The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (58 page)

On the most natural interpretation of these two claims, an interpretation whereby it is a substantive issue which of them is correct, the term ‘things’ ranges over truths. And on that interpretation Wittgenstein’s view is surely in line with the counterclaim (that there is nothing that cannot be put into words). The idea of an ineffable truth is, surely, an anathema to him, even given whatever distinction we are forced to recognize between what he would say in an authentic mode and what he would say in his assumed role as the producer of this text. For, either way, he would balk at the notion of something that is the case yet cannot be said to be the case (see e.g. the first sentence of 4.002, 4.063, 4.5, and 6.5–6.51).

However, this is by no means the only way of construing the term ‘things’ that confers interest on the two claims. Consider states of understanding. It is clear that many states of understanding can be put into words; an example would be a solicitor’s understanding of some legal nicety that she has to explain to one of her clients. But it is far from clear that all states of understanding can be put into words. (Reconsider the variety of potential objects of understanding to which I drew attention in §4 of the Introduction.) So if the term ‘things’ ranges over states of understanding, then there is scope, once again, for a substantive debate about which of these two claims is correct. But there is scope too, I suggest, for a substantive debate about what Wittgenstein’s own verdict would be.

In the penultimate remark of the
Tractatus
, which I quoted in the previous section, Wittgenstein notably says, ‘Anyone who
understands me
eventually recognizes [my propositions] as nonsensical’ (emphasis added). ‘Anyone who understand me’, not ‘anyone who understands my propositions’. This allows us to take the remark in just the way in which it asks to be taken – as a remark made
in propria persona
– without saddling Wittgenstein with the paradox of intelligible nonsense.
⁵³
But if there is such a state as
understanding Wittgenstein – if there is such a state as seeing what he is up to in this extraordinary work – then it is a real question whether
that
can be put into words, just as it is a real question whether Wittgenstein thinks it can, just as it is a real question, for that matter, whether the various other states of understanding that Wittgenstein mentions in the
Tractatus
– understanding a proposition (4.024), understanding the constituents of a proposition (ibid.), understanding logic (5.552), and understanding language (5.62) – can be put into words, or whether he thinks they can.
⁵⁴

Once we have taken account of all of this, there are ways of construing the two readings of the
Tractatus
whereby, to borrow a wonderful phrase of David Wiggins’ from a different context, ‘suddenly it seems that what makes the difference between [them] has the width of a knife edge’ (Wiggins (
1995
), pp. 327–328). Where advocates of the traditional reading hold that there are ‘things’ that cannot be put into words, and that the
Tractatus
conveys ‘things’ of that sort, we can construe the ‘things’ in question as states of understanding, including the state of understanding Wittgenstein. Where advocates of the new reading hold that there is ‘nothing’ that cannot be put into words, and that the
Tractatus
conveys ‘nothing’ whatsoever, we can construe the ‘things’ in question as truths. We can then look back at the accounts of the two readings proffered above and see each as entirely consonant with the other.
⁵⁵

7. Transcendental Idealism in the
Tractatus

There is space, then, for an approach to the
Tractatus
that merges the two readings. But what is to be said in favour of any such approach?

I think we can see in outline how a combined reading might help us to make sense of why Wittgenstein has produced this nonsense. Thus:

The Combined Reading
: The nonsense in the
Tractatus
has been carefully crafted both to have the appearance of sense and, in quite
particular ways, to militate against that appearance. We come to appreciate it as nonsense when we find that we cannot in the end make full and integrated sense of it. In Peter Sullivan’s excellent metaphor, adapted in turn from a phrase used by Warren Goldfarb, it falls apart in our hands (Sullivan (
2004
), p. 40; Goldfarb (
1997
), p. 71). This brings us to an appreciation of the forces that give this nonsense the appearance of sense in the first place, and of what it takes to resist those forces. The understanding that Wittgenstein imparts is a practical understanding. It has, as one of its most significant aspects, an insight into how not to be seduced into thinking that his book is the network of truth-evaluable propositions that it presents itself as being. But there is more to it than that. There had better be more to it than that; otherwise the
Tractatus
will be like the notorious plinth whose sole purpose is to support a sign reading ‘Mind the plinth’. The understanding that Wittgenstein imparts has a second, broader aspect: an insight, more generally, into how not to be seduced into thinking that the nonsense that accrues from bad philosophy is what it presents itself as being.
⁵⁶
This makes the
Tractatus
a significant contribution to good philosophy, albeit an indirect one. It is indirect because Wittgenstein does not so much practise good philosophy in this book as indicate, by assuming the role of the bad philosopher, why, how, and where good philosophy needs to be practised. But that is enough for us to be able to identify a third, still broader aspect to the understanding that he imparts. This understanding has as much to do with sense as it does with nonsense. In particular, it has to do with propositional sense. The
Tractatus
helps us to make sense of propositional sense. But the sense that it helps us to make of propositional sense
is not itself propositional
. The understanding that Wittgenstein imparts has to be expressed, not in words, but in good philosophy, where good philosophy, recall, is an activity, not a body of doctrine (4.112). This activity involves both the clarification of propositional sense and the resisting of illusions of propositional sense. The understanding, of which good philosophy is an expression, is ineffable.

I think we can even see how such a reading would work at a more detailed level; and why the nonsense that Wittgenstein produces (what I called in §3 his ‘vision’) takes the superficial form of an explicit account of what it is to make propositional sense of things. Here we can take Frege’s struggle with the
Bedeutungen
of predicates as our guide. Frege helped us to
an understanding of the semantics of predicates by making pseudo-claims, ostensibly about the semantics of predicates, which the understanding itself exposed as nonsense. An analogue in the
Tractatus
, as we saw in §5, is Wittgenstein’s treatment of logical form. It is one of many analogues.
⁵⁷

Such a reading would also connect well with something else that I think we can readily see: how the recognition of apparent sense as nonsense is liable to resist verbal expression. For when we attempt to put such a recognition into words, our natural urge will always be to redeploy the nonsense, using some such formula as, ‘It does not make sense to say that ….’ But if we do that, then clearly we shall have said something that is itself nonsensical. No more sense attaches to ‘It does not make sense to say that frumptiliously quirxaceous phlimps keed’, if taken at face value, than to ‘Frumptiliously quirxaceous phlimps keed.’ To be sure, there are various subtleties and complications that I am ignoring here, having to do with the fact that the first of these sentences need
not
be taken at face value. It may be taken as a metalinguistic claim about the last four words in it. But that seems not to extend satisfactorily to a case where there really is an illusion of sense, as when I say, ‘It does not make sense to say that time passes at one second per second.’ (Think what a monolingual Francophile would say in such a case: certainly not anything about any words of English.)
⁵⁸
Be all of that as it may, here too we have an indication of why the understanding of what it is to make propositional sense of things, and correlatively of what it is merely to appear to make propositional sense of things, may not admit of verbal expression, either in general or in application to a particular case.

None of this, however, quite does justice to the way in which the nonsense in the
Tractatus
serves to undermine itself; nor indeed to the sense, however tenuous, in which that nonsense is as much the ‘content’ of the book as its ‘target’. (These two things are of course related.) We can begin to do justice to these if we return to the discussion of logic in §4.

As we saw, one of Wittgenstein’s primary objectives, where the understanding of logic is concerned, is to counteract the temptation to misconstrue limits, in the sense of essential features, as limitations. This temptation is extremely strong. We easily hear the claim that it is either raining or not raining, for example, not as repudiating the possibility of its doing neither, but as presupposing that possibility, and then excluding it; in other words, not as denying that the possibility exists, but as denying merely that it is realized. That it is either raining or not raining seems to be something that is ‘worth saying’, something that can genuinely be thought, something that might, at some level, have been otherwise (cf. 6.111). For Wittgenstein, these are deep illusions.

But like the illusion of sense attaching to the sentence ‘Time passes at one second per second,’ they are illusions whose exposure is most naturally reported in a way that is under their very sway. We naturally say, ‘Thought can only be of what is logically contingent; there is no such thing as thinking that it is either raining or not raining.’ But this is of a piece with, ‘Speed can only be assigned to a process that occurs in time; there is no such thing as the speed at which time passes.’ This is an attempted expression of the recognition that ‘the speed at which time passes’ is nonsense, just as the other sentence is an attempted expression of the recognition that ‘thinks that it is either raining or not raining’ is nonsense. But the attempt is self-stultifying. The very thing that it is an attempt to express precludes its success.

It is the same when we consider the apparent restriction of reality, not only to what is logically possible, but to the kind of thing that can be represented in propositional sense-making – which excludes, for example, objects. We are liable to say, ‘Reality consists of how objects are, not of the objects themselves,’ or, as Wittgenstein himself famously does say, ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’ (1.1). And if asked to amplify on these claims, we are liable to say something like the following: ‘That grass is green is part of reality, because there is such a thing as thinking or saying that grass is green; greenness itself is not part of reality, because there is no such thing as thinking or saying greenness.’ But here we confront the same problem. If ‘thinks greenness’ is nonsense, then so too is ‘There is no such thing as thinking greenness.’ To put the point in a way that is itself no doubt under the sway of the illusion: if there is no such thing as either thinking or saying something, then there is no such thing as either thinking or saying that there is no such thing as either thinking or saying that thing.

It is anyway clear that something is awry with 1.1 (‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’) when we pit it against the second sentence of 5.61: ‘We cannot say in logic, “The world has this in it, and this, but not that.”’
⁵⁹
And what is awry with it is precisely that it casts the world’s limits as limitations, as 5.61 goes on to make clear:

For that [sc. saying in logic ‘The world has this in it, and this, but not that’] would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic
should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well.

This remark from 5.61 is a reformulation of the Limit Argument, in the version that has already occurred in the Preface and that we considered in §4.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this. Among the sources of the temptation to construe the world’s limits as limitations, one of the most significant is the very desire to counteract the temptation. At some level we recognize the incoherence of construing the world’s limits as limitations. In recognizing this incoherence we are tempted to forbid any reference to the possibilities that the world’s limits exclude, in such a way that we ourselves make reference to the possibilities that the world’s limits exclude, and hence in such a way that we ourselves construe its limits as limitations.
⁶⁰
Wittgenstein has himself, if not succumbed to the temptation, indulged it. (That is one of the lessons of the new reading.) He did so even in his account of good philosophy when he wrote:

[Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in so doing, to what cannot be thought.

It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.

It will signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said. (4.114–4.115)

Better, surely, just to have written:

Philosophy must set limits to what can be thought.
⁶¹
It must present clearly what can be said.
⁶²