The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (55 page)

But it would be grotesque to do so without issuing some caveats at the outset. First, there were profound continuities between Wittgenstein’s earlier thinking and his later thinking. Some commentators would say that these were far more profound than the discontinuities.
²
Second, and as it may appear conversely – though this is arguably the same point in another guise – if one is going to divide his work into phases at all, there are grounds for not stopping at two. Thus people often refer to his ‘intermediate’ or ‘transitional’ work, meaning by this various remarks that he dictated and notes that he produced after his return to philosophy, while he was still struggling with his earlier ideas and while his later ideas were beginning to take shape.
³
There has even recently been a call to acknowledge a ‘third Wittgenstein’, responsible, among other things, for the drafts that he wrote
in the last year and a half of his life that were published posthumously as
On Certainty
.
⁴

I should also say something at the outset about why, having decided that it is appropriate to accord Wittgenstein two chapters, I have not reached the same decision for any of the rest of my protagonists. For Wittgenstein was not alone among them in giving significant new direction to his work in the course of his philosophical career.
⁵
The point is simply this. In both his early work and his later work Wittgenstein provided insights into what it is to make sense of things that are of the greatest relevance to my project, but he did so in ways which, however profound the continuities in his thinking, call for significantly different treatment. This is not true, or not true to anything like the same extent, of any of the rest of my protagonists.

2. Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy

The 4.11s in the
Tractatus
, along with some scattered remarks elsewhere (notably p. 3, 4.0031, 6.211, and 6.53), present a very distinctive conception of philosophy.
⁶
On this conception philosophy is completely different in kind from any of the natural sciences. Its aim is not to discover truths but to promote clarity of thought. It ‘is not a body of doctrine but an activity’ (4.112).
⁷

Wittgenstein shares with Frege the idea that whatever we can think at all we can think clearly (4.116; cf. p. 3 and cf. §6 of the previous chapter).
Indeed, there is a sense in which, for both of them, our thinking is always clear: unless we are thinking clearly we are not thinking at all.
⁸
Nonetheless, because of infelicities in natural language, such clarity is not always manifest in the ‘outward form’ of what we say when we express our thoughts (4.002). So there is another sense in which, for both of them, our thinking is
not
always clear and needs to be made clear. Such is the business of philosophy.
⁹

Why? What is wrong with unclear thinking?

Wittgenstein has an antipathy to unclear thinking which, as we shall see in §8, is positively moralistic. But we do not need to share all his scruples to appreciate the problems to which unclear thinking can give rise. There is one kind of problem in particular that exercises Wittgenstein. It is associated with superficial patterns in the various combinations of words that we use to express our thoughts. It arises when we notice the patterns, extrapolate, and suppose that other combinations of words are likewise used to express thoughts, though in fact they are not. We
think
we are thinking, but we are not. This leads us to pose pseudo-questions which, in the nature of the case, we do not know how to address, certainly not in a way that will satisfy us. And this in turn can be frustrating, distracting, time-wasting, sometimes even tormenting.

Here is a simple example. Albert looks out of his window. The traffic passes. The time passes. Albert reflects on these two facts. And he is struck by the superficial similarity between the English sentences used to express them. Realizing that it is perfectly proper to ask, ‘At what speed does the traffic pass?’, he is led to pose the apparently parallel pseudo-question, ‘At what speed does the time pass?’
¹⁰
Various pseudo-responses suggest themselves, such as, ‘The time passes at one second per second.’ But Albert cannot reconcile these pseudo-responses and their various apparent consequences with all sorts of other things that he wants to say, for example that the speed at which anything passes must admit of alternatives. (On occasions in the past, when he has been enjoying himself, the time has seemed to pass more quickly. But it cannot really have done so – can it?) He gets more and more confused, more and more agitated. He fails to see that these pseudo-responses do not express any thoughts at all, that they cannot be proper responses to any question, that there is no proper question there in the first place. It may seem a trivial and unrealistic example,
¹¹
but it illustrates the kind of difficulties that we fall into.

Wittgenstein characterizes these difficulties in terms of a distinction that he draws between ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’. Signs are the written marks or noises that we use to communicate (cf.
Lectures
, p. 26). They are what we ordinarily think of as words. Symbols are signs together with their logico-syntactic use. (Logical syntax is akin to ordinary grammar but deeper. Thus ordinary grammar associates the use of the verb ‘are’ in ‘Humans are animals’ with the use of the verb ‘eat’ in ‘Humans eat animals.’ Logical syntax recognizes differences between these, reflected in the fact that it makes sense to add to the latter sentence, but not to the former, ‘including themselves’.)
¹²
Wittgenstein expresses the relation between these as follows: ‘A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol’ (3.32). And he points out that ‘one and the same sign … can be common to two different symbols’ (3.321). Thus the word ‘round’ is sometimes used as a noun to denote a slice of bread, sometimes as an adjective to indicate circularity: one sign, two symbols.

