The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (65 page)

Very well; what are these reasons?
⁴⁴

We saw in §1 how Wittgenstein dissociates philosophy from science. Among the many profound differences that he sees between them, one of the most important is that philosophy can have no pretensions to
detachment
. We might have thought that the descriptions of the grammar of our language that we need to provide in philosophy should in principle be graspable by those who do not already understand the language. Nothing less, we might have thought, could have any purchase on those who
mis
understand it. For Wittgenstein, however, such detachment is neither necessary nor possible. To engage with those who misunderstand the language (typically ourselves
in another guise) we must give them the same kind of exposure to it as we give infants, not so much telling them what it is like as showing them what it is like. Thus even when we describe it, and in particular when we describe its grammar – making conceptual connections explicit, distinguishing between different forms of speech, exposing pieces of nonsense, and suchlike – we must do so in terms that are unintelligible except to those who understand.
⁴⁵
The process is a reflective, reflexive, self-conscious process: a moving to and fro in which the aim is to maintain our linguistic balance while all the time ‘commanding a clear view’
⁴⁶
of what we are doing.

But what
are
we doing? Well, we are exercising our language. But what exactly is ‘our language’?

It is certainly not English. It is not any system of expressions of that kind. The example about aunts being female might have looked like an example concerning English. But if it were, there would be no reason to think that the relevant grammatical rules could not be described except to those who already understand the language. There is no impediment to describing the use of the English words ‘aunt’ and ‘female’ in, say, French. No, the relevant grammatical rule is: not to count somebody as an aunt without also being prepared to count that person as female. And this is a rule that can be observed, or violated, by monolingual speakers of French, through their use of the expressions ‘
tante
’ and ‘
le sexe féminin
’.

Our language is something more like the range of conceptual resources that we use to make sense of things, then.
⁴⁷
Certainly, this helps to explain why anyone should think it impossible to describe our language without using it. But now a second question arises. Who exactly are ‘we’?

There are various ways of answering this question, depending on how certain matters are resolved, though nothing of much importance in what has been said so far hinges on their resolution. The matters in question include: whether being one of ‘us’ means sharing particular forms of life, or merely having the potential to share them; if the latter, in what sense of ‘potential’; and, either way, which forms of life. However these matters are resolved, ‘we’ are not just English speakers. On some ways of resolving them, ‘we’ are a certain group of human beings. On others, ‘we’ are all human beings. On others again, ‘we’ include any beings, actual or imaginable, with whom humans can communicate,
⁴⁸
or any beings whom humans can recognize as making conceptual sense of things.

So far there is not a hint of any transcendental idealism. But now comes the twist. It is extremely difficult to stop at this point.
⁴⁹
It is extremely difficult
not to envisage the ‘we’ expanding as it were to infinity. Once we have considered the various possibilities above, we find it hard ultimately not to think of ‘ourselves’ as all
possible
makers of conceptual sense. One of two things can then happen. First, the contingency of our conceptual sense-making can disappear. ‘Our language’ comes to admit of no alternative. Any use of language is a use of our language.
⁵⁰
This possibility would obviously be unacceptable to Wittgenstein, for reasons given in the previous section. The second thing that can happen is that the contingency remains. ‘Our language’ does admit of alternatives. But by definition these cannot be used to make conceptual sense of anything. Conceptual sense can be made of things only by means of our language. So the limits of our language determine the limits of what can be made conceptual sense of, that is to say the limits of
the world
. They do so, moreover, by excluding what cannot be made conceptual sense of, hence in a way that cannot itself be made sense of by means of our language.
⁵¹
This is transcendental idealism. We can now see, therefore, why Wittgenstein might be thought to be committed to such a thing.

But this second possibility is patently no more acceptable to Wittgenstein than the first. It is incoherent. It acknowledges alternatives to our language which it nevertheless does not acknowledge as having any of the marks of alternatives to our language. It sees contingency where it accepts that there is only necessity. (It casts as limits, in the sense of limitations, what it recognizes as limits in the sense of essential features.) True, this need not be a rebuke to the exegesis. It may be a rebuke to Wittgenstein. Whether it is or not depends on what it takes to resist the urge to see the ‘we’ expanding in this way. The problem for Wittgenstein, which is at the same time an advantage for the exegesis, is that there are forces in his own work that make that urge almost irresistible. Indulging in the kind of self-conscious reflection that Wittgenstein advocates, we cannot help asking such questions as this: ‘What, ultimately, does being an aunt
consist in
?’ For we cannot help wondering about the quintessence of all that we make sense of, that which gives our language its point and helps to make it possible. We know that aunts have to be female; and we know that females have to have a certain biological constitution. Such are our rules.
⁵²
But what does it
take
, ultimately, for things to be configured in such a way that somebody is an aunt? On a Wittgensteinian view, there is nothing we can summon in response to such a question that is clearly demarcated from the language itself. Someone who wants to know what being an aunt consists in must see how we exercise our
concept of an aunt, see what role that concept plays in our lives, see how we use it to make sense of things. Such a person must come to share, or already share, our form of life. They must come to be, or already be, one of us. So we cannot answer the question except by acknowledging that what it takes for somebody to be an aunt is determined, at least in part, by us and by how we make sense of things. And the only way to prevent this from being a rather crazy empirical idealism,
⁵³
whereby if human beings had never had the concept of an aunt there could never have been any aunts, is to let the ‘we’ expand to infinity.

What Wittgenstein must do, then, but what I think he is at perfect liberty to do, is to disallow the questions that lead us to this point. We must not ask, ‘What does being an aunt consist in?’ Or at least, we must not ask it with a certain philosophical intent. (It may be a perfectly good conceptual question, to be answered by saying that an aunt is a sister of a parent. It might even be a perfectly good scientific question, to be answered in terms of gametes and the mechanics of propagation.) We must see such questions, when they are asked in the wrong way, as pseudo-questions, symptoms of an illness that itself awaits Wittgensteinian therapy.
⁵⁴
This shows, I think, how Wittgenstein can avoid the charge of being a transcendental idealist.
⁵⁵

5. Distinguishing Between the ‘Everyday’ and the ‘Metaphysical’

If it is indeed possible to exonerate Wittgenstein in this way, it is nevertheless possible only at a price. The price is to signal another problem that he must confront. There is a distinctive crisis of confidence to which his work gives rise, having to do with the fact that there is no Archimedean point from
which to tell what makes sense. It is impossible, in particular, to tell what makes sense
to us
except in
our
terms and from
our
point of view.

We have noted several times in this enquiry how self-consciousness about our sense-making can militate against self-confidence in it. This is a problem that afflicts philosophy of any broadly analytic kind. But philosophy of the kind that Wittgenstein advocates actually aggravates the problem. For the self-consciousness that is required of good philosophy, on Wittgenstein’s conception, involves just the same experimenting with our concepts, just the same prodding and stretching of them, just the same investigation of how they function, that can give rise to bad philosophy. The reflection on our language that is needed to understand its grammar is of a piece with the reflection on our language that can all too easily lead to a misunderstanding of its grammar. There is a sense in which, had we only ever exercised the language and not reflected philosophically on what we were doing (for instance, had Albert, in §2 of the previous chapter, simply mused that the time had been passing, and not wondered how this thought related to the thought that the traffic had been passing), all would have been well. This is part of what Wittgenstein is getting at in his use of the term ‘everyday’.
⁵⁶
But once self-consciousness wreaks its damage, self-consciousness itself must help to rectify the damage. The problem is how to tell when it is doing the latter, as opposed to continuing to do the former; how to distinguish between bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use and subjecting them to further metaphysical use; how to distinguish between good philosophy and bad philosophy.
⁵⁷

Perhaps it is obvious that, once we have got as far as counting the same thing both necessary and contingent, something has gone wrong. But what about positing a contingent grounding for necessity? Or denying that our number system ‘resides in the nature of numbers’ (
Zettel
, §357)? Or, for that matter, insisting that our number system does reside in the nature of numbers?
⁵⁸
Wittgenstein claims that ‘3 + 3 = 6’ is a rule as to the way in which we are going to talk (quoted by G.E. Moore in Moore (
1959
), p. 279). The celebrated mathematician G.H. Hardy says that, on the contrary, ‘[the] truth or falsity [of mathematical theorems] is absolute and independent of our knowledge of them,’ and that ‘in
some
sense, mathematical truth is part of objective reality’ (Hardy (
1929
), p. 4, emphasis in original).
⁵⁹
Wittgenstein replies that ‘what a mathematician is inclined to say about the objectivity
and reality of mathematical facts … is … something for philosophical
treatment
’ (§254, emphasis in original). Hardy then turns his attention to ‘transfinite mathematics’ – the formal mathematical theory of the infinite – and rails against the kind of opposition to such mathematics that he sees encapsulated in the slogan ‘The finite cannot understand the infinite’ (ibid., p. 5). Wittgenstein concedes that this slogan is ‘inept’ but denies that it ‘is … all that nonsensical’ and urges that it serves as a corrective against a misunderstanding of how the relevant mathematics works, a misunderstanding of which he thinks Hardy and others are guilty (
Zettel
, §273). How are we to arbitrate? How are we to tell which of these claims are contributions to good philosophy and which are pieces of bad philosophy needing treatment by means of the former?

Here is another way to view the problem. Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy rests on a fundamental distinction between successful attempts at sense-making, in accord with the grammar of our language, and unsuccessful attempts at sense-making, resulting from a misunderstanding of that grammar. How do we distinguish between these? There seems to be a circularity: to be sensitive to any such distinction we must have a clear understanding of the grammar; to have a clear understanding of the grammar we must discern it in our linguistic activity; to discern it in our linguistic activity we must recognize which parts of our linguistic activity are in accord with it; and to recognize which parts of our linguistic activity are in accord with it we must be sensitive to the original distinction.

I do not claim that this apparent circularity is vicious. I do not even claim that it is real. (Each step in this sequence can be disputed.) Perhaps there is a distinctive discomfort occasioned by attempts at sense-making that are not in accord with the grammar of our language.
⁶⁰
Perhaps
there is – though even then, of course, ‘distinctive’ is the operative word, with its own threat of circularity. (Mathematicians can feel plenty of discomfort when they are wrestling with bona fide mathematical problems.) The point, however, is that whether the circularity is real or not, the distinction needs to be drawn; and it needs to be drawn in practice, not just in theory, so the mere threat of such circularity cannot but dent our confidence, first in our own ability to draw the distinction, and then,
eo ipso
, in our attempts to make self-conscious sense of things. It cannot but issue in doubts about whether various difficulties that we face are the difficulties of trying to answer pseudo-questions or the difficulties of trying to answer genuine questions that just happen to be difficult.