The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (60 page)

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen:
in
it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value.

If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.

… If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts – not what can be expressed by means of language.

In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole.

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. (6.41–6.43, emphasis in original)
⁷⁹

Part of the force of these remarks is that, in acknowledging the various facts that constitute the world, we are free to adopt different attitudes towards those facts. We are free to adopt different attitudes towards the world ‘as a whole – a limited whole’ (6.45).
⁸⁰
One way to think of this is that we are free to see the whole in each of its parts. We are free to reflect on the possibilities that each thing affords, and to see how these are related one to another and each to all. The more we manage to do this, the more sense we make of things; the more meaning the world might to said to possess; the greater value it might be said to have; the more it might be said to wax; the better we exercise our wills; the ‘happier’ we are.
⁸¹

I have been emphasizing affinities between Wittgenstein and Kant. But in the light of the quotation above, together with some of Wittgenstein’s subsequent remarks – notably his remarks on eternal life as a kind of timelessness belonging ‘to those who live in the present’ (6.4311) and his identification of viewing the world as a limited whole with viewing it ‘
sub specie aeterni
’ (6.45) – and in the light also of some of his glosses on this material in the
Notebooks
,
⁸²
it is hard not to be equally struck by affinities between
Wittgenstein and Spinoza. I am thinking especially of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, a sort of seeing of the infinite in the finite, which Spinoza believed brought us to our highest level of freedom and our highest virtue (
Ch. 2
, §5).

This reference to Spinoza also provides me with a way of saying, finally, where the
Tractatus
stands in relation to metaphysics, on my conception of metaphysics. I argued in
Chapter 2
, §6, that the design of Spinoza’s
Ethics
is to help us in the first instance to make maximally general sense of things, but also thereby to make ethical sense of things, partly indeed by making sense of what it is to make ethical sense of things. In other words, Spinoza tries to impart metaphysical understanding in such a way as to impart also, thereby, ethical understanding.
⁸³
I believe that the same is true of Wittgenstein, provided – it is a crucial proviso
⁸⁴
– that making sense of things is understood broadly enough to include the non-propositional variety to which I have been urging he is committed. The important difference is that, whereas in Spinoza’s case only the ethical understanding is ineffable, which is why it has to be imparted indirectly, in Wittgenstein’s case both the ethical understanding and the metaphysical understanding are ineffable (that is, of the non-propositional kind).
⁸⁵
So the metaphysical understanding too, in his case, has to be imparted indirectly. It is imparted by means of what we are supposed eventually to recognize as sheer nonsense. But, be that difference as it may, for Wittgenstein just as for Spinoza, metaphysics is in the service of ethics. Metaphysical understanding, which is to say maximally general understanding, is itself part of the ethical life.

In Wittgenstein’s case there is an additional reason for this. Metaphysical understanding incorporates an understanding of what it is to make propositional sense of things. This in turn enables us to avoid the confusions of bad philosophy. And to avoid such confusions is, for Wittgenstein, another ethical requirement. Consider the famous last sentence of the
Tractatus
:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. (7)

There are myriad ways of taking this, even in a sense of ‘taking’ loose enough to allow for the nonsensicality of the sentence.
⁸⁶
This is partly because of the different ways of taking the word ‘must’. No doubt we are intended to hear
its logical overtones. But we are also surely intended to hear its deontological overtones. In a later remark Wittgenstein says that every philosophical error is the mark of a character failing.
⁸⁷
To be confused is to lack a certain integrity. It is to fail to be true to oneself. (It is, in a mixture of Spinozist and Wittgensteinian terms, to be subject to sad passions caused by a failure to see the symbols in one’s own signs, a failure to ‘see the world aright’ (6.54).) Where confusion resides in the very desire to say something, the ‘happy man’ will have no such desire.
⁸⁸

In conclusion: the
Tractatus
is, on my conception of metaphysics, a profoundly metaphysical work, if a highly unusual one. It is designed to help us make maximally general sense of things. But since the
sense that it is designed to help us make is non-propositional, the means that it uses are indirect. It works through a creative use of nonsense. It is more like a work of art than like a work of science.
⁸⁹
In this respect, among many others, it is a significant departure from anything we have seen hitherto.

1
Throughout this chapter I use the following abbreviations for Wittgenstein’s works:
Culture
for Wittgenstein (
1980a
); ‘Ethics’ for Wittgenstein (
1965
);
Investigations
for Wittgenstein (
1967a
);
Lectures
for Wittgenstein (
1980b
);
Letters
for Wittgenstein (
1995
); ‘Letter to Ficker’, for Wittgenstein (
1967b
);
Notebooks
for Wittgenstein (
1979a
);
On Certainty
for Wittgenstein (
1974b
);
Philosophical Grammar
for Wittgenstein (
1974a
);
Philosophical Remarks
for Wittgenstein (
1975
); and
Tractatus
for Wittgenstein (
1961
). Section-numbered references to the
Investigations
are to Part I of that work. All unaccompanied references are to the
Tractatus
.

2
Cf. n. 49.

3
E.g.
Philosophical Remarks
.

4
See Moyal-Sharrock (
2004
).

5
The same is true of Derrida, for example, whose later work, even if it did not repudiate his earlier work, exhibited markedly different interests and concerns. (How far it is also true of Heidegger is an interesting bone of exegetical contention. For two contributions, see Krell (
1986
) and Jordan (
2004
). I shall presuppose relative constancy in Heidegger’s thinking in
Ch. 18
.)

6
Distinctive, but by no means completely unprecedented: the conception bears deep affinities with that of Socrates for example (cf. the opening exchanges in Plato’s
Meno
and cf. Davidson (
2005d
), pp. 249–250).

7
Cf. P.M.S. Hacker’s remark, in Hacker (
1996
), p. 110: ‘If one had to choose one single fundamental insight from the whole corpus of Wittgenstein’s later work, it might well be argued that it should be the insight that philosophy contributes not to human knowledge, but to human understanding.’ (For elaboration of this conception of philosophy,
in propria persona
, see Hacker (
2009
).) It is certainly in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy that there is most clearly a continuity between the early work and the later work: see further §1 of the next chapter.

Note: in neither the early work nor the later work is philosophy expected to advance without its practitioners making claims about reality. It is just that, when they do, their claims will not typically be to inform anyone of anything, but to illustrate the workings of the concepts involved. Cf. 3.263 and
Investigations
, §128, respectively; and cf. Winch (
1987
), pp. 10–11.

8
Cf. 3.2ff. and 5.5563. (The latter shows that Wittgenstein lacks some of Frege’s contempt for natural language. But see the very next point in the main text.)

9
Cf. Hacker (
2001a
), p. 202; Diamond (
2004
), p. 160; and McGinn (
2006
),
Ch. 1
,
passim
.

10
Cf. 6.3611.

11
In fact it is based, as they say, on real life: see Prior (
1993
), pp. 36ff., and, for a much more recent contribution to the discussion, Olson (
2009
). But I must emphasize how much, in examples of this kind, depends on context (cf. Conant and Diamond (
2004
), p. 76). Albert’s confusion has its source in one particular attempt to construe the question ‘At what speed does the time pass?’ There may yet be decent ways of construing the question, and indeed of construing the proposed answer, that ‘fit’ other things we want to say – though the issue of what is meant by ‘fit’ here is a philosophical minefield in its own right, involving issues about the nature and workings of metaphor that I cannot hope to address in these confines. Cf.
Investigations
, §§139 and 537.

12
It is often said that symbols are signs together with their
meanings
(e.g. Black (
1964
), p. 130). That this is wrong is well argued by Colin Johnston in Johnston (
2007
).

Note also: signs are to be construed here as ‘sign-types’, not ‘sign-tokens’, i.e. in such a way that the following list – ‘tiger’, ‘lion’, ‘tiger’ – contains two signs, not three, albeit in one case repeated (cf. 3.203). (We shall return to the distinction between sign-types and sign-tokens in
Ch. 20
, §3.)

13
Cf.
Investigations
, §§350 and 351.

14
But cf. n. 11: this is
not
to deny that it is possible to confer such a meaning, nor that such a meaning may already have been conferred, nor indeed that, if it has, the meaning in question may ‘fit’ the original meaning.

15
This calls for a caveat similar to that issued in
Ch. 5
, n. 9. Wittgenstein is not always explicit – in fact he is never explicit – about which he is referring to. The use of ‘philosophy’ in 4.112, for example, stands elliptically for good philosophy; that in 3.324, for bad philosophy.

16
There is what appears to be an unrelated use of ‘metaphysics’ in the
Notebooks
, at p. 106. I shall not try to interpret that use.

17
For an interesting discussion of this passage, see Conant and Diamond (
2004
), pp. 76ff.

18
Cf. 6.3751.

19
In §8 I shall highlight a third, broader conception of making sense of things, the one that I take to be most significant in the context of the
Tractatus
, on which metaphysics assumes yet another guise.

20
But the similarity with Hume is structural only. There is nothing in the
Tractatus
that directly corresponds to Hume’s repudiation of sense-making that does not derive from sense experience. Cf. Anscombe (
1971
), pp. 25ff., and Diamond (
1993
), Lecture One, §IV.

21
Graham Bird makes the nice point that, just as Wittgenstein’s boldness occurs in the Preface to his first book, and is not reflected in the Preface to his later book, so too Kant’s boldness occurs in the Preface to the first edition of his masterwork and contrasts with the somewhat more guarded, more pessimistic tone of the Preface to its second edition; see Bird (
2006
), Ch. 24, n. 18. (We find a similar boldness in Ayer (
1971
). This is A.J. Ayer’s very youthful defence of the logical positivism that we shall encounter in
Ch. 11
. Its last chapter is entitled ‘Solutions of Outstanding Philosophical Disputes’.)