Wittgensteins creative sublimation of Kant
Wittgenstein:The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
It's far from original to say that Wittgenstein's philosophy has a lot in common with Kant's. The above quotation is where you can see it most clearly, and several commentators describe it as a peculiarly linguistic flavour of transcendental idealism. I think this is either right or almost right. But I want to bring in Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the notion of language games and forms of life to emphasize that the locus of his new kind of transcendental philosophy is ultimately taken out of the head and placed in social practices.
In some ways this non-cognitivist transcendentalism is a huge departure from Kant, who unlike Wittgenstein was concerned with reason above all, with the mental faculties of the rational subject, and with systematization. But in other ways, these philosophies are getting at the same point. I've already described them both as transcendental. What do I mean by that?
The transcendental perspective concerns the necessary conditions for the human experience of the world and defines the limits of this experience and the knowledge of objects therein; and from this perspective, the world around us, what is real in experience, is limited accordingly: the limits of my experience mean the limits of my world.
So it's clear enough that Wittgenstein's early philosophy can fairly be described as transcendental. What about his later work? This is where he is concerned with the ordinary ground and public context of our utterances, and with the way that a failure to pay attention to these leads thinking astray, down roads that lead nowhere, such as the search for a definition of linguistic meaning, the demand for definitions in general, the need for absolute certainty, and the question as to the nature of the "language of thought," and so on.
The language games that constitute the lives of human beings thereby constitute the human "form of life," because human beings are linguistic to the core.
Quoting Jean-Pierre Cometti, 'Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and the question of expression'
In the later Wittgenstein the notion of "forms of life" takes the place of the Tractarian doctrine of the boundary between what can and cannot be said, which determines in turn the "limits of my world". My world takes on the limits of my form of life.
In other words, the limits of my form of life mean the limits of my world.
But is it idealism? Under most definitions, maybe not. But in the terms of Kant's transcendental idealism, whose primary thrust is to drop the myth of transcendent, absolute knowledge, then the answer might be yes. I'll say no more about that at this stage.
One more interesting thing to note is that Kant and Wittgenstein are similar not only in their transcendental perspective on human beings, but also in their use of this perspective to show that most philosophy hitherto has gone astray by asking questions that cannot be asked.
Notes:
I lifted the idea that Wittgenstein had "creatively sublimated" Kant from Robert Hanna's "Wittgenstein and Kantianism," available here:
Robert Hanna:Wittgenstein . . . carefully read The Critique of Pure Reason along with Ludwig Hänsel in 1918, three years before the publication of the Tractatus. I do not think that Wittgensteins reading of the first Critique in 1918 directly or substantially influenced the Tractatus itself, since in fact virtually no changes were made to the manuscript of the Tractatus between 1918 and its publication in 1921. . . . But I do think that Wittgensteins early philosophy is essentially the result of his indirect engagement with Kants Critical philosophy, via Schopenhauer, prior to 1918, and also that Wittgensteins later philosophy is essentially, although mostly implicitly and without fanfare, the result of Wittgensteins direct engagement with Kants Critical philosophy after 1918. . . . So whereas Moore and Russell explicitly abandoned and rejected Kants Critical epistemology and metaphysics, Wittgenstein, both early and late, creatively absorbed and sublimated them.
Comments (208)
Interesting question. They were both engaged in critical projects directed at exposing the emptiness of philosophy, especially metaphysics, but whereas Kant was an insider doing a salvage operation, Wittgenstein had no such commitmenthe was an outsider who was not optimistic about philosophy, seeing it as mostly nonsense. What this meant was that Wittgenstein went much further, and thus had no real sympathy for the form that Kant's critical project took: as you say, the critical reflection upon the forms of understanding.
However, Wittgenstein's later philosophy is full of critical reflection; it's just that he chooses not to focus on the traditional topics of reason, the understanding, and so on. And crucially, this is largely because he believes that the misuse of language is responsible for the problems in the philosophy of mind and psychology. That is, philosophers literally do not know what they're talking about when they talk about concepts, reason, and the understandingKant included.
So there's only so far you can take the parallel I'm making.
I forgot about this bit. I'm not sure what that would look like. Wittgenstein is sceptical not only of other philosophers, but even of his own philosophy, so I don't think he has much time for philosophy at all except for a therapeutic use, in clearing up the mess made by philosophy.
