The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (64 page)

Essence
is expressed by grammar.

Consider: ‘The only correlate in language to an intrinsic necessity is an arbitrary rule. It is the only thing which one can milk out of this intrinsic necessity into a proposition.’

Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (§§371–373, emphasis in original)
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Recall the conflicting accounts of substance advanced by Descartes (
Ch. 1
, §6), Spinoza (
Ch. 2
, §2), and Leibniz (
Ch. 3
, §3). And recall Hume’s consequent impatience with the notion (
Ch. 4
, §1). Recall finally its rehabilitation on the part of Hegel (
Ch. 7
, §6) and on the part of the early Wittgenstein (
Ch. 9
, §3). What the later Wittgenstein proffers is this:

When philosophy is asked ‘What is … substance?’ the request is for a rule, a universal rule which holds for the word ‘substance’. (‘Philosophy’, p. 51)

No more, no less.

What Wittgenstein has left room for, then, though it resembles Cartesian metaphysics inasmuch as it consists in the pursuit of necessary truths, is to be conceived in a radically non-Cartesian way. It is not of a piece with science. It does not provide science with foundations (though it may provide us with a more secure grasp of certain scientific concepts). Above all it does not
answer
to anything. Wittgenstein entirely repudiates Descartes’ perceptual model of what it is to accept a necessary truth (
Ch. 1
, §4).
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On that model, when we accept a necessary truth, this is both explained and justified, at least in part, by the nature of reality, by its
being
a truth. We preclude talk of male aunts, for example, because we are sensitive to the fact that there are no male aunts. This fact is quite independent of us. It is something that we have
discerned
, like the fact that there are no cubic planets.

For Wittgenstein this model is utterly confused. Nothing explains and justifies our accepting the necessary truths we do. That is to say, nothing explains and justifies our having the grammatical rules we have. Or at any rate nothing explains and justifies these things in the sense intended in the model. We might be justified in the sense that our rules fulfil some important function in our lives, and this too might explain why we have them. But that is not the sense intended in the model. For we have not thereby got anything ‘right’. Our rules do not correctly
represent
anything. As Wittgenstein memorably says, in §371 of
Zettel
, after posing the question whether the rules governing our number words and our colour words reside in our nature or in the nature of things: ‘How are we to put it? –
Not
in the nature of numbers or colours’ (emphasis in original).

Does this mean that Wittgenstein embraces some form of idealism? For if it is not because we have noticed the impossibility of male aunts that we preclude talk of such a thing, then must it not be because we preclude talk of such a thing that it is impossible? More generally, if, as Wittgenstein claims, ‘essence is expressed by grammar’, and if grammar does not answer to essence, then does it not follow that essence answers to grammar?

Not at all. There is no need to acknowledge an answerability in either direction. True, in saying that there are no male aunts, we are giving voice to one of our grammatical rules. And, as with any of our rules, it is a rule that we might not have had. This is not however to say that, but for us, there might have been male aunts. It is rather to say that we might not have thought and spoken in these terms; we might not have made sense of things in this way; we might not have had the concept of an aunt. We have not
made
aunts female. That aunts are female is a necessity. If it has any explanation, it has a conceptual explanation – say, that an aunt is a sister of a parent, and that sisters have to be female. The point is simply this.
For something to be
a necessity
is
for our stating it to be an enunciation of one of our grammatical rules.

Here, at least, there is another interesting parallel with Descartes. In Chapter 1, §3, I argued that the Cartesian view, whereby for something to be a necessity is for its falsity to conflict with our concepts, does not prevent the necessity from being absolute. Structurally, exactly the same holds here. There is a sense in which both Descartes and Wittgenstein see a contingent grounding for necessity in features of how we make sense of things. But in neither case does this compromise the necessity. In neither case, to invoke the contrast that I drew in §4 of the previous chapter, does it cast limits as limitations.

Not that Wittgenstein is completely nonchalant about this. On the contrary, he is acutely aware, just as he was when he wrote the
Tractatus
, not only of the temptation to cast limits as limitations but of the way in which his own work can exacerbate that temptation. Part of the problem is that he is not only interested in indicating a contingent grounding for necessity. He digs ferociously beneath the surface of our sense-making to show just how deep the contingency lies. He wants to dispel any impression that how
we
make sense of things is ‘the’ way to make sense of things. Thus he draws attention to what he calls our ‘forms of life’, something that he in turn describes as ‘what has to be accepted’ or as ‘the given’ (p. 226). He is referring to the basic biological realities, the customs and practices, the complex of animal instincts and cultural sensibilities, that dispose us to notice various connections between things, to be struck by certain similarities and differences, to find some things natural foci of attention, to value certain things, to take some things for granted, to defer to certain authorities, and so forth. If it were not for these, we would not be able to make shared sense of things in the way we do. We would not have the concepts we have. We would not have the rules we have. As Wittgenstein graphically reminds us: ‘Disputes do not break out … over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don’t come to blows over it’ (§240).
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He is not especially concerned
with how, among the ways in which any given features of our situation might affect our sense-making, they actually affect it. He is not much concerned, for that matter, with the
fact
that they affect it. His concern is with its very affectability, with the depth of its contingency. He writes:

I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. (Pt II, §xii)
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And Wittgenstein is indeed self-conscious about the threat that this grounding of necessity in contingency poses to the necessity, just as he is about the idealism that is lurking. ‘This seems to abolish logic,’ he writes in §242 – having in the previous section allowed his interlocutor to comment, ‘So you are saying that human agreement decide what is true and what is false?’ His response is as follows. (I have interpolated some phrases to connect this response with my own gloss on these issues.)

It is what human beings
say
that is true and false; and they agree in the
language
they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.

If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments…. This … does not [abolish logic]. – It is one thing to describe methods of measurement [to describe ways of making sense of things], and another to obtain and state results of measurement [actually to make sense of things]. But what we call ‘measuring’ [‘making sense of things’] is partly determined by a certain constancy in results of measurement [in the sense of things that is actually made]. (§§241 and 242, emphasis in original; cf. §§108 and 520)

The upshot of all of this is a radically new conception of necessary truth and our grasp of it, unlike anything that we have seen hitherto.
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Kant too, of course, indicated a contingent grounding for necessity, or for some necessity, and effected a philosophical revolution in the process, but only
by conceding that the necessity in question, the necessity of the synthetic
a priori
, was not absolute. He was dealing with limitations, not true limits. Wittgenstein’s conception concerns the latter. It concerns what Kant would have counted as analytic.
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But the novelty of the Wittgensteinian conception is even more radical than the discussion so far suggests. For, unlike Kant’s analytic truths – or Leibniz’ truths of reasoning, or Hume’s relations of ideas, or Frege’s analytic truths, or the logical truths of the
Tractatus
– necessities as Wittgenstein conceives them can cease to have that status. (Or rather, more strictly, the propositions whereby we express them can cease to play that role, while still in some loose but important sense retaining their identity as propositions. The significance of this way of putting it should become clearer shortly.) Our rules can change. This may seem to controvert the point I emphasized earlier, that Wittgenstein’s conception does nothing to prevent the necessity of that which is necessary from being absolute. But there is no conflict. The necessity of that which is necessary is absolute
for as long as it is necessary
. To say this is not, contrary to appearances, to take away with one hand what one has given with the other. Imagine a board game whose rules change, so that a move that was once obligatory becomes merely optional. And suppose that, even so, players of the game still routinely make this move. Then the proposition that this is how players move was once used to state a rule and is now used to describe a general practice. But
when
it was used to state a rule, it expressed an essential feature of the-game-as-it-was-then. (Recall in this connection the discussion in
Ch. 7
, §7, of Hegel’s deliberate flouting of grammatical rules to allow concepts to evolve; and the distinction drawn there between a strict way of describing such cases and a loose way of describing them.
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) The important point is the point I made earlier: necessity as Wittgenstein conceives it corresponds to a particular way of using a proposition. This accounts
both
for the absoluteness of necessity, which is secured whenever a proposition is used in that way,
and
for its provisional character, which is a feature of the fact that a proposition used in that way may yet be used in other ways.
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Let us return to the issue of where Wittgenstein stands in relation to metaphysics. I have been considering the implications of his views for
metaphysics on a Cartesian conception. But what are their implications for metaphysics on my conception? What room do they leave for metaphysics if metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things?

It all depends, just as it did when we considered the same question in connection with the early Wittgenstein (see §2 of the previous chapter), on what is meant by making sense of things. If making sense of things is understood as arriving at truths about the world, then we can say now, just as we said then, that by Wittgenstein’s lights metaphysics is simply the most general of the natural sciences, and therefore something quite distinct from philosophy.
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If making sense of things is understood as introducing clarity into our thinking, then we can likewise say now, just as we said then, that by Wittgenstein’s lights metaphysics is simply good philosophy in its most general reaches. (But the generality here has to be understood as the generality of the concepts involved.
⁴⁰
As we observed in §1, Wittgenstein repudiates any pretensions that philosophy may have to methodological generality.) If making sense of things is construed broadly enough to include understanding of a non-propositional kind (see §8 of the previous chapter), then there may also be scope to say now, just as we said before, that by Wittgenstein’s lights metaphysical understanding is a way of seeing the world aright, fostered by his own work – though there no longer seems to be any residue of the idea that such understanding could be fostered by trying to express it and making play with whatever nonsense accrues.
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There are various ways, then, of seeing the later Wittgenstein, just like the early Wittgenstein, as metaphysics-friendly, on my conception of metaphysics.

Of all my protagonists it is the later Wittgenstein whose views I find most compelling. I lament the fact that the little I have been able to convey does them such scant justice. That said, in the remaining sections of this chapter I shall build up to what I take to be
the most fundamental objection to them.
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4. Transcendental Idealism in the Later Work?

In the previous section I considered reasons for thinking that Wittgenstein is committed to some kind of idealism and I applauded his efforts to rebut them. But there are further, subtler reasons that we need to address for thinking the same thing. They are reasons, more specifically, for thinking that he is committed to some variation on the transcendental idealism that we found in the
Tractatus
. If they are sound, the
form
of the commitment must nevertheless be contrasted with that of the
Tractatus
, in terms both of motivation and of the latter’s obliqueness, which on the one hand furnishes us with more or less explicit statements of transcendental idealism, something that is quite contrary to the spirit of the later work, and which on the other hand prevents us from regarding these as straightforward affirmations of what Wittgenstein himself thinks, a sort of dissembling that is equally contrary to the spirit of the later work. My own view is that the reasons in question, the reasons for finding a commitment to transcendental idealism in the later work, are not sound. But I think we have to travel a long way to see why not.
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