The relevance of this to the difficulties discussed above is twofold. First, the use of a single sign in two contexts, as two different symbols, is a common source of the confusions to which we are prone. Because the word ‘passes’ is used both in the sentence ‘The traffic passes’ and in the sentence ‘The time passes’, it is easy to take for granted that there is some deep common element in what the traffic does and what the time does, and then to agonize about how to understand this common element. We do not pause to ask whether the similarity between these two sentences is the relatively superficial similarity that attends the use of one sign as two symbols. Second, and related, because a sign is used in one context as a certain symbol, with a certain meaning, we naturally assume that this guarantees it a use as that same symbol, with that same meaning, in any other context that is superficially similar. Thus because we know what ‘speed’ means in the phrase ‘the speed at which the traffic passes’, we naturally assume that it can retain that meaning in the phrase ‘the speed at which the time passes’.
¹³
But in fact, if what I have been suggesting about this example is correct, this second use
of the word ‘speed’ cannot be a use of the same sign with the same meaning. So unless and until some other meaning is conferred on the word ‘speed’, no sentence or pseudo-sentence that contains the phrase ‘the speed at which the time passes’ can be used to express any thought at all.
¹⁴

Now Wittgenstein, to repeat, holds that the aim of philosophy is to combat confusion of precisely this kind. But just as Kant distinguishes between good metaphysics and bad metaphysics (
Ch. 5
, §2), so too Wittgenstein distinguishes between good philosophy and bad philosophy.
¹⁵
And he holds that the mark of
bad
philosophy is just such confusion (3.324–3.325 and 4.003). The aim of good philosophy, then, is to combat bad philosophy. (And this is its sole aim. If there were no bad philosophy, there would be no need for good philosophy. This is where the analogy with Kant breaks down.) Moreover, the one use of the term ‘metaphysical’ in the
Tractatus
, apart from a couple of references to something that Wittgenstein calls ‘the metaphysical subject’ (5.633 and 5.641), indicates that he equates metaphysics with bad philosophy.
¹⁶
Thus he writes:

The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said … – i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person – he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy –
this
method would be the only strictly correct one. (6.53, emphasis in original)
¹⁷

It is a further question what the implications of this view are for metaphysics on my conception of metaphysics as the most general attempt to make sense of things. If making sense of things is understood as arriving at truths about the world, then metaphysics is simply the most general of the natural sciences (4.11), which is arguably physics.
¹⁸
If making sense of things is understood as introducing the kind of clarity into our thinking that will enable us to arrive at truths about the world without the distractions
of bad philosophy, then metaphysics is simply good philosophy, in its most general reaches.
¹⁹
Either way, we see that the accidents of definition allow for an interpretation of the
Tractatus
whereby it is entirely metaphysics-friendly. Nevertheless, this accords neither with the letter of the text nor with what most self-styled metaphysicians would say about what they were engaged in. Here, just as in Hume (
Ch. 4
, §4), the fact that it is possible to characterize what we have before us as a celebration of proper metaphysics sits alongside the more blatant fact that, given how metaphysics has traditionally been conceived, and given how it has in fact been practised, what we have before us is an assault on the very enterprise.
²⁰

And Wittgenstein, in echo of Kant (
Ch. 5
, §2), is emboldened to say, in the Preface to the
Tractatus
, ‘[This] book deals with the problems of philosophy [i.e. the problems occasioned by bad philosophy, what Wittgenstein means by metaphysics]…. I … believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of [these] problems’ (pp. 3–4).
²¹
But there is an ironical twist. He immediately adds, ‘If I am not mistaken in this belief, then … [part of] the value of this work … is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved’ (p. 4).

3. The Vision of the
Tractatus

In the light of all of that, the
Tractatus
presents a quite unexpected initial appearance. Where we might have anticipated a series of examples of the confusions that bad philosophy engenders, together with more or less piecemeal attempts to eradicate them and perhaps also to offer some diagnosis – the kind of thing, in other words, that we find in Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ – what we actually find, from the very outset, is what looks for all the world like hard-core traditional metaphysics, in the same vein as the great metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. ‘The world is all that is the case,’ Wittgenstein tells us in the opening sentence (1). The world is ‘the totality of facts’ (1.1) and not the totality of
objects.
²²
A little later he expands on this with a series of remarks about ‘objects’ and their relation to ‘substance’: ‘Objects are simple…. [They] make up the substance of the world…. Substance is what subsists independently of what is the case’ (2.02ff.). And so it goes on until we reach the climax of the book, where we are told that ‘the sense of the world [lies] outside the world’ (6.41); that ‘God does not reveal himself
in
the world’ (6.432, emphasis in original); and finally, in the very last sentence, that ‘what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (7). Heady, transcendent, abstract stuff! Or so it seems.

A fuller account of how this is supposed to consist with Wittgenstein’s explicit view of philosophy, and his admonishments against the bad variety, must wait until later (§7). But already it is possible to say something to mitigate the impression that he is presenting a grand metaphysical vision of reality that is simply impervious to those admonishments. He is presenting a vision, all right, but a vision that subserves a Fregean project, to make sense, not of things, but of sense, its possibility, its scope, and its limits – where sense is understood to be sense of the kind that can be expressed in propositions.
²³
Even the material towards the very end of the book, about what is and what is not ‘in the world’, is proffered as part of that same vision, the connection being that propositions can only express how things are ‘in the world’, as opposed to what is ‘higher’ (6.42). We may still have concerns about whether Wittgenstein’s pronouncements can escape his own philosophical censure, but at least this gives some indication of why they might be thought to be relevant to it.