I couldn't find a free version -- I wish I could because when I read this I had access, but no longer do. Alas, as a counter-point to the notion I enjoyed this paper: On Interpreting Kant's Thinker as Wittgenstein's 'I' -- would have read it before posting but there's a possible clue for thinking through the thought from the opposite side.
I think this misses the mark. It is logic rather than language which is transcendental. Logic is the transcendental condition that makes language possible. Language and the world share a logical structure. Logic underlies not only language but the world. It is the transcendental condition that makes the world possible.
The claim that:
(5.6)
is followed immediately by:
(5.61)
Note the shift from language - my world to logic - the world.
However:
(5.62)
(5.63)
The world is my world but my world is not the world, for my world is not anyone else's world.
In the Tractatus both logic (6.13) and ethics (6.421) are transcendental.
Ethics stands outside the limits of language. (6.421)
Logic stands on one side of the limit of the world. Ethics on the other.
(6.43)
The proposition that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world does not mean that all there is is the linguistic or propositional world. That all there is is what can be said.
Quoting Jamal
Human forms of life are linguistic but language games cannot be understood by abstracting or isolating what is said from what is done, from the other activities of our lives.
Quoting Jamal
This does not mark the same kind of limit.
In the Tractatus limits are drawn to what can be thought by way of what can be said. The primary reason for doing this is similar to Kant's denying knowledge in order to make room for faith (CPR Bxxx). Ethics is experiential. Outside the limits of the propositional. He later abandons this line of investigation:
(PI 373)
The form of life of a cloistered monk is not my form of life, but it is possible for me to become a monk and for the monk to leave the monastic life.
I'd like to read that. Patricia Kitcher is great. I see the abstract mentions McDowell's linking of Kant and late Wittgenstein but I haven't read that.
:100:
I think, just before Witty, Nietzsche & Peirce (among others) in their own ways also elevate "social practices" and deflate "pure reason" as well. Witty's way might still be the most insightful, even compelling.
Quoting Fooloso4
:fire:
This is the gist of the TLP but I think Witty extends this from formal "transcendental" logic (re: world-structure) to a concrete 'logic of practice' (re: forms-of-life, language-games (i.e. being-with-others-in-the-world aka "mitsein")) later on.
:up:
Fascinating question. It would be odd indeed if a being having a generous scope regarding the use of language for the questioning of being lacked the scope of language necessary to formulating the question, let alone proposing some possible answers.
Are logic and language separable? First we divide the whole into parts to facilitate an understanding of the whole and then we proceed to destroy the whole by declaring some parts more real than others. The notion of either logic or language without the other is as non-sensical as a one sided coin.
According to the Tractatus language pictures the world. This is possible because there is a logical structure underlying both language and the world.
Makes sense to me as well, though I think there is indeed a parallel, which you've pointed out.
There's a lot in common: the centrality of ethics, for instance, as well as the limitation on knowledge in light of the ethical and logical, ala
Be that as it may, that does not answer the question of whether logic and language are separable. All it does is raise the parallel question of whether logic and the world are separable. I suspect they are not. No logic, no language. No language, no logic.
And to simply say that one underlies the other gives no necessary primordiality to one or the other. It is not as if we could strip the world away and examine the underlying logic or take away the underlying logic and observe the world. No logic, no world. No world, no logic.
The only useful purpose of their intellectual separation is to facilitate an understanding of the unitary phenomenon of the logical world created with language. Can it get more transcendental than that?
On Kant's side, the "limit of experience" is not so much trying get beyond a particular domain, like a dog straining against a tether, but a problem of perceiving the self, particularly a self in the world:
Quoting CPR, Kant, B421
On the Wittgenstein side, I do not read the "form of life" as a replacement for what could not be explained by Kant. It seems to me that Wittgenstein avoided expressing the idea as 'essential' as this:
Quoting Jamal
I'm quite partial to incoherence, but it depends on the context. I think between language and silence there are also grunts, growls and purring....
I agree. I dont think I implied anything like that, but its certainly worth emphasizing.
Quoting Paine
Quoting CPR, Kant, B421
As it happens Ive been reading the paralogisms recently. But I dont know what youre getting at with respect to my attempt to describe the transcendental perspective. What Kant has to say in the paralogisms is about rational psychology and the indeterminacy of the I. It is certainly a consequence of the transcendental perspective but I cant quite see its specific relevance.
Quoting Paine
Nor do I. Actually though, I dont know what you mean.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. His later philosophy breaks the last rule in the Tractatus. He knew that.
Indeed. I'm not arguing this. I'm just saying they are not propositional and are not as clearly beholden to local axioms as a more fully developed linguistic system is. My point was a minor one - that between silence and linguistic 'coherence' lies noise.
Well said. And more than a minor point.
As a criticism of Descartes, the quoted section shows how Descartes presumed a private experience to be able to stand for what can be said of all humans. Kant was willing to approach 'Reason' as that kind of universal but not the individuals using it. As a consequence, a different psychology is needed.
Quoting Jamal
I was objecting to your expression of "the human form of life" on the basis of such a proposition being more explanatory than Wittgenstein intended.
One could just as well say that the limits of my language and the limits of my world are the limits of me.
And I for one am tired of being written out of the equation.
Quoting Tom Storm
:up: An excellent point!
Thank you for the detailed points. Im not really interested in promoting the view that Wittgenstein was a linguistic idealist, especially not with regard to his later philosophy, where I agree that other activities are part of our forms of lifeas I try to say in the OP, its our life and social practices in general that matter here. In the OP I do emphasize (perhaps over-emphasize) the linguistic nature of forms of life, but I certainly dont think thats all there is to them.
A potentially damaging criticism in your post is your point that in the Tractatus its logic, not language, which is transcendental, which means that 5.6 cant serve as the model of transcendental philosophy in the way Im using it in the OP. Im not sure about this, but I suspect its not a big deal. By which I mean that I could continue to hold pretty much the same position if I just ditched those statements of the form, the limits of my X mean the limits of my world.
And then theres this:
Quoting Jamal
Quoting Fooloso4
Fair. But I meant it more loosely and suggestively, simply to show that Ws transcendental came to be centred on our concrete practices, rather than on language/logic as it was in the Tractatus, and rather than on the mind as it was for Kant. Perhaps I could have worded it differently, or, again, just ditched 5.6 as model statement.
Incidentally, I tend to think of forms of life hierarchically, as if theres a multiply nested plurality all within the general human form of life.
Would it not be better then to say "human forms of life", since the only common form of life is the basic biological form which, as basic, is not culturally mediated (even if our understanding of it is).
I feel like denying that the only common form of life is the basic biological form, but Im not ready to pursue it right now. Anyway, you might be right.
I mean, given the right circumstances, I and the hunter gatherer can work out how to live together and talk to each other. Could we do this if there were not some general but suprabiological human form of life?
Edit: cross-post. Yes, I think so, thats kind of what I was thinking.
Just hasn't happened yet.
The aliens in the ocean seem to be speaking, though.
There are striking similarities, but that's basically true for everyone else as well. Kant seems to be the dividing line in the history of philosophy, and everything is reaction to Kant, if one wants just to see it that way. It is still interesting to think about if Wittgenstein never read Kant properly.
Cthulhu?
Yeah. Well sure, everyone from octopuses to planet-encompassing sentient oceans is welcome. I was throwing "human" around carelessly.
Mostly it was an off-hand thought about language and animals and W.
It's probably worth pursuing it.
This is an interesting statement. With "asking questions that cannot be asked", you seem to imply that philosophy is doing the impossible. And when I wonder, "what do you actually mean by this?", because "doing the impossible" doesn't make any sense, I come up with two completely different possibilities. One would be "asking questions that cannot be answered", and the other would be "trying to ask questions which cannot actually be asked". Since the former is rather boring, implying a sort of unintelligible type of question, I assume you would mean the latter.
But even "trying to ask questions which cannot be asked" is difficult to understand because of the different senses of "possible" which we use, and the variety in types of limitations which are evident relative to the different types of possibilities. So for instance, we have a relationship between language and logic, which with a formal understanding of "logic", would make logic dependent on language unlike @Fooloso4's representation of "Logic is the transcendental condition that makes language possible." But if we restrict the definition of "logic" in the way that I just proposed, we still need to come up with terms to describe the type of thinking which transcends logic.
This is not at all difficult, because we have the means to talk about irrational, and unreasonable thought, and the thinking of different animals which is not logical. This is the way language works, it is not limited by the activities which it empowers, and this is why it is extremely powerful. Language transcends logic, it can also transcend knowledge to talk about the unknown, and it further transcends all forms of thinking and thought, to talk about things which cannot even be thought about (we can speak nonsense). That's what the "private language" demonstrates, the transcendent capacity of language. This implies that there is no such thing as "questions which cannot be asked", leaving only "questions which cannot be answered".
This puts language in a very special, unique place, which seems counterintuitive, and many would argue against it. This is the place of infinite possibility, absolutely limitless, implying that there is nowhere tht language cannot go, nothing which cannot be said. To understand this phenomenal position of language, all one needs to do is take a look at the language of mathematics. The natural numbers are limitless, infinite, and this provides the capacity to count any quantity. This is indicative of the way that language is, in general, it is "designed" so as to give the user the capacity to go beyond any limitations, therefore to speak about anything whatsoever. Now we must rule out the second option "trying to ask questions which cannot actually be asked", because anything can be asked, that is simply the limitless capacity which language is.
So we're back to the first possibility, "asking what cannot be answered", in our interpretation of "most philosophy hitherto has gone astray by asking questions that cannot be asked". Since language can go anywhere, and it is designed to speak about anything, and therefore ask any question, why would we say that philosophy has gone astray by asking questions which cannot be answered? Isn't this exactly the job of philosophy, to venture into the unknown, and ask what cannot be answered? Didn't Socrates say that philosophy begins in wonder? Putting the transcend nature of language to work, utilizing its limitless capacity, to ask what cannot be answered, is exactly the role of philosophy.
I would argue in favor of forms of human life.
(PI 19)
To imagine such a language is to imagine a form of life that is different from ours.
(PI 241)
What we in our technologically advanced world say would not be what less technologically advanced peoples would agree with. They would think we were crazy.
Look also at Wittgenstein's use of an imagined people or tribe. Their way or form of life differs from ours
(PI 6)
(PI 194)
(PPF 325)
It is not my representation. It is what Wittgenstein says. I cited it. Unless you are claiming that he means something else by the term 'transcendental.
I think LW is open to the charge of what Habermas calls performative contradiction, in that he seems to be privileging a particular language-game in his later writing to discuss, criticize, and relativize language-games. It doesnt matter whether we call this game philosophy or not. The question rather is whether such a critical perspective carries its own warrant, so to speak, or whether it is merely another way (among many) of seeing particular sorts of ?facts.
If your point is that according to Wittgenstein there are multiple forms of life, then of course I agree. My pointwhich was just an asidewas that in the interpretive debate over the granular level and the plurality or singularity of form(s) of life, I have a way of juggling the different interpretations, viz., that there is a plurality of forms of life among human beings, as well as an overarching singular form of life, and perhaps many levels in between. This is compatible with the presence of exclusive (and even incommensurable) forms.
Very amusing, MU.
Back when I used to pay a bit of attention to such things there was, as you note, disagreement as to whether he meant the human form of life or human forms of life.
With regard to an overarching singular form of human life, on the one hand:
(OC 475)
He quotes Goethe:
(OC 402)
On the other:
(PPF 327)
In this case, however, I think it more likely to be a difference in life form rather than form of life.
How do you see the 'relativizing' of separate language games as a rejection of logic and structure? That goes against the grain of passages like the following:
"When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this."
(PI 194)
Arguing for the limits to our explanations are not the denial of an existing order.
Do you know of an instance of Habermas bringing the charge of performative contradiction against Wittgenstein?
and doesn't there also have to be a logical structure underlying mind?
I think Wittgenstein would say no:
(5.4731)
(3.02)
It is the logical structure underlying language and not mind that is a check against illogical thought. I take this to mean that any illogical thought or propositions would evidently involve a contradiction.and would not be accepted.
Logic, language, and the world can only make sense to beings for whom logic, language, and the world can make sense.
Why are you and I one of those beings and my hat is not?
I dont. If anything, Habermas seems sympathetic to the later Wittgenstein (less so to the Tractatus). But theres a lot I dont know about Habermas.
Performative contradiction: I suppose it depends on how seriously you take the idea that LW was not doing philosophy in, e.g., the PI. The passage you quote begins When we do philosophy . . . and the meaning of the sentence implies that LW himself, in this performance, isnt doing philosophy, but rather commenting on it or criticizing it. Is this really tenable?
I apologize for the misunderstanding, but you really did say "I think...", and you did not mention Wittgenstein in that opening paragraph at all, so I assumed you were stating what you believe. As much as you went on to cite the Tractatus, this is what you said in your opening paragraph:
Quoting Fooloso4
I read Wittgenstein to be saying he is still doing philosophy at that juncture. This is a balancing point for many different interpretations. The matter seems to revolve around different methods of reduction. If the activity is no longer "philosophy", what is it?
Maybe you could say more about the implication that philosophy has been abandoned..
Reality is actually very amusing, that's why metaphysicians are generally of a good humour.
Quoting Fooloso4
The problem with this perspective is that illogical thought is actually quite common, and even illogical speaking cannot be ruled out. So the reality that there is not necessarily a logical structure underlying language must be respected. The lack of an underlying logical structure is the position Wittgenstein moved on toward in the Philosophical Investigations, with "family resemblance", and the idea that boundaries (the prerequisite for logic) are created as required, for the purpose at hand.
How is an appeal to "family resemblance" a negation of logical structure? What structure are you referring to?
Right, that would be the question. PI 194 turns out to be a good test case, because the description
LW gives of philosophers -- "we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this" -- surely can't be self-referential; that is, refer to the very statement LW is making. (Presumably he doesn't think he has drawn any odd conclusions from misunderstanding "civilized" people.) Rather, it's a critique of what some philosophy leads to -- but critique in the name of what?
Quoting Paine
Here I'm just referencing the usual idea that LW's program was "therapy," an attempt to get us to stop engaging in certain fruitless lines of thought and speech. Maybe "murder-suicide" would be more accurate! Can you end philosophy, using philosophy? For my part, I prefer to take LW's brilliant speculations at face value, for what they add to our understanding of rationality and language, and not worry too much about whether he was right that 1) philosophy ought to be/can be abandoned and 2) LW himself has stopped doing it, as of . . . right now . . . . or no, wait, he means at the end of this sentence . . . no, wait . . . . OK, now he's stopped . . .
You have framed this in an interesting way. I understand the doubt that the passage was self-referential. If the observation is accepted as sincere, the meaning is different. That would be working within conditions rather than rising above them.
Ask your hat.
Is it necessary that there be a logical structure underlying mind in order to identify a contradiction? If someone is given contradictory orders they will be at a lot as to what to do if they attempt to follow those orders. Even an obedient dog will not be able to.
A common response to this is: "think" or "think about it" or "think it through". We might also ask for an explanation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are late to the party. This has been part of the discussion since the OP.
I wouldn't use that word "negation", and I don't particularly like the framing of the op, with the term "sublimation". This is because I do not believe that Hegel's dialectics of logic provides a very good description of the process we would call the "becoming" of knowledge.
Logic is an activity which consists of applying formal rules ("logic" being defined in that way for the purpose of the following argument). Notice that induction is a process which is often called "inductive reasoning" rather than classing it as a form of "logic". This way of classifying allows that reasoning, and thinking in general, is not necessarily "logical". Plato demonstrated the necessity for defining words in this way, because we are known to intentionally break rules. This type of act, where we intentionally do what we know is not-good, becomes very problematic if virtue is knowledge.
What Wittgenstein shows with the concept of "family resemblance" is that the way that the same word ("game" in his example) is used to refer to very different types of things, does not demonstrate that there is a logical relationship between those different types of things. This indicates that there is not a logical structure which supports the way that language is commonly used.
You portray this as a negation of the idea of "logical structure", in the mode of Hegelian dialectics, but I don't think that Hegelian "sublimation" adequately captures the real process which creates the structure of "family resemblances"). The issue being that Aristotle already demonstrated that "becoming" is fundamentally incompatible with the logic of being/not-being, and I see Hegel's sublimation as an attempt to understand "becoming" under the logical terms of simple negation. Even within the concept of "sublimation", elements of the two opposing principles, which ought to annihilate each other if they are truly negations, are allowed to coexist, so "negation" is not even a correct term to be used if we are to understand "sublimation" in the way that it is intended by Hegel.
Notice that when Wittgenstein uses "family resemblance" at 67 of the Philosophical Investigations, he takes a stab directly at the heart of supposedly rigorous logic, with the concept of "number". There is not a logical relation between the different kinds of "number" (cardinal, rational, real, etc.) only an indirect relation between them. The various concepts of "number" are supposedly held together by some form of overlapping, like fibres woven to make a rope, the rope being the concept "number", which supposedly holds them all together. But the strength of that rope is questionable, because the relations which it is composed of are not logical. And in reality the supposed "rope" is just the fact of the same word being used, and some indirect, non-logical relations between those different usages.
So he goes on to explain how the use of a word is fundamentally unregulated, unbounded, and this is what supports my claim that there is no limit to what can be said. Language is fundamentally, at it's base, unrestricted, and this feature of it allows for infinite capacity, and infinite possibility of expression, just like "number" allows for infinite capacity of quantification.
The issue now is that infinite possibility provides for nothing actual, no actual understanding. Therefore we have to enact boundaries, which we do for various reasons, or purposes, as Wittgenstein explains. This act of circumscribing is what empowers logic, such that we might define "number" as "natural", or "real", depending on the purpose intended, and logic can proceed within that closed conceptual space. This indicates that logic is not inherent within language, because the nature of language to provide infinite capacity for understanding, does not allow that logic inheres within, because logic proceeds by constraining that capacity.
Quoting Fooloso4
I don't understand your "common response". In any case, explanation is provided above.
Quoting Fooloso4
That's me, I like to think of it as "fashionably late". But I'm even late to pick up on the fashions. So by the time I'm starting to get it, and start showing up late because I think it's fashionable, the new fashion is to show up early, and I'm just old-fashioned.
Are you confusing sublimation with Hegels sublation?
That said, I see from Googling around that theres been some talk of sublimation as expressing some of the sense of Hegels Aufheben. And I quite like that sense in the context of the OP as well.
Oh, yes, sorry about that, I never ran into "sublimation" in philosophy, and I guess I just read the word in the title as "sublation".
So, I guess I don't at all understand what you mean by "sublimation" in the title. That's a word I've only heard in a meteorological context to talk about how snow, the solid form of H2O, evapourates directly to gas, without passing through the intermediary, liquid form, in the process of evapourating. With the use of Google, I see the term is used in psychology, and I assume that is the meaning you are using. If so, I'll read up on that.
:ok: :razz:
Interesting. On further reading I see that Freud's "sublimation" has some resemblance to Hegel's "aufheben" which I translate as "sublation" (if I remember to get it right). By Wikipedia it is stated that Freud wanted to indicate with the word, a scientific, sort of chemical process. But Jung was critical, claiming Freud obscured the origins of the word, to make it appear scientific.
Whatever the case, I think we might agree that I made a Freudian slip.
I deeply regret my failure to make this point myself.
However, if it is the case, that the described condition which Freud called "sublimation", is really quite similar to Hegelian "sublation", and Freud used the word "sublimation" to intentionally obscure the origin of his conception, then this might be the original form of "Freudian slip". It might be that there is more intention within a true Freudian slip, than was hitherto imagined.
There is an issue I have found with German philosophers in general, and that is that they tend to have very idiosyncratic word usage. It appears to me like they actually choose unusual words, to intentionally hide the origins of their conceptions. So they'll read and learn prior philosophers and prior concepts, then present them in a new way with different words, hiding their sources, and creating the illusion of originality.
I cannot understand the need, or reason for this attitude of hiding sources to demonstrate originality. In philosophy it is generally beneficial to show the sources, and the other authors who support your own thesis, and how your thesis is related to those of others, sort of like an appeal to authority. So the German philosophers appear to be kicking themselves in the shins by hiding the sources of their conceptions in this way. I've read about how Wittgenstein may have been influenced by Charles Pierce, and some similarities are quite evident. But Wittgenstein doesn't very much reveal his sources. I suppose that if a philosopher reads a lot, and picks up some ideas here and others there, then synthesizes, the original conceptions would get twisted or reformulated, to mesh with others, so that the work would be original and there would be no need to reveal sources.
The mention of Hegel prompts me to ask about the role of time. Kant was very particular about how that as an element of experience. Wittgenstein is ahistorical in laying out the conditions of what can be said about the world as a whole or experience as Kant treated the matter. But he recognizes that the structures of language games developed over time.
Yes, and the shifting of the river bed of certainties, which points to historical change, as opposed to Kants often ahistorical timetime as the form of inner sense, but not as social change. I think these are different topics: Hegel and Wittgenstein on history, Kant on time as such.
Scurrilous accusations.
It isnt true of the German philosophers Ive read. Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, and Adorno didnt do it. Their novel terminologies were genuine. Heidegger too: as far as I can see he sincerely coined new terms to get away from certain modes of thinking in philosophy (the conscious subject, etc). Hegel? I dont know. Obscurantist, lets say maybe, for the sake of argumentbut so as to seem more original than he really was? I dont buy it. Leibniz? What was he trying to hide?
But yes, people do argue that Freud in particular tried to conceal his sources. Turns out hed probably read more Nietzsche than he admitted. And if he did take sublimation from someone else it was likely Nietzsche, who used the word in Human, All Too Human.
Do you mean spurious accusations? Or do you think of me as a rat or something like that? I've known that proponents of German philosophy tend to defend vigorously the true originality, and authenticity of the German philosophers. So I suppose I was just stirring the pot, looking for an emotional response.
Novel terminology may be "genuine", but what does that really mean? Let's assume that there truly is novel modes of thinking expressed by people like Heidegger, which actually require new words, and it's not just a pretense, the authors are not just trying to separate themselves from the old, they've actually "discovered" or are endowed with, something new. Due to the role of intent in thinking, wouldn't these two (the pretense of something new, and the actual presence of something new) just be reducible to the very same thing in the end, anyway? Attempting to separate oneself from the old is to do something novel. But making oneself readable requires establishing a relationship with the old, and this turns the separation into a pretense.
Isn't that sort of what Wittgenstein showed with the idea of private language. A person can make up one's own private language, but it's really not at all useful, even for one's own purposes, unless that person provides relations to the language that one is already immersed in, the language which relates to the person's life full of meaning. Then, if the private language is presented as something completely novel, something outside the public language, the very fact of it being presented to the public language, gives it the appearance of pretense from the perspective of the public language. I mean, the author of the new words, must in some way relate those words to concepts understood in the public domain with words that already have meaning in that domain, in order for the new words to be intelligible. In this process the use of the new words takes on the characteristics of a pretense. It looks like what we would call a pretend language. So the intent to separate oneself, form the common language, with the use of new words, or using old words in a new way, will always have the characteristics of a pretend language.
The deeper issue of course is the reality of conceptual evolution, language evolution, difference in what what you call "modes of thinking", and genuine novelty. Genuine novelty is real and cannot be dismissed. The issue I see is that "reality" is defined by what is conventional, so the idiosyncratic philosophical perspectives will be judged as unreal, untrue, and pretense, as the pretend language. However, from the doubt of Socrates onward, it has been shown that the idiosyncratic has a real place in knowledge. The problem is to find this place, how it fits in.
Quoting Jamal
Thanks for the information.
Gerbil.
I think we can avoid this question if we take Wittgenstein's advice about not looking for all encompassing theories in PI to heart. Unfortunately , Wittgenstein himself doesn't always take this advice, and some of his disciples in particular fail to heed it when they attempt to develop a theory of all language, or even all communication, solely in terms of "games." That language is sometimes usefully thought of as a game does not entail that we must always think of it as such, or attempt some sort of "reduction."
If you go through an introductory text on philosophy of language, you're likely to find a steady stream of mutually exclusive claims about how language is "just" (reducible to):
- Signs representing propositions (abstract objects);
- Just verification or truth conditions.
- Just games
- Just the communication of internal mental states, etc.
There are good arguments for each, and also significant flaws in each, and in general they also tend to totally ignore the broader field of semiotics, leaving the field a bit "free floating," from other philosophical areas of inquiry that certainly seem relevant (e.g. metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, etc.).
I personally really like the work of Robert Sokolowski, who capably weaves together Husserl, much of philosophy of language, Aristotle, and Aquinas to develop a solid theory of philosophical anthropology in a way that jives well with Wittgenstein's sentiment. However, it doesn't go overboard in trying to reduce the human experience or it's horizons to language. There is a practical element. He follows Aristotle's advice in the Ethics that "sometimes with complex things you need to start at the end or the middle, with what is most familiar, not with a clear foundation/beginning," and that "we shouldn't expect hyper detailed answers for the most complex phenomena."
This allows him the space to develop a theory where conversation and intersubjectivity are essential to the human experience, and how we come to "say things about things," without getting "stuck in the box of language," or "the cabinet of the mind." That is, he says we should start with language because it is dominant in our lives and philosophical discourse, uniquely human, and on the surface of our experience to analyze. Then, from the intersection of language and phenomenology, we can get into how predication works, how intelligibilities are perceived/communicated, etc. without having to reduce everything to language or necessarily ground the discourse in language in a strict sense. There is room for metaphysics, etc., but we start with what is most obvious, "what people say," and phenomenological experience, then make our way from there, without using these as a "foundation" in the strict sense of "all phenomena must be traced back to and explained in terms of our foundation."
It seems to me like perhaps the biggest misstep in modern philosophy is the obsession with foundationalism, although the 20th century tendency to claim all other positions were "meaningless" or the jump to make all difficult philosophical questions into "pseudo problems," or else eliminate (or massively deflate) the difficult term, are up there too. By my count, there have been serious attempts to eliminate causation, truth, logic, meaning, qualia, our own consciousness, etc. Surely these can't all be dispensed, or we'll have no philosophy left.
I think we can set this out more clearly.
Quoting SEP: Transcendental Arguments
5.6 concerns Solipsism.
Quoting SEP: Transcendental Arguments
Meh. I'm taking a leaf from Joshs and posting long quotes.
So what is the transcendental argument Wittgenstein uses, @Jamal? "Thus, from the fact that we are able to make such statements meaningfully, the existence of a community of others that fix this rule can be inferred, as a necessary pre-condition for the former..."?
"Form of life" is only used a couple of times in Wittgenstein's opus. How does it cash out?
His argument does not seem to be about biology.
Some of us are stuck on the treadmill of metaphor, otherwise known as idling.
The counterfactual seems tough here. If there is a lone astronaut on a mission out past the Moon, and a freak particle accelerator accident someone generates a black hole that tears the Earth apart, so that now our astronaut is the lone surviving human, would her thoughts lose their content?
It doesn't even seem that it is obvious that we must be around other minds for our thoughts to have content. We can imagine a human child raised by highly sophisticated robots. The robots have no subjective experience, but they are able to function well enough to keep the child alive and run her through the basics of a K-12 education, responding to her prompts the way a much more advanced Chat GPT might. Do her thoughts lack content? It's not obvious that they should.
I guess this sort of gets at my point about foundationalism, the need to ground the obvious substance of everyday experience, instead of begining [I]with[/I] them as Aristotle suggests.
Saint Augustine says, "understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand." (Tractate 29) To which Anselm adds "For I believe even this: that unless I believe, I shall not understand." (Proslogion, drawing on Isaiah 7:9) This could be taken as a religious platitude, but in fact Augustine applies it against the same sort of solipsistic and relativist concerns common to modern philosophy.
His point, laid out most fully in Contra Academicos, is that learning itself requires taking experience as it comes. We can doubt anything. Yet, if we doubt every letter in our physics textbook, we shall never learn physics. Only after we have digested the topic can we have an informed opinion about its validity, and this will be the case even if no firm "foundation" exists (which is the case in modern physics; we know the middle better than the smallest or largest scales). This is true for social concerns and solipsism too. We can doubt that our parents are our parents, for we could have been switched at birth, but it would be insane to refuse filial devotion to our parents for this reason. Augustine's point is less clear in the context of modern culture, were it isn't seen as so shameful to lack filial devotion. The modern example here might be posting nude pictures to the internet because you assume other minds might not exist (whereas the ancients didn't much care about nudity).
So, regardless of whether conversation is required to give thoughts content, it is clear that in our case, it is an important component of how our thoughts come to have content.
There were other people. They are how she got there. I don't see this as any sort of counterexample. "...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
An axiom need not be seen as god's writ. They can be seen as something we choose to do, a way to maintain coherence. One undertakes that this is the foundation, rather than discovering a foundation.
And yes, we can doubt anything; but not everything. Something must be understood as foundational, if only for our present purposes.
If Aristotle had only had the opportunity to read On Certainty.
Gotcha. I am only vaguely familiar with Davidson. I assumed "a process of triangulation must occur, whereby the content of the thought someone is having is fixed by the way in which someone else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world," suggested an ongoing process.
The latter example still seems like a problem, unless we're going to say that "someone else," doesn't need to mean "some other experiencing entity."
Is this true though? Tolkien nerds can certainly correct each other on the proper use of the Elven language, but was the language not a language system until Tolkien shared it? Surely it had rules before then. Once one knows what a rule is, it seems completely possible to make up you own, in isolation, e.g., Allan Calhamer inventing the game Diplomacy, Naismith inventing basketball, etc. That we can create rules in the absence of a community and then other can learn them is how we get stuff like the mystery of the Zodiac Killer (Ted Cruz of course) or the related