The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (59 page)

What Wittgenstein produces, again and again in the
Tractatus
, is nonsense designed to prevent the production of just such nonsense. (That too is a lesson of the new reading, but seen now in a different light, whereby what Wittgenstein produces is not just a sequence of strategically chosen instances of what he wants to put us on our guard against, but an abortive attempt to explain why he wants to put us on our guard against it.) This is reminiscent of the celebrated remark that Karl Kraus is reputed to have made: ‘Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.’
⁶³

Because Wittgenstein’s concern is with the kind of thing that can be represented in propositional sense-making; because the nonsense he produces purports to restrict reality to precisely that, in other words to the kind of thing that can be represented in propositional sense-making; and because this restriction is, even within the ‘terms’ of the nonsense, not itself the kind of thing that can be represented in propositional sense-making, the nonsense takes what is by now, for us, a familiar form.
It is a species of transcendental idealism
.
⁶⁴
Wittgenstein’s recoil from Kant notwithstanding, the
Tractatus
is in many ways a thoroughly Kantian book, with a thoroughly Kantian problematic.
⁶⁵

Here is an excerpt from the
Tractatus
in which the transcendental idealism is more or less explicit. (It is cast using the first-person singular. This is perhaps more reminiscent of Fichte than it is of Kant.
⁶⁶
It raises some large questions.
⁶⁷
For our current purposes, however, these lie at something of a tangent. What matters is the idea that reality is limited by propositional sense-making, that the world is limited by language.)

The limits of my language
mean the limits of my world.

… [What] the solipsist
means
is quite correct; only it cannot be
said
, but makes itself manifest.

The world is
my
world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of
language
(of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of
my
world. (5.6–5.62, emphasis in original)

Does this mean that Wittgenstein – how to put it? –
is
a transcendental idealist? Patently not, in any straightforward sense. The
Tractatus
, as is clear by now, works in far too oblique a way for us to be able to draw any such conclusion from the mere presence of transcendental idealism in the text.

But can we at least say that transcendental idealism is part of the ‘vision’ that Wittgenstein presents in his book? In other words, can we say that,
to whatever extent he can be said to hold that propositions share logical form with reality
(4.12) – to pick one cardinal example – he can also be said to be
a transcendental idealist? Arguably, not even that. We must not just assume that everything in the text is to be taken in the same way, nor even that it is to be taken in one of two ways, either as part of a single self-consciously nonsensical ‘vision’ that Wittgenstein is presenting or as something that he is saying, meaningfully, and in a more authentic mode, about how we are to deal with that ‘vision’ and with related nonsense (e.g. 6.54). This is a
multifarious
text, a text in which ideas are variously developed and suppressed, temptations are variously indulged and dispelled.
⁶⁸

One view would be this. The statements of transcendental idealism are quite different from the remarks about logical form. The latter are nonsense that we should regard as resulting from a knowingly unsuccessful attempt to express the understanding that they impart, an understanding that includes the very capacity to recognize them as nonsense. But where the statements of transcendental idealism are concerned, there is a greater critical distance between the author and the doctrine. It is there as if in scare quotes. Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissociate himself from it
entirely
, even to the extent of denying it a role as an attempted expression of our understanding of its sources.
⁶⁹

That would be one view. And the combined reading does not rule it out. The combined reading is non-committal about how the nonsense in the
Tractatus
enables Wittgenstein to impart whatever understanding he does. Nevertheless, the view in question is not my own view, as is no doubt evident from what I have already said.
⁷⁰
I do take the statements of transcendental idealism to be of a piece with the remarks about logical form, and therefore part of the ‘vision’ that Wittgenstein presents in this book. I am prepared to say, with all the myriad qualifications that would likewise be needed with respect to the remarks about logical form, that Wittgenstein is a transcendental idealist. Transcendental idealism is nonsense that he does regard as the result of an attempt to express, in words, understanding that cannot be expressed in words; understanding of what it is to make propositional sense of things; understanding which, on the one hand, is fostered by our seeing that this nonsense is the result of an attempt to put it into words and which, on the other hand, fosters our seeing that this nonsense is nonsense.
⁷¹

But I need to say more, both to substantiate my view, and indeed to bring the discussion back to the matter that principally concerns us, which is where the
Tractatus
ultimately stands in relation to metaphysics. I shall try to discharge both tasks in the next and final section. This will involve an attempt to take due account of what seems to me to be in many respects the most significant fact about the appearance of transcendental idealism in the
Tractatus
, a fact which has been completely
absent from the discussion so far.

8. Metaphysics in the Service of Ethics

The
Tractatus
, I have said, is in many ways thoroughly Kantian. Kant tried to acknowledge a limitation to sense-making. As a crucial part of that operation he distinguished between the thick sense-making whose limitation he tried to acknowledge and the thin sense-making whereby he tried to acknowledge it (
Ch. 5
, §8). Wittgenstein affects to acknowledge a limitation to sense-making too, or at least to propositional sense-making. But the propositional sense-making whose limitation he affects to acknowledge is of the thinnest kind. So he cannot likewise claim that the means whereby he does so is propositional sense-making that is yet thinner. Instead, he claims that it is nonsense. That is why ‘affects’ is the operative word. Wittgenstein, unlike Kant, wants us in the end to see the whole operation as a charade. The fact remains that, structurally, it is a profoundly Kantian operation.

My aim in this section is to show that it is profoundly Kantian in other ways too. In particular, it is profoundly Kantian in motivation.
⁷²

Consider:
why
was Kant so keen to distinguish two kinds of sense-making? Not just to sanction his limit-drawing. For the real question is why he was so keen to draw the limit,
as a limitation
, in the first place. And a significant part of the answer, as we saw in
Chapter 5
, is that he needed ‘to deny
knowledge
in order to make room for
faith
’ (Kant (
1998
), Bxxx, emphasis in original). Faith, which he defined as ‘reason’s moral way of thinking’ (Kant (
2000
), 5: 471), was directed at our freedom, at our capacity to exercise our wills either by obeying the commands of morality or by disobeying them, at our immortality, at the existence of God, and, quite generally, at whatever was ultimately of value, all of which Kant saw as
lying beyond the reach of our thick sense-making, that is beyond the reach of the kind of sense-making that could take the form of robust discursive knowledge. Freedom, the good or bad exercise of the will, the commands of morality, immortality, God, value: these cannot but ring extremely loud bells for any student of the
Tractatus
. They also provide me with a good cue to reveal what I had in mind when I referred at the end of the previous section to what seems to me to be in many respects the most significant fact about the appearance of transcendental idealism in the
Tractatus
. I had in mind the fact that it appears, not only in the 5.6s, but just as blatantly, if not more so, in the 6.4s, where Wittgenstein treats of each of these topics in the light of it.
⁷³

What we have so far is an isomorphism, albeit a rough one, between, on the one hand, the Kantian distinction between thick sense-making and thin sense-making and, on the other hand, the Wittgensteinian distinction between genuine thinking and certain kinds of pseudo-thinking involving the production of nonsense.
⁷⁴

Transcendental idealism, for Wittgenstein just as for Kant, can help us to an appreciation of what lies on the right-hand side, including, perhaps, the very endorsement of transcendental idealism.
⁷⁵
What the 6.4s indicate is that, again for Wittgenstein just as for Kant, this is an appreciation of what lies on the right-hand side in both senses of the phrase: an appreciation
that
it lies there; and an appreciation
of it
, of the forces at work when we engage in it, of the possibilities they reveal to us, of the possibilities they open up for us.

Neither Kant nor Wittgenstein thinks that our rational engagement with things – that part of our engagement with things that is made possible by the fact that we are rational beings, what can be called, in the broadest sense of the phrase,
our making sense of things
– is exhausted by whatever lies on the left-hand side. It obviously includes whatever lies on the left-hand side, which for both Kant and Wittgenstein has as its paradigm the kind of knowl- edge embodied in the natural sciences (cf. 4.11 and 6.53). But for Kant it also includes each of the following:

• faith

• hope

• the practical use of reason

• the regulative use of concepts

• aesthetic judgments

and

• thought about things in themselves;
⁷⁶

while for Wittgenstein, I suggest, it includes each of the following:

• the various kinds of understanding mentioned in §6 (including understanding of Wittgenstein)

• the practice of philosophy (§2)

• logical inference (5.13–5.133 and 6.12–6.1201)

• the practice of mathematics (6.2–6.211 and 6.233–6.2341)

and much of what comes under the head of

• evaluation,

including feeling the world as a whole, experiencing its beauty, coming to grips with the problem of life and its meaning, exercising the will, and being happy or unhappy (6.421, 6.43, 6.45, and 6.521).

What, then, is the relation between our making these kinds of sense of things and what lies on the right-hand side? In Kant’s case the former always at least finds partial expression in the latter, even if it extends beyond it. (Whether it does extend beyond it raises delicate exegetical questions which it would be impossible to address without further clarifying the notion of thin sense-making. In the present context we can afford to bypass these questions.) In Wittgenstein’s case, though the former certainly extends beyond the latter, it sometimes finds apparent or attempted expression there: what we could call, echoing the fact that the right-hand side consists of pseudo-thinking, pseudo-expression.

The crucial point, however, is that Wittgenstein is as keen as Kant to acknowledge sense-making beyond that which lies on the left-hand side. It is just as important for him as it is for Kant. And it commands just as much respect.

This is what we see most clearly in the 6.4s. ‘
The book’s point
,’ he famously wrote in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, ‘
is an ethical one
’ (‘Letter to Ficker’, p. 143, emphasis in original).
⁷⁷
Part of that point – part of the enterprise of doing justice to sense-making of this non-propositional kind, in particular evaluation – is to uphold a fundamental separation of fact and value.
⁷⁸
And this is where transcendental idealism has a part to play. For it is largely in trying to come to terms with this separation that we construe the world as the totality of facts,
to the exclusion of
value (6.41), that is to say to the exclusion of what can be affected by acts of will (6.43). There are, for Wittgenstein, genuine insights that lead us to construe the world’s limits as limitations in this way, genuine insights that lead us to endorse this version of transcendental idealism. They are ineffable insights into what it is to think, into what it is to exercise the will, and into what separates these.

Wittgenstein does not say a great deal in the 6.4s about how these relate to each other, about how that which is conceived as lying outside the world affects that which is conceived as lying inside it. But the little he does say, exploiting as it does the nonsense inherent in the idea of limits that are at the same time limitations, is highly suggestive. Most strikingly, we find the following: