The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (63 page)

There is also some taxonomical-cum-terminological overlap with the
Tractatus
. The later Wittgenstein, just like the early Wittgenstein, distinguishes between good philosophy, which is what we have just been considering, and bad philosophy, which is the home of the very confusions against which good philosophy is pitted. And he uses the word ‘philosophy’ sometimes elliptically for the one and sometimes elliptically for the other.
⁶
Moreover, in the
Investigations
, just as in the
Tractatus
, the only clearly pertinent use of the term ‘metaphysical’ indicates that he identifies metaphysics with bad philosophy. ‘What
we
do,’ he says, with a characteristically allusive use of the first-person plural,
⁷
‘is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (§116, emphasis in original). That is, what ‘we’ do is to rescue words from their abuse in the hands of bad philosophers – who no doubt, very often, include ‘us’.
^8
,
9

The
Investigations
does however go into greater and more explicit detail than the
Tractatus
about the form that good philosophy can be expected to take. Wittgenstein makes clear that the enterprise must do as much as is required to combat confusion and no more. So it must be purely observational, as opposed to explanatory; it must simply lay bare the grammar of our language and not conjecture about why it is the way it is; it must, in an important sense, highlight what is already open to view. Similarly, it must surrender any pretensions it has to systematicity or generality and be content to apply specific correctives to specific confusions as the need arises. It must, like any therapeutic exercise, have as its
end its own end; as its aim, that is, its own termination. (‘The real discovery,’ Wittgenstein remarks, ‘is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to’ (§133).) In sum, it must be descriptive, piecemeal, contextual, and restorative.
¹⁰

2. Differences Between the Early Work and the Later Work

Granted this fundamental continuity between the early work and the later work – this shared conception of philosophy – perhaps the most striking difference between the two is that in the later work Wittgenstein straightforwardly practises what he preaches. Whatever the reasons for the indirection of the
Tractatus
, they have no counterpart here. The procedure that Wittgenstein adopts in the
Investigations
is utterly different from that
which he adopts in the
Tractatus
. The
Investigations
consists of a succession of examples of philosophical confusion together with Wittgenstein’s own efforts at rectification. This is more Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ than Leibniz’ ‘Monadology’.

To be sure, Wittgenstein retains a deep concern with what it is to make linguistic sense of things; and he is as keen as he was in the
Tractatus
to make sense, in particular, of that, so as to be able not just to fight bad philosophy with good philosophy but to understand what he is fighting with what. He is every bit as self-conscious about what he is doing, then, as he was before. But there is also an important respect in which he is keen to be clear about what he is doing simply because what he is doing is one more thing, beset by philosophical confusion, that he is keen to be clear about. (See §121.) And even here he is true to his own methodological scruples. He does not argue for a particular view of the nature of linguistic sense-making. Rather, by a careful interlacing of hints, suggestions, and commonplaces, he gets us to explore the view that we already have.
¹¹
At the same time he tames what he sees as our ill-conceived urge to go beyond that view and to provide something more like a scientific theory of sense (of the kind that we find in Frege and, indeed, that we seem to find in the
Tractatus
).

His concern not merely to effect cures but to provide diagnoses is again reminiscent of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’.
¹²
So too is something that attends this concern and that we find throughout his work: a very acute sense of the power and the allure of what he is fighting against. Wittgenstein speaks of the problems with which he is grappling as ‘deep disquietudes … [whose] roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and [whose] significance is as great as the importance of our language’ (§111). And he insists that the prejudices that stand in the way of our seeing how words function ‘are not
stupid
prejudices’ (§340, emphasis in original, adapted from singular to plural).
¹³
Sometimes when he is reflecting on the forces at work here, the results are very moving. This from
The Big Typescript
:

Philosophy does not call on me for any sacrifice, because I am not denying myself the saying of anything but simply giving up a certain combination
of words as senseless.
¹⁴
In a different sense, however, philosophy does demand a renunciation, but a renunciation of feeling, not of understanding. Perhaps that is what makes it so hard for many people. It can be as hard to refrain from using an expression as it is to hold back tears, or hold in anger….

The job to be done in philosophy … is really more a job on oneself. (‘Philosophy’, p. 46)

Furthermore, by practising philosophy in his later work, as opposed just to providing an account of it, Wittgenstein is able to reveal his sense of the power of bad philosophy not only in what he says about it but also in his very real, very palpable struggles with it. He uses an interlocutor who is able to give resounding voice to the confusions at stake, to make nonsense look for all the world like sense, to say just what we all have an urge to say, Wittgenstein very evidently included.
¹⁵
(Wittgenstein’s struggles, it has to be said, contrast markedly with the calm assurance and the bullying dogmatism of many of those purporting to follow him.)

As I have stressed, the way in which Wittgenstein proceeds in the
Investigations
is quite different from the way in which he proceeds in the
Tractatus
. But to what extent are there also doctrinal differences?

This issue is utterly unstraightforward. It is unstraightforward partly because of the problem of how far any ‘doctrines’ advanced in the
Tractatus
can be said to be advanced
in propria persona
and partly because, in the
Investigations
, Wittgenstein can be said not to be in the business of advancing doctrines at all (§128). Nevertheless, I think we may say, subject to all the necessary qualifications, that he comes to make sense of linguistic sense-making in some importantly different ways. It is well known, for example, that there is an explicit
volte-face
in his only lifetime publication apart from the
Tractatus
, namely the article ‘Logical Form’, published seven years after the
Tractatus
, in which he recoils from his earlier conception of elementary propositions as logically independent of one another.
¹⁶
There is also a later shift from a commitment to the determinacy of sense. Earlier, he would have been prepared to say that a proposition has no sense unless it not only is true or false, but would have been true or false whatever the circumstances.
¹⁷
Later he is happy to sanction the kind of vagueness of sense whereby that which is true or false, say an utterance of ‘She is still only a child’, would have failed to count as either true or false in suitably borderline circumstances (had she been fourteen years old, say: cf. §§69–71, 79, 80, and 99–107);
¹⁸
or the kind of context-dependence of sense whereby that which is true or false, say an utterance of ‘That thing is in pain’, would have failed to count as either true or false if various conditions for the very application of one of the concepts had not been met (had that thing not been a living creature but a pot full of boiling water, say: cf. §§117, 281, and 282).
¹⁹

Particularly noteworthy is the much livelier appreciation evinced in the
Investigations
than in the
Tractatus
of the varieties of things we can do with words. The early Wittgenstein was not of course oblivious to the fact that there are meaningful linguistic moves that we can make other than asserting something true or false, such as asking a question (cf.
Notebooks
, p. 107). Nor was he oblivious to the fact that there are radically different ways even of asserting something true or false: that was after all the burden of his account of logic (see §4 of the previous chapter). Nor indeed was he oblivious to the possibility of feigning to say something true or false as a way of conveying non-propositional sense-making, or not if what I argued in §8 of the previous chapter is correct: if what I argued there is correct, this is what he took himself to be doing in the bulk of his first book. But the project was to make sense of propositional sense-making. And within that parameter he showed little concern for drawing finer distinctions, while beyond that parameter he showed little concern for drawing distinctions other than with producing senseless logical propositions
or producing nonsensical pseudo-propositions.
²⁰
By contrast the later Wittgenstein reminds us of the ‘countless different kinds of use of what we call “symbols”, “words”, “sentences”’ (§23).
²¹
He puts this in terms of the many different ‘language-games’ we play (§§7 and 23).
²²
Given the point that I made in the previous section about the restricted role that making claims about reality can be expected to have in philosophy, this is significant not least as a way of evoking the many language-games, apart from making claims about reality, that philosophers themselves can be expected to play, such as announcing their problems, raising questions, making suggestions, stating grammatical rules, giving examples, telling stories, expounding their methodology, rehearsing their own and other people’s confusions, and transforming pieces of disguised nonsense into patent nonsense.
²³
It is also significant in suggesting that, had the early Wittgenstein shown similar sensitivity to the variety of language-games we play, he might have worked with a broader conception of meaningfulness and, correspondingly, of what can be put into words, and he might then have counted the propositions of the
Tractatus
as themselves meaningful expressions of the understanding he was trying to convey.
²⁴

At any rate there is in the later work a more nuanced, more variegated, less theoretically committed depiction of linguistic sense-making, based more on an investigation of how language is actually used than on any attempt to meet requirements imposed
a priori
(see §§65, 66, 107, and 340).
²⁵

3. Metaphysics, Necessity, and Grammar

All of this leaves room, in a curious way, for something like Cartesian metaphysics. Or rather, in one respect it leaves room for something like Cartesian
metaphysics. In almost every other respect there could scarcely be a more profound or more resolute rejection of Cartesian metaphysics.
²⁶

Descartes held that metaphysics consists largely in the pursuit of indubitable necessary truths, truths of which we can have clear and distinct perception, truths whose falsity we cannot so much as entertain (
Ch. 1
, §§1 and 3). Wittgenstein holds that, to combat philosophical confusion, we must ‘command a clear view of the use of our words’ (§122, emphasis removed), which means, among other things, that we must acknowledge necessary truths involving these words, truths whose falsity we cannot so much as entertain. So far, so Cartesian.
²⁷

But remember, for Wittgenstein there are truths and there are truths.
²⁸
Acknowledging a necessary truth is fundamentally different from acknowledging a contingent truth. (In this, as we have noted, he is faithful to his earlier view.)
Asserting
a necessary truth and asserting a contingent truth involve different language-games. To assert that aunts are female, for example, is to enunciate a rule rather than to make a claim about reality. Thus we must not count somebody as an aunt unless we are also prepared to count that person as female. Alternatively, we are not allowed to apply the description ‘is an aunt but is not female’ to anybody: that combination of words has no sense. We cannot (do not, will not) entertain the possibility of a non-female aunt.
²⁹

So what Descartes conceived as metaphysics is, on Wittgenstein’s conception, ‘the shadow of grammar’, to borrow P.M.S. Hacker’s apt phrase (Hacker (
1986
),
Ch. 7
30
). Here is Wittgenstein: