[Wittrs] Wittgenstein & Solipsism
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:07:36 -0000
Have been away for a few days and, having gone cold turkey on the Internet and
lists like these. I rather enjoyed it. Nevertheless, skimming this list to
catch up I note Walter's reference to Wittgenstein and solipsism in the
Tractatus (from the quick philosophy list which Sean is sharing with us). At
the end of the section he reproduced from the Tractatus Walter says this:
"I think that W eventually came to terms with this himself as he attacked the
notion of private languages with more and more force, starting in the 30s.
"I mean, if we can only have gotten the meaning of such terms as 'rock' and
'red' from others, while we might be wrong about any particular attribution,
the danger of solipsism seems to fade away."
I think this is a good point, i.e., Wittgenstein clearly flirted with and
wrestled over the solipsistic question in the Tractatus, particularly when he
tried to place the idea of "self" and "subject" into the context of his
logical-metaphysical account. After all, it makes perfect sense to think of the
self in the way he presents it, an extensionless point in space-time which
stands necessarily outside and apart from all the "observed" phenomena with
which it engages.
Of course, this isn't precisely what science is interested in when studying
brains (or computers) because, in that case, what is wanted is to understand
how that extensionless point comes to be in a physical environment and, of
course, what makes it what it is? How do some physical entities have awareness
while others don't -- and why?
But, of course, standing in that relation to all other existents which
Wittgenstein considers the extensionless point of "self" is the issue. What is
consciousness qua awareness?
Certainly, when we fix on this phenomenon of a point of view (a "visual field",
though "visual" should probably be understood more broadly than as merely being
a matter of vision!) in which all other things are captured/contained/occur
(and so forth), we are drawn into this notion of solipsism, insofar as it is a
position in extremis re: what we mean by a "self". After all, we also have this
longstanding notion of "soul" which seems to derive from it, suggesting to us
that there is another entity in the universe besides all the physical things
that are observed and as if this entity has a special status that
differentiates it from all those other perfectly physical entities. Well, of
course it does -- though not as an entity like the others!
And this is where, I think, Walter makes an important connection. The
Investigations were undertaken by the mature Wittgenstein as an antidote to the
"grave errors" of the earlier work. But we have often argued here over just how
really "grave" Wittgenstein thought the errors were (if he really thought them
"grave" then why didn't he specify them or otherwise clearly renounce them) or
what they were "errors" at all.
Where does the Tractatus end and the Investigations pick up? All of us no doubt
agree that there are connections between the two works and, of course, that
there are differences. But how deep and how significant are those differences
and is Wittgenstein's radical movement away from the methods and form of the
Tractatus to that of the Investigations an indication that he had, in fact,
thrown aside that earlier work with its "grave errors" -- or that he only built
on it?
Well, Walter correctly points out the role of the "private language" argument
in the Investigations as part of the antidote to the Tractatus.
Instead of elaborating a complex set of statements which provide a picture of
how things are including how the self is, Wittgenstein, in the later work,
moves toward an examination of language itself and its implications for this
kind of thinking. Yes, in both works it is language and how it works that draws
him on. But his point about the impossibility of a language that is purely
private is salutary here. If language requires others to validate our usages
(because language is a matter of rule following and rule following implies the
capacity of being right or wrong about one's choices and you can't be that
without others to gainsay you or react in a way that affirms your usages), then
there is no sense arguing for solipsism (a condition where each of us is
presumed to be the only real thing in a realm of private illusions).
Yes, it remains conceivable that we are in a dream and the others we meet and
communicate with and measure ourselves agains are all elements in that dream
but language is then in the dream, too, and so one cannot speak coherently
about being in a world that is just a dream.
Being in a dream, as with language, requires that we be able to differentiate
this experience from that one, the state of dreaming from the state of
not-dreaming. We recognize a dream by seeing its difference with what we call
reality (the non-dream). But this does not say we cannot, in fact, be dreaming
the non-dream, too. I am reminded of the recent Leonardo di Caprio movie,
Inception, which revolves around a team of people who have the "technology" to
enter into others' dreams and steal ideas or, as is the case which forms the
premise of the story, to plant ideas, to bring about their inception in the
mind of another.
In that film, we are treated to a thriller tha happens on multiple dream levels
where the hero (Leonardo) and his colleagues burrow deeper and deeper into
their subject's subconscious, creating dreams within dreams. We discover that
Leonardo, himself, is a troubled soul who has lost his wife and former partner
to suicide (was it in a dream of hers or his rather than in reality?) and,
maybe, lost himself in some long ago forgotten dream state.
At the end, the twist is that we don't know whether our hero has actually
awakened from his dream, after having reached his wife in his own subconscious
to set her (or himself) free, or whether he is still, in fact, dreaming. The
totem that he uses to assure himself that he is really awake and not dreaming
(the supposedly non-private indicator that he can rely on as an external fact)
fails to reveal (to him or to us?) the truth though the clear implication of
the story is that he is still lost somewhere in his own deep subconscious, that
all that has occurred is, in fact, still his dream.
What would presumably tell Leonardo that he is dreaming is the contrast with
some other state in which the dream state reveals itself as such. But the crux
of the story is that he is dreaming at multiple levels and so he cannot ever
really be sure and, by dint of that, neither can any of us. Clearly he thinks
he has awakened at the end but for some reason he forgets to wait for his totem
to do what it can only do in reality (if, in fact, its behavior in reality is
not itself a dream-like function).
Well, as Wittgenstein saw in the Tractatus, solipsism is only understandable by
dint of the contrast and, finally, no such contrast is possible if language is
genuinely private. But what is private or public is itself a matter of the
manifestation in the state in which one finds oneself since one can dream a
verification as well as experience it for real. Without some standard that we
can relie on and against which we can measure other states, we have di Caprio's
endlessly recursive dream states in that movie.
So language isn't private within each given state but public because it is
subject to the corrections and responses of others whether of the dreamed or
dreaming variety! Wittgenstein's point in the Investigations is that language
isn't private when we are using it and so, by its very operational capacity,
denies the possibility that we are living lost in a dream.
Even if di Caprio really is still in a dream state at the end of Inception,
that dream state is a state of wakefulness for him unless and until it gives
way to another state against which the earlier state can be gauged, and so
forth.
So Wittgenstein's insight in the Investigations was that, finally, solipsism as
a doctrine is pointless because it is incoherent. On the other hand it says
nothing against the possibilities explored in Inception.
This is not a contradiction but merely a recognition that what Wittgenstein
first pointed out in the Tractatus is still the case, namely that the self, as
observer, is not a part of the world but its precondition. However, whereas the
Tractarian insight suggested a way of fitting the solipsistic perspective into
our overall understanding of the universe (and this is no bad thing on a
non-language level), it misleads us when it suggests there is a deep, deep
mystery here that we can discuss which is solipsistic at bottom.
In the Investigations Wittgenstein appears to have moved past this suggested
mysticism into a perspective which shows how really pointless solipsistic
claims must be in any philosophical account. If true they cannot be
articulated; if false we can never know that they are.
If language is the vehicle of philosophy (though perhaps not of religion or
mysticism, whatever the merits of these latter two approaches), then
philosophical claims like solipsism are misleading because they are excluded
from serious philosophical discourse. This, I think, is an important difference
between the later and earlier Wittgenstein. The Tractatus attempted to speak of
solipsism and integrate it into a comprehensive picture of how things are. The
Investigations simply to remove it from the arena of philosophical concerns.
SWM
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