[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:37:09 +0000 (GMT)
Today I will mostly be:- defending the view that in both his earlier and later
philosophies Wittgenstein ('W') was offering two different doctrines of the
'unsayable', and that his position cannot be properly understood without
recognising how this is fundamental to both philosophies. It is why the PI (PI,
Preface) "could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against
the background of my old way of thinking". It is why the PI in the Preface
mentions "_this_ stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book" i.e.
Sraffa with his fundamentally unsayable Neapolitan gesture that _shows_ but
does not _say_.
Insufficient recognition of the importance of the fundamental 'unsayability' of
certain fundamentals (the 'simples' of the TP and the 'rules' of PI) leads
commentators into exegetical overdrive and over-interpretation of what W is
(mis-)taken to be 'saying', placing far more weight on W's remarks than he
intended them to bear (I take seriously the W who entertained the idea of a
philosophical work consisting of 'jokes', and think PI contains many
'_jokes_').
The fundamental unsayability is linked to TP's claim to have solved all the
fundamental problems of philosophy and PI's aim of dissolving all philosophical
problems: in both, philosophical problems are seen as kinds of pseudo-problems
(W's poker-handed reply to P at the Moral Sciences Club illustrates this, as he
one-by-one dismisses P's examples of genuine philosophical problems by placing
them in some other category than merely philosophical).
W was a complex even self-torturing man, but was not, I suggest, given to false
modesty. His claim to have solved all the fundamental problems of philosophy
with the TP, by showing that the questions they raised (though of greater
ethical importance than those raised by science) are nevertheless just a kind
of 'nonsense' that cannot answered because of the (unsayable) limits of our
language, was not a modest claim. His realisation that the TP failed in this
aim (P, a careful student of the TP, realised long before W) lead him, I
suggest, to think that if he had failed to solve the fundamental problems in
the TP then no one ever could:-and so in PI the view is that philosophical
problems are pseudo-problems that can never be solved but which may be
dissolved by the therapeutic examination of our actual use of language to
relieve us from the confusions and 'bewitchment of the intellect' that the
'high seas' of language toss up.
The fundamental task set in the TP is to explain how language can link to
reality: and the explanation is that it is because they have the same
underlying structure. If we analyse both we find in each case that they break
down into more and more 'simple' things, until we reach a point in language
where the proposition asserts the existence of a fact that is so 'simple' that
it cannot be further broken down. These atomic propositions link with reality
because there are atomic facts; that is, the proposition corresponds with
reality if the 'simple' asserted by the proposition exists in reality as a
'simple' logically atomic fact. (To adopt the jokey manner of the later W, he
should perhaps have asked: 'But why should there not be logically sub-atomic
props and facts?' This move to some patent nonsense might have _shown_ some
disguised nonsense at work here).
It turns out this 'atomic' level of propositions and facts is beyond what can
be said in language (W never offers a single example of an atomic proposition
though his whole theory depends on their existence). That this 'atomic' level
nevertheless exists can be 'shown'; and while the 'showing' of it in the TP is
strictly nonsense (because nothing written there is a proposition of science)
it contains the solution to all the fundamental philosophical problems because
they are 'shown' to be problems that provoke solutions that are only futile
attempts to say the unsayable (when it would be best to pass them by in
silence).
By the time of his PI, W has abandoned the view that language derives its
'sense' from a one-to-one 'pictorial' correspondence between its underlying
structure and the structure of reality. The 'sense' of language is no longer
_given by its relation_ to an external non-linguistic reality(as it was in TP)
but is internally _related to_ its own 'rules' (I say _given by its relation_
and _related to_, and not _generated by_, because afaik in neither the later or
earlier philosophy does W attempt to say what 'generates' sense; rather W tries
to account for 'sense' relationally, without giving some kind of priority to
what it is related to).
These 'rules', it turns out, are also unsayable - they can perhaps be shown,
but not said: that is, we can assemble examples of language-use so to go from a
piece of disguised nonsense to patent nonsense, and thereby _show_ we have
violated a 'rule' somewhere along the line. But this kind of therapy does not
involve ever 'saying' what the rule is: indeed W gives no explicit or stated
example of a 'rule' in the sense where a 'rule' marks the bounds of sense. (W's
frequent use of emphasising _italics_ is a _sign_ that the italicised words
point beyond themselves: that they are part of a 'showing', for those who have
the grasp, but that they do not _say_ what it is they _show_).
Robert seems to think this is "anachronistic" a view: and of course it may be -
certainly enough targets are set up in the above paragraphs to give critics of
this view target-practice. Perhaps someone will offer an explicit, stated
example of an atomic proposition or of a 'rule' (for that would clearly scupper
the POV outlined above)? Or show that the TP did not rely on a putative
isomorphism between language and reality? Or show that PI relies on such a
putative isomorphism?
Donal
Not snowed under
Yet
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts: