[C] [Wittrs] Re: Re: Re: Metaphysical Versus Mystical
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 10:24:18 -0800 (PST)
(J)
... I just don't find you convincing here at all. The biggest problem is that
your views don't require the Tractatus to have the critical props
6. Imagine that Wittgenstein had not had deep religious experiences during the
war and had not written about the transcendental. Imagine he had not said that,
after the props of natural science answer all the questions it possibly could
(6.52), that the problems of life would not be touched. And that the problems
of life were NOT problems precisely because they come from outside the world,
and the seeing of this vanishes them. And that they show themselves to you, but
are extrawordly and beyond your ability to language about, because language is
only to pin what is in the world. Imagine he had not said, "Is not this the
reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear,
could not then say wherein this sense consisted?" (6.521)
If Wittgenstein had not invented the idea of the transcendental being both
extrawordly and showing itself to us, there would be no need for you and I to
wonder about whether THIS STUFF is different from the stuff he talks about in
the book that fail as props but are NOT TRANSCENDENTAL. Clearly you cannot
dispute that he creates two buckets. (He may create 3 -- see below). And by
"buckets" I don't mean that you or I -- or him -- could not produce more senses
of the idea "nonsense" (more buckets) or that we could speak in a bucketless
way too. What I mean is that the SYSTEM he speaks of seems to prescribe two
basic things. He sets this structure up. To see it your way, therefore,
requires that many of props 6 vanish. Of course, you could erase many of props
6 -- that's the way the Tractatus existed before his religious experience. (It
already had the requirement of silence and saying versus showing). Really, the
religious experience was the
retrofitting of the transcendental into a SPECIAL PLACE. That is the final
thing that he does. I don't see how that can be denied.
Here is what the problem reduces to: (a) something is senseless because the
symbols and signs have no meaning; and (b) something is shown to us which
cannot be an utterable truth. This distinction is as clear as anything in the
Tractatus. The only question is what belongs to each. The
historical information and the props themselves seem to suggest that problems
of life, aesthetics and ethics are of type (b) and that other metaphysics and
philosophical views of all sorts are of type (a). This is consistent with the
objective of the Tractatus -- to silence certain kinds of philosophy and
metaphysics, yet to set aside a certain status or realm for the transcendental.
A good example here is skepticism (6.51). It is senseless and confused and
cannot be said. It's a kind of gibberish. There is no meaning to the claims.
That people deeply feel religious spirituality is a matter that is an
unutterable truth. Something unsayable by virtue of the form of life. If you
try to utter it, you spoil it. You don't get it right. This, too, results
in "nonsense," but of a different kind. Wittgenstein is quoted by Monk as
saying:
"There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They MAKE THEMSELVES
MANIFEST. They are what is mystical." [Wittgenstein quote in Monk, p.143 --
allcaps substituted for italics]
Furthermore, spurred on by a poem he was discussing with Engleman, Wittgenstein
writes:
"If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then NOTHING gets lost.
But the unutterable will be -- unutterably -- CONTAINED in what has been
uttered!" [151, allcaps for italics]
Now, it is true that Wittgenstein had developed the concept of showing over
saying before his (temporary) religious conversion. And it is true that he
applied this idea to non-transcendental stuff. He regularly used it against
Russell's theory of types and for statements such as "there are 3 things in the
world," which Wittgenstein insisted could not be said. So we might think of
three possible categories here:
1. something that shows itself and is extrawordly (ethics, aesthetics,
spirituality -- presumably devout)
2. something that shows itself and is not extraworldly (apparently, this is
what logic does; logical symbols, if I understand this right)
3. something that does not show itself, is senseless, and has no meaning to its
signs (all else??)
Yours thinking we won't have any agreement here ...
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Discussion Group: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html
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