the utterer of nonsense—nonsense that, upon being revealed as nonsense, loses its attractiveness, and nonsense that retains it nevertheless. I would like instead to speak of the task of writing that is demanded in order to exhibit something both as the highest tendency of the human mind and as degenerating into nonsense. It is this task of writing that Wittgenstein undertakes in the Tractatus. 82. Ibid., p. 74.

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On Wittgenstein’s Dissatisfaction with the Tractatus

12

On Wittgenstein’s Dissatisfaction with the Tractatus

My interpretation of the Tractatus can also shed light on Wittgenstein’s later dissatisfaction with the work, for it requires us to reassess the shift both in Wittgenstein’s understanding of logic and language, and in his conception of the task of philosophy. In my view the seeds of Wittgenstein’s later concern with grammar, everyday language, and the therapeutic aims of philosophy can already be discerned in the Tractatus. Here, however, I would like to discuss a specific problem that is usually advanced as the reason for Wittgenstein’s shift from his early to his later philosophy: the color exclusion problem. This problem is raised by Wittgenstein in “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” the text of a lecture Wittgenstein prepared but never presented. According to the common view of this essay, Wittgenstein presents in it his discovery of nontautological internal relations between simple objects. The case of colors is taken as paradigmatic of such a discovery. Such an understanding of “Some Remarks on Logical Form” would seem to lay my interpretation of the Tractatus open to the following criticism: it cannot be the case that Wittgenstein had a concept of form that was as elaborate as I have attributed to him in the Tractatus. In particular, he could not have had a concept of form that included nontautological internal relations that constitute what an object is. In “Some Remarks” Wittgenstein indeed seems to raise for the first time the notion of the existence of such internal relations, an admission that could be seen as paving the way for the transition to his later view of grammar. In this case grammar would be the spelling out of those internal relations, which are not strictly speaking logical (or not logical according to a narrow Fregean or Russellian conception of logic). 210

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So let us reconsider the problem of colors as it bears on internal relations, starting with a claim Wittgenstein makes in the Tractatus: For example, the simultaneous presence of two colors at the same place in the visual field is impossible, in fact logically impossible, since it is ruled out by the logical structure of color. Let us think how this contradiction appears in physics: more or less as follows—a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time; that is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time; that is to say, particles that are in different places at the same time cannot be identical. (It is clear that the logical product of two elementary propositions can neither be a tautology nor a contradiction. The statement that a point in the visual field has two different colors at the same time is a contradiction.) (6.3751)

This is the statement that Wittgenstein seems to refer to when he later writes in “Some Remarks”: “The mutual exclusion of unanalyzable statements of degree contradicts an opinion which was published by me several years ago and which necessitated that atomic propositions could not exclude one another. I here deliberately say ‘exclude’ and not ‘contradict,’ for there is a difference between these two notions, and atomic propositions, although they cannot contradict, may exclude one another.”1 But what exactly is the nature of and reason for Wittgenstein’s shift? The common view of the relation between Wittgenstein’s statement in the Tractatus (6.3751) and his revocation of it in “Some Remarks on Logical Form” is advanced by D. Pears: [Far-reaching analysis] pushes the level of complete analysis downwards until there are no underlying facts left, but only objects devoid of internal structure. In other words, all the factual implications in a sentence’s total demand are brought to the surface and included in what it says. The simple objects that remain, when logical analysis has been completed, are the pivots on which all factual discourse turns. This is directly connected with his view of logic. He says that all necessity is logical necessity, reducible to the tautological combinability of sentences. This view would have to be abandoned if it turned out that some necessary connections were embedded in the unanalyzable natures of things. For if that were the situation, the properties on which these exceptional necessary connections depended could not be ex1. SRLF, p. 35.

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tracted and their names could not be included in the analyses of sentences mentioning the things that possessed them, and so the connections themselves could not be represented tautologically. It is from this point of view that we should see his refusal in the Tractatus to treat colors as simple objects. If color words could not be analyzed, the undeniable incompatibilities between colors would force him to retract his sweeping claims about necessity. In 1929 he gave up the thesis that color-words are analyzable and allowed them to occur in elementary sentences. That amounted to an abandonment of the sweeping claims made about necessity in the Tractatus, and his more subtle account followed later.2

Pears starts from the assumption that there is an undeniable incompatibility between colors, but he argues that such ascriptions must be further analyzed in order to reveal that incompatibility as a matter of logical necessity. Pears claims that “if color words could not be analyzed, the undeniable incompatibilities between colors would force [Wittgenstein] to retract his sweeping claims about necessity.” This implies that color terms are logically complex and must disappear in the analysis. Furthermore, their analysis will show us that there is indeed a logical incompatibility between two color ascriptions. In 6.3751 Wittgenstein argues indeed that because the incompatiblity is logical, we have not reached the level of elementary propositions. But the question is, what does it mean for Wittgenstein to reach that level of description in which the contradiction disappears? Does it mean that color terms will disappear, or that when we reach that level of description, we grasp the proper form of the space of colors, say, in relation to time and space? Indeed, Wittgenstein remarks in 2.0251: “Space, time, and color (being colored) are forms of objects”; and further, in treating the form of depiction of a picture: “A spatial picture can depict anything spatial, a colored one anything colored, etc. . . .” (2.171). This strongly suggests that color has a form that is to be shown.3 And the showing of that form is precisely the basis for the description in terms of elementary propositions. 2. D. Pears, The False Prison, vol. 1, pp. 72–73. 3. E. Anscombe concludes from her reading of 6.3751 that elementary propositions cannot be simple observation statements: “Indeed quite generally, if elementary propositions are simple observation statements, it is very difficult to see how what Wittgenstein says [in 6.3751] can possibly hold good of them; for any proposition, which could reasonably be called a ‘simple

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To make this clearer, consider the way Wittgenstein describes the apparent contradiction in physics. The claim that a particle has two different velocities is turned into a claim that a particle cannot be in two different places at the same time; that is, particles that are in different places at the same time are not identical. We might ask why we would think of particles that are in different places at the same time as different. This seems to follows from the very form of space, time, and particles, that is, of what we will call space, time, or a particle. So, as we bring out the form of space or of the existence of particles in space, we would arrange such propositions in a formal series. The different terms of such a formal series can serve to derive a contradiction from a statement such as “a particle has two different velocities at the same time,” but it is only the whole formal series that provides us with something of the form of what we call the place of particles in space. This is made clear by the remark in the Notebooks on which 6.3571 is based: A point cannot be red and green at the same time: at first sight there seems no need for this to be a logical impossibility. But the very language of physics reduces it to a kinetic impossibility. We see that there is a difference of structure between red and green. And then physics arranges them in a series. And then we see how the true structure of the objects is brought to light. The fact that a particle cannot be in two places at the same time does look more like a logical impossibility. If we ask why, for example, then straight away comes the thought: Well, we should call particles that were in two places different, and this in turn all seems to follow from the structure of space and of particles.4

I note that the true structure of the object is brought to light by such a series. Moreover, as Wittgenstein points out, “we should call particles that were in two places different, and this in turn all seems to follow from the structure of space and of particles.” That is, we understand what the object is, what its form is, what we call a place in space occuobservation statement,’ one could find another that would be incompatible with it and precisely analogous to it logically.” An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, p. 27. I agree with Anscombe that the objects need not be identified with objects of acquaintance, but this does not mean that colors do not have a form that can be shown and symbolized in elementary propositions. 4. NB, p. 81.

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pied by a particle, by presenting what we say in a formal series. That formal series is the basis for the representation of states of affairs in terms of elementary propositions where the form of the objects (of space and particles) is brought out in the notation. The logical incompatibility appears between structures in the formal series, but the formal series as a whole is what brings out the form that should be reflected by elementary propositions.5 Referring to the view of the Tractatus in “Some Remarks,” Wittgenstein reiterates the claim that he has taken into account the internal constitution of entities: “I have said elsewhere that a proposition ‘reaches up to reality,’ and by this I meant that the forms of the entities are contained in the form of the proposition which is about these entities. For the sentence, together with the mode of projection which projects reality into the sentence, determines the logical form of the entities” (p. 36). It seems therefore that the problem presented in “Some Remarks” does not concern Wittgenstein’s discovery of internal relations that constitute the objects, but rather the distinction made between the form of objects—the internal relations that constitute the objects—and the logical form of facts. Far from discovering the internal relations of objects, the statement of the problem assumes that distinction from the start. Indeed, the problem lies precisely in the assumption of a sharp demarcation of those two realms (a demarcation I presented in Chapter 6). In the Tractatus Wittgenstein thought that he could clearly separate the rules for the logical constants that can be given in advance of experience and characterize the general form of representation, from the internal form that can only be uncovered, as it were, by inspecting phenomena. What Wittgenstein realizes and expresses in “Some Remarks” is that the grammar of the object and that of the logical constants are not separable, not independent. According to the Tractatus, which assumes that the grammar of facts can be separated from the grammar of objects, we are allowed to form the proposition “A is red and A is green.” Since every conjunct is a sensical proposition, and the conjunction of two propositions yields in turn a proposition, that conjunction must be allowable. Now, when such 5. In their Investigating Wittgenstein, J. Hintikka and M. Hintikka suggest a similar solution to the color exclusion problem. Their solution is similarly motivated by the understanding that Wittgenstein attributes form to objects and that form is the basis for the complexity of the factual.

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an operation results in tautologies and contradictions, we are given allowable combinations with no content whatsoever. These are the senseless, limit propositions. But the proposition “A is red and A is green” yields something that must be thought of as nonsense from the perspective of the internal form of the object, yet is an allowable combination from the perspective of facts. It is in this clash of perspectives that the real problem arises. This is why Wittgenstein states in “Some Remarks” that in such a case we would have a truth table that contains only three rows. One supposed option of combination (according to the syntax of the logical constants) would be ruled out as nonsensical. This is what distinguishes this case from the tautologies and contradictions which can be expressed as standard truth tables despite their senselessness. In his conversations with the members of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein makes this aspect of the problem perfectly clear: I used to have two conceptions of an elementary proposition, one of which seems correct to me, while I was completely wrong in holding the other. My first assumption was this: that in analysing propositions we must eventually reach propositions that are immediate connections of objects without any help from logical constants, for ‘not,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ and ‘if’ do not connect objects. And I still adhere to that. Secondly I had the idea that elementary propositions must be independent of one another. A complete description of the world would be a product of elementary propositions, as it were, these being partly positive and partly negative. In holding this I was wrong, and the following is what is wrong with it. I laid down rules for the syntactical use of logical constants, for example ‘p.q’, and did not think that these rules might have something to do with the inner structure of propositions. What was wrong about my conception was that I believed that the syntax of logical constants could be laid down without paying attention to the inner connection of propositions. That is not how things actually are. I cannot, for example, say that red and blue are at one point simultaneously. Here no logical product can be constructed. Rather, the rules for the logical constants form only a part of a more comprehensive syntax about which I did not yet know anything at that time.6

Here Wittgenstein clearly says that the problem lies in separating the syntax of the logical constants from the inner relations of elementary 6. My emphasis, WVC, pp. 73–74.

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propositions (that is, from the forms of objects). He is not discovering here for the first time the existence of such nonlogical inner relations, but is rather admitting to having assumed their independence from the syntax of logical constants! This description of the problem does not make it any the less acute. On the contrary, much of the argument of the Tractatus, as I presented it, depends on separating the form of our means of representation from the grammar expressing the form of the object. The very task of the Tractatus, which is to provide an account of the general form of the proposition apart from the provision of specific examples of elementary propositions, depends on that separation. The very idea that the Tractatus could complete the task of exhibiting the grammar of our means of representation while leaving the inner form of experience to be assumed by human subjects in the fabric of their lives seems to be problematic. It is Wittgenstein’s distinction between the completion of the task of logic and the later appropriation of the form of experience, and with it the entire progression of the Tractatus, that need to be reassessed.

Works Cited Index

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Index

Index

Index

Aesthetics, 8, 134 Affect, 134, 143–144 . See also Feeling Agreement, 50, 176; and truth, 58–60; with the world, 192, 200 Analysis, 43–44, 68, Chapter 6 passim, 109– 111, 151; and the nature of objects, 168– 171, 211–212 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 6, 21, 164, 176, 212 Astonishment, 119, 144, 146–149 Augustine, 144, 149 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 15 Carnap, Rudolf, 74, 135, 144, 205; The Logical Syntax of Language, 1, 2, 111, 126, 183–186; Aufbau, 126 Cavell, Stanley, vii, 8, 10, 207 Complex, 42–43, 72, 81, 113, 172, 212 Conant, James, 6, 202–207 Conceptual notation, 81, 83, 89 Conditions, 5, 11, 54, 162–163, 166, 172– 173, 177, 196, 199; as form, 40, 45–46; of representation, 59–62, 68; recognizing, 105, 107, 111; conditionality of logical necessity, 131, 133; presence of, 137 Configuration, 36–40, 44, 197 Creation, 15, 17, 56, 139–140 Depiction, 50, 52, 55–58, 64, 66, 103, 212 Diamond, Cora, 6, 35, 90, 156, 188, 193, 202, 204, 207, 208–209 Dreben, Burton, vii Elementary propositions, 27–29, 32, 72, 168, 171; and analysis, 42–43, 98; cannot be anticipated, 108–113; and the will, 133; and color exclusion, 211–216

Engelmann, Paul, 2, 4 Enigmatic, xiii, xvi, 16, 136, 146–147, 206 Ethics, 13, 16, 92, 164, 192, 196–201, 204, 209; ethical point of the Tractatus, 2–6, 8, Chapter 10 passim; and language, Chapter 9 passim Facts, 6, 7, 9, 12, 14–17, 91–92, 95, 98, 102, 104–106, 114, 141–142, 161–167, 197– 200; and logic, Chapter 1 passim; and objects, Chapter 2 passim; representing facts, Chapter 3 passim; propositonal sign as fact, 63, 67–70; have no value, 124–129 Feeling, 126, 134, 137–141. See also Affect Ficker, L. von, 3, 8, 23, 207 Figure, xviii, 4, 10, 13, 22, 51, 52, 125, 141– 142, 150, 152–154, 194–195 Finitude, 23, 137–142 Floyd, Juliet, 7, 23, 154, 195–197 Form, 31, 89, 129, 130, Chapter 11 passim; of objects, Chapter 2 passim; pictorial, Chapter 3 passim; of signs, Chapter 4 passim; symbolic, Chapter 5 passim; and analysis, 92–102; recognizing, Chapter 7 passim; and limits, 116–119; and color exclusion, Chapter 12 passim. See also Logical form Formal concept, 80–87 Frege, Gottlob, xv, xix, 1, 21, 26, 30, 37, 40, 59, 68, 69, 74–76, 83–85, 87, 89–90, 94, 115, 184, 204; Begriffsschrift, 4, 89; Foundations of Arithmetic, 72, 89 Freud, Sigmund, 51, 56 Friedlander, Eli, 11, 144 Hacker, P. M. S., 4, 24, 51, 166–167, 176– 182, 191–192, 194, 203

225

226

Index

Heidegger, Martin, xxi, 1, 127, 135, 143– 144, 149, 164, 205 Hintikka, Jaakko, 115, 162, 173–174, 201 Hintikka, Merrill, 162, 173–174, 201 Hylton, Peter, 25 Ishiguro, Hide, 175 Kant, Immanuel, xiii, xix, 1, 11, 21, 23, 45, 117, 128, 131, 139, 150, 154, 190–191 Kierkegaard, Søren, 6, 144 Ladder, 5–6, 10–11, 13, 22, 146, 152–158, 162, 202–204 Limits, 4, 8, 17, 22–23, 25, 121, 126–127, 149–150, 155, 158, 193, 195–197, 206, 207; and the subject, 112–117; ethics and the experience of, 133–144 Logic, 1–8, Chapter 1 passim, 40–44, 47, 55– 58, 62, 70, 72, 77–87, 89–98, 101–103, 107–112, 114–115, 128–131, 169, 183– 184, 188–189, 208 Logical constants, 57, 69, 71–72; are not representatives of objects, 26, 29, 32, 42, 57, 70, 91–92, 94, 96; are not functions, 84–87; and grammar of objects, 214–216 Logical form, 37, 49, 57, 63, 69, 74–75, 200, 214 Logical space, 28–31, 39, 56, 62, 74, 182 McGuinness, Brian, 8, 15–66, 143, 175 Malcolm, Norman, 24 Manifestation, 143, 201 Meaning, 16–17, 26, 29, 50–51, 69–72, 75– 78, 86, 99–100, Chapter 7 passim, 115– 117, 120, 129–130, 132–137, 143–144, 148–153, 162, 167, 175–192, 195, 196, 199–204, 208–209 Metaphysics, 2, 10, 13, 126, 147–148, 152– 153, 156, 203, 206–207 Moore, G. E., 10, 144, 202 Mounce, H. O., 156, 194, 197–198, 208 Mystical, 11, 138–144 Name, 42–43, 78, 88, 109, 110, 173–175, 178–180; vs. proposition, 68–73, Nonsense, 17, 35, 54, 98, 108, 113, 121–122, 162, 188–189, 195, 199, 201, 215; nonsensicality of the Tractatus, 5, 6, 21,

202–209; and formal concepts, 80, 83; significance of, 140–144, 148–153 Object, in states of affairs, 30–33; form of, Chapter 2 passim, 161–176; and depiction, 50– 58, 179–180; name and, 69, 70, 72, 73, 188; and analysis, 97–102, 190–192, 110; and subject, 113–114, 117; grammar of, 210-–216 Ontology, 21, 28–29, 44, 79, 112, 200 Operation, 29, 57, 85–87, 112 Ordinary language, 88–91, 100–102, Chapter 7 passim, 170, 186–189 Pears, David, 24, 44, 54, 66, 77, 143, 162, 166, 168–171, 175, 178, 188–190, 193, 195, 203, 211–212 Philosophy, 8, 10, 12–13, 90, 94, 97–98, 101, 110, 114, 119, 144, 148–149, 150–154, 182, 207–208 Picture, Chapter 3 passim, 61, 65, 105, 173– 180; metaphysical, 21, 133, 142; protopictures, 77, 86, 87 Presentation, 50–57 Projection, 63–67, 177–182, 214 Quantification, 75, 86–87 Ramsey, Frank, 165–166, 187 Representation, 49–50, 55–62, 67, 69, 73, 78, 92–93, 104, 105, 107–108, 110, 112, 114, 116–120, 128, 129–133, 184, 191– 193, 214, 216 Representative, being a, 26, 50–57, 70, 72– 73, 76–77, 91–92, 96, 101, 175 Ricketts, Thomas, 21, 26, 154, 178 Russell, Bertrand, xv, xix, 1, 7, 21, 25–28, 30, 32, 37, 43, 51, 74–75, 83–84, 87, 89, 97– 98, 109–111, 113, 115, 168–171, 173– 174, 184, 189, 201–202; Principia Mathematica, 4; Introduction to the Tractatus, 111, 176, 185–187 Schopenhauer, Arthur, xix, 93, 118, 120, 129, 132, 190–192 Sense, 55– 60, Chapter 4 passim, 99–101, 180; and meaning, Chapter 7 passim, 113, 115–116; of the world, 123, 134, 138, 146 Senseless, 26, 83, 215

Index Shields, Philip, 200–201 Showing, 29, 55, 70, 78, 81, 83, 93, 101– 102, 110–111, 140, 143, 162, 167, 171, 173–175, 185–186, 201, 212 Sign, Chapter 4 passim, 71–78, 81–84, 86– 98, 101, 181, 183–188 Significance, 16–17, 48, 106–108, 117–118, 124, 126–127, 133, 136–142, 150, 162– 163, 199–202 Silence, 2–3, 15, 16, 24, 147–150, 153, 157 Simple, 9, 25, 27, 29, 42, 43, 91–92, 96–102, 109, 113, 123, 168–173, 210–212 Solipsism, 115–120, 191–196 Space, 27, 63, 65–70, 75, 81, 85–86, 137, 182, 212–214; and form, 36–46, 166–167, 178; pictorial, 50–59. See also Logical space Speech, 154 States of affairs, 72, 99, 167, 214; and facts, Chapter 1 passim; and objects, Chapter 2 passim

227

Structure, Chapter 1 passim, 65, 73, 75, 85, 104, 109–110, 165–167, 172, 178, 211, 213, 215; vs. form, Chapter 2 passim; and representation, Chapter 3 passim Subject, 14, 47–49, 51, Chapter 8 passim, 127, 131–136, 139, 148, 150, 157, 158, 162–165, 177, 180–182, 191–203, 208 Sublime, 11, 12, 125, 139 Symbol, 54, 61– 62, 66, 70, Chapter 5 passim, 88–90, 92–93, 173, 183–186, 188 Truth, 9, 94, 96, 123, 143, 153; of pictures, 58– 60; simple truth, 91–92, 102; of solipsism, 115–116, 120, 191, 193–194, 196 World, the, xvii, xxi, 13–17, 21–26, 45–48, 106–108, 161–164, 191–202, 205, 208; and the subject, Chapter 8 passim; as a limited whole, Chapter 9 passim; at the end of the Tractatus, Chapter 10 passim