[C] [Wittrs] Re: Re: Metaphysical Versus Mystical
- From: "J D" <ubersicht@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:40:30 -0000
SW,
A few quick comments.
The rapidity with which my responses were posted owes not to my having dashed
off responses to each but to my have waited to post any of them until I'd had a
chance to consider each of them in light of the others. I wanted to reply to
each one and then after doing so to re-read them from that point of view.
That's why all of the responses hit at once.
I would grant that the approach I take to the Tractatus may color my
interpretation in ways that I'm not aware but I don't know that any particular
principle I follow has an effect on this discussion. It could be though. I'd
have to see.
Actually, my sense is that you may be appealing to elements of Wittgenstein's
later remarks on religion in your attempt to distinguish different kinds of
nonsense.
I want to direct your attention to a latter Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig von
Ficker, editor of "Der Brenner", regarding the Tractatus:
"The book's point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a
sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here
because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write,
then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all
that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the
important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the
inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of
drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just
gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being
silent about it. And for that reason, unless I am very much mistaken, the book
will say a great deal that you yourself want to say. Only perhaps you won't see
that it is said in the book. For now, I would recommend you to read the preface
and the conclusion, because they contain the most direct expression of the
point of the book."
Note that he refers to "gassing" and his own attempt to avoid gassing by being
silent. If nothing else, this suggests to me that we should question whether
he would have considered much religious talk to be nonsense pure and simple.
Which is not to say that there may not be something important behind it.
My point remains that "nonsense" as a logical concept does not admit of kinds
in the way you suggest. But "nonsense!" as a rebuke might be avoided for other
reasons. And to that extent, I agree that there are distinctions we might try
to draw (doing a lot of speculation) between things Wittgenstein would DISMISS
as nonsense and things he would recognize as nonsense but would not simply
dismiss.
Again, a difference between the logical point - it's all nonsense - and the
psychological/religious/aesthetic/ethical point(s) about the inclination to say
certain things.
The 1929 Lecture on Ethics is still awhile after the Tractatus, so we use this
at our peril. Still, I think it may shed some light here.
"Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will
say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to
them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows
that by these words we don't mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by
saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts
and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the
correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious
expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it
were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of
would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject
every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio,
on the ground of its significance."
"That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not
nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their
nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was
just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My
whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write
or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language."
"This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.
Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate
meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science.
What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document
of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting
deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it."
He clearly does call these ways of speaking "nonsense". But he denies any
willingness to ridicule those tendencies in the human mind that give rise to
them.
There is nonsense with which he is sympathetic and presumably nonsense with
which he is unsympathetic, but it's still in the same logical category of
nonsense.
Whether the "gassing" of which he spoke in the letter to Ficker would be
something he would ridicule in 1929 is an interesting question. I suspect that
he'd be less inclined to speak of "gassing" when others attempted to make
points he thought he'd made better by being silent once he began to see that
his way of setting out the boundaries was problematic. But this is just a
surmise with no textual basis.
We might also distinguish between his unwillingness to ridicule the human
tendency that nonsense and gassing document from whether he'd ridicule the
particular expressions of that tendency.
JPDeMouy
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