[lit-ideas] Re: The Wittgenstein Tautology -- as identified by Torgeir Fj...
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 29 Mar 2004 20:25:03 PST
If someone asks, where the boss gets off asking her to do something she hadn't
anticipated and finds burdensome, we might reply, 'The boss is the boss.'
If the complainer says that she _knew_ that (for what else could the boss be?)
she hasn't understood the import, let alone the implicature of the reminder. One
could always take refuge in the claim that these words don't, strictly speaking,
merely mean that the boss is the boss, but something else instead, viz., that
the boss has the proper standing to require this work done--which may seem a bit
tautological too, but not all the way tautological, if you see what I mean. But
that one feels the need to take refuge there may simply show that one hasn't
understood the original utterance, which is perfectly all right just as it is.
Tractatus 7: 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muB man schweigen.'
Now it will be clear, at least to Richard Henninge, and some others, that the
McGuinness-Pears rendering of this as
'What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.'
is not a _literal_ translation. The 1922 translation, by C. K. Ogden, 'Whereof
one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,' is closer to the original:
whether it is closer to the spirit of the original, I cannot say. Someone--F. P.
Ramsey?--once said, 'If it can't be said, it can't be said, and it can't be
whistled, either.'
To repeat: I see this passage as a reminder that we should not, having
understood from 6.54 that the framing propositions of the Tractatus cannot be
'said' (for they do not have a sense), keep trying to do philosophy, i.e., keep
trying to say things like them. Thus I see Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, as
being _very_ unlike the Logical Positivists, who kept right on making
pronouncements which, in light of their own criterion of meaning, were
meaningless.
As for 'can/cannot' referring only to 'physical' possibility/impossibility, one
should try to identify the greatest prime number, and see how much an appeal to
the material world has to do with that.
It would not be misleading to understand Tractatus 7 as saying, in effect, that
one must stop trying to do philosophy as philosophy is commonly conceived, an
injunction that is in keeping with 6.53:
'The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be
said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing
to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say
something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to
certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the
other -- he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy --
but it would be the only strictly correct method.' [Ogden trans.]
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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