[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical Investigations online - amplification re PI
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:06:54 -0700
Donal writes
Previously I wrote:-
>4. There is a key piece of thinking that links W of the TLP and the PI
and his two different views of 'what can be said and what can only be
shown':-
/what gives 'what is said' its sense is never 'said' in 'what is said' -
what gives 'what is said' its sense cannot be said but can only be shown.>/
Some comments below by way of amplification of this in relation to
/Philosophical Investigations /[‘PI’]:-
These comments pray in aid excerpts from Ray Monk’s “Wittgenstein: The
Duty of Genius”.
(1) We might begin by asking how explicitly does ‘the later W’ address
whether or not he still adheres to the view italicised above (that was a
key part of his TLP) namely that /what gives 'what is said' its sense is
never 'said' in 'what is said' - what gives 'what is said' its sense
cannot be said but can only be shown/? And, if there is no explicit
answer on this ‘whether or not’ question, how explicit (or otherwise)
should we expect W to be on this point?
My suggestion is that there is an asymmetry here – depending on whether
the answer to the question is ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This asymmetry arises
because what is in the TLP must, as W says in the Preface to PI, be
taken as essential “background” to understanding PI. So views retained
from TLP need not be the focus of explicit affirmation in PI or
otherwise addressed; whereas what is in TLP but is later rejected, needs
to be addressed (even if the relation between later and earlier, and
thus what has been ‘rejected’, is left for the reader to discern and is
not itself explicitly addressed). Repeating what is accepted as
“background” would be otiose whereas making clear what is different and
contrasting is not. So we might expect explicit clarity on the point if
W had disavowed this key piece of thinking. But we might not expect
explicit clarity on the point if W was assuming it as understood, as a
point of fundamental continuity between his earlier and later views –
given, for example, that in his Preface he makes clear that the TLP is
essential as “background” to understanding PI. And so lack of explicit
clarity on the point favours the view that W continues to adhere to this
key piece of thinking.
This ‘assymmetry’ becomes more decisive the more fundamental we take
this key piece of thinking to be in W’s philosophy: and here my
suggestion is that this key piece reflects the “central point” of the
TLP (as W put it to Russell in a letter) as it simply amplifies the
‘saying/showing’ distinction that is fundamental to TLP. In short, if W
had abandoned anything as fundamental as the ‘saying/showing’
distinction, we might expect him to say so; but if he had not abandoned
it, then, given the TLP must be taken essential “background”, we might
not expect W to say that he has not abandoned it.
The above is reinforced by two further points:
(a) W’s view, that the ‘saying/showing’ distinction itself can only be
shown not said, means we might understand why W does not seek to
explicitly ‘say’ but rather only ‘show’ that he continues to adhere to
the distinction. Indeed, Monk argues that in the later philosophy W
follows more closely the consequences of the distinction being itself
unsayable, by no longer seeking to ‘say’ anything about it as he did in
TLP: “…the really decisive moment [“between his ‘transitional’ phase and
his mature later philosophy”] came when he began to take literally the
idea of the /Tractatus /that the philosopher has nothing to /say/, but
only something to /show/, and applied that idea with complete rigour,
abandoning altogether the attempt to say something with
‘pseudo-propositions’” (p.302, author’s emphasis throughout);
(b) Monk writes: “Explicit statements of what Wittgenstein is trying to
accomplish in his philosophical work are rare” (p.304). We should
therefore not perhaps be surprised that there is a lack of explicit
statements as to what W seeks to show, or what the ‘saying/showing’
distinction accomplishes, in the later philosophy – particularly in the
light of the considerations at (a).
And yet there are various aspects of W’s later writings that corroborate
that he maintained the key idea italicised above - the idea that was
absolutely fundamental to the TLP and which is, I suggest, also
fundamental to PI.
(2) “Other great philosophical works – Schopenhauer’s /World and
Representation/, say, – can be read with interest and entertainment by
someone who ‘wants to know what Schopenhauer said’. But if
/Philosophical Investigations/ is read in this spirit it will very
quickly become boring, and a chore to read, not because it is
intellectually difficult, but because it is practically impossible to
gather what Wittgenstein is ‘saying’. For, in truth, he is not /saying/
anything; he is presenting a technique for the unravelling of
confusions. Unless these are /your /confusions, the book will be of very
interest.” [p.366, author’s emphasis throughout]
What might be added to this is that the “technique” is a matter of
showing not saying. It is involves “the uncovering of one or other piece
of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running
its head up against the limits of language”, as Wittgenstein describes
the “results of philosophy” (in his conception). When we ask what these
“limits of language” are (or what demarcates sense from nonsense) we
find that the later Wittgenstein believes these “limits” (or any such
‘demarcation’) is not something that can be drawn or ‘said’ [or
expressed, or stated]: these “limits” can only be /shown/; and we find
them /shown/ when, as it were, we run up against them in actual cases.
If we take the “limits of language” to be set by relevant “rules”
(separating sense and nonsense in relation to some ‘language-game’),
then these “rules” cannot be said but can only be shown. It is a
misreading of Wittgenstein, particularly his ‘rule-following
considerations’, to think that his aim is to state or express what the
“rules” are that govern various 'language-games' – this is no more the
aim than it is his aim to express or draw in language the bounds of
sense (which aim Wittgenstein takes to be aiming at the impossible).
On
the contrary, it is central to the ‘rule-following considerations’ to
show that we cannot determine the sense of a ‘rule’ by some kind of
statement, and to show that rule-following has a different 'basis': for
one, whatever might be said to be a “rule” by way of some statement
would stand in need of a further stated interpretation of that rule if
we were to determine the sense of the “rule” /by statement/; and that
‘further stated interpretation’ would stand in need of a further stated
interpretation to determine /its/ sense, and so on – from which
Wittgenstein takes it (perhaps almost as obvious) that following a
“rule” is not given by any stated interpretation but is “exhibited” [or
/shown/] in what we regard as ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’
in actual cases.
We may understand why in the Preface to PI we read that the later
philosophy can “only” be understood against the background of the
earlier:- for they share a central and crucial preoccupation with
/showing the unsayable “limits of language”/. But the Preface to PI also
‘says’ that the later philosophy must also be seen “by contrast with”
the earlier:- for, despite sharing the fundamental tenet that the
“limits of language” may only be shown, the TLP and PI differ markedly
in how this is to be done and they represent markedly different POV. The
contrast might be expressed along the following lines:- in the TLP it is
sought to show the “limits of language” by adopting a kind of
‘transcendental’ perspective, where we view language ‘/sub specie
aeternitatis/’, from the ‘outside looking in’ on language, or as God
might view language; whereas, in PI, we find the “limits of language”
can only be /shown/ when (so to speak) we run up against them, and so
from a kind of ‘immanent’ perspective - we recognise these limits from
the ‘inside looking out’, and our understanding is perhaps irreducibly a
‘human’ understanding connected with our specific human ‘form of life’.
I thank Donal for setting all this out. I should say straight off that I
disagree with most of what he says about the Investigations, essentially
because I don't believe there is a notion of, a contrast between, saying
and showing of the sort he sees in it.
Of course, this is so far a possibly interesting remark about my mental
state, no more.
A timid first move. Many have thought and said, as does Donal, that the
aim, or one of the most important aims, of the Investigations, is to
demonstrate—or exhibit or show—what needs to be said now about what was
said then, i.e., in the Tractatus. Donal takes him to be saying that
that the Tractatus is 'essential as backgro[u]nd' for (understanding?)
the Investigations. Donal is right. There it is, right on the page. My
advice is to ignore it.
Wittgenstein pays little attention to it in the text—in the interesting
parts of the text, I should say, and in some places seems not to
remember what he had said in the Tractatus. I'm thinking here of his
discussion of 'simple objects,' the need for such things, and how one
would determine (could determine) what was simple in various imagined
cases. This discussion though simply passes the argument in the
Tractatus that there must be simple objects by. It's as if Wittgenstein
had struck his forehead with his palm and exclaimed, 'Simple things! I
remember saying something about that in the Tractatus; I should makes
some notes about simple things, simple objects, simplicity...,'
whereupon, he writes §39 and §§46-49.
I should have said, above, that I was 'thinking here, for example...' I
don't want to try to amend the text above; my email has been unable to
pay attention to line breaks.
More later.
Robert Paul
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