[lit-ideas] Re: EP has left the building (Was: Saying an EP)
- From: Henninge@xxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Henninge)
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 05:34:04 +0200
To take up Donal's questioning, let me begin with that part of his post in
which he seems most to stray from Wittgenstein:
> 2.024 "Substance is what subsists independently of what is the case".
>
> That is:- objects, since these "make up the substance of the world"
(2.021),
> are independent of "what is the case" ie. "the world" - objects are "the
> unalterable form" (2.023), no matter what is "the case" or "the totality
of
> facts".
This is good. This is clear, but there is one section left out between the
2.024 and 2.0251that Donal cites. It is the following:
2.025 Sie ist Form und Inhalt.
2.025 It is form and content.
>
> 2.0251 "Space, time, and colour..are forms of objects".
>
> Ie. These MERE forms are NOT objects - objects are BEYOND these mere
forms.
>
>
> Of course, this may all rest on my colossal misunderstanding of the text -
> but it may be worthwhile to clarify this, if so.
I've blown up the words of Donal's that lead him astray. It is not an
accident of language that the plural "forms of objects" referring to "space,
time, and colour" is the same "form" as in the "objects are 'the unalterable
form' (2.023)." The answer to the puzzle may be in the next two sections:
2.026 Nur wenn es Gegenstände gibt, kann es eine feste Form der Welt geben.
2.026 Only if there are objects can there be a fixed form of the world.
[This "fixed form" is what P&M call "an unalterable form" here and in
2.023--"Diese feste Form besteht eben aus den Gegenständen" (This fixed form
consists of the objects.)] [Much can be learned about Wittgenstein by
reflecting on what is wrong with (a) any translation and (b) especially
P&M's translation, especially--because it has almost canonic acceptance. W's
"feste Form" becomes in P&M "unalterable form," while Ramsey's "fixed form,"
*while* less expressive, roughly speaking, is better, strays less far from
"feste Form" than "unalterable form" which turns "fixed" into something more
like "rigid" or "permanent" or "unchanging." P&M should never have
translated a positive term by a composite term combining a negation with a
positive term (un-alterable)--a difference built into the form of the
translating element and thus immediately a reason for a poor correspondence,
a weak equivalence.
2.027 Das Feste, das Bestehende und der Gegenstand sind Eins.
2.027 The fixed, the existent and the object are one.
From this we can see that the fixed (form), the substance or what subsists
independently of what the case is, and the object(s) are ONE ("and the same"
P&M add unnecessarily). The form is not mere and it is not beyond the
object--it is the object. It is so close to the object that two objects with
the same logical form cannot be distinguished except by the fact that they
are 2, i.e. different. Remember, the "substance" is "form and content.
>
> But the question arises: if objects are somehow beyond space, time and
colour
No--not beyond space, time and colour. "Roughly speaking: objects are
colorless" (2.0232), but that objects are "beyond space and time," even
roughly speaking, would remove objects from the imaginable, from "logical
form."
> - if they are crucially independent of "what is the case" - surely this
> implies they are phenomenally unknowable "objects" since the only stuff we
> can know phenomenally must be known (at least 'as if') in space or time or
> colour.
>
> If they are not phenomenally knowable, how is it right to think that their
> content is to be established by science, experience etc.? - even though
the
> logician may deign to tell us, from on high as it were, a priori that they
> _simply must_ exist.
>
> How, fer feck sake, is a "cat" or a "blue dot" etc. an "object" that
subsists
> independently of space, time and colour?
For Wittgenstein, the "cat," "blue dot" and other objects are better
described by their possible functions in states of affairs in "logical
space" where space, time and color are inessential.
If you didn't have a "cat" there where the cat is or a "dot" where the blue
dot is, there would be a hole in the objects, the "fixed form." That
impossible hole, its impossibility, is the subsistence background that makes
everything possible, roughly speaking. It might be good to consider the
German word for object: It is Gegen-stand, the "stand-against." Think of the
objects, not so much as physical or even phenomenal things, but as the
standing-against of differences (in color in a visual field, for instance,
or of one "part" of space from another/the next, or one moment from the
next). Perhaps you can begin to comprehend why the object must be simple. If
the "standing-against" were *also* a standing *with* that which it is
"standing-against," it would lose its "standing-against-ness," its
objectivity, its integrity. There would be no "correspondence" of picture
elements to object (elements), no picturing of any kind, no comparing of the
pictures we make ourselves of facts and the facts themselves. All objects
would lose their form and bleed into the other (now no longer) objects. That
is the fixed form (Kant would say "necessary for thought"). A proposition's
truth would only be based on the truth of another proposition because there
would be no way to compare the sense of the proposition to the world it is
describing.
>
> Donal
> Still In Puzzleland
> Hoping not to be passed over in silence
>
>
Richard Henninge
University of Mainz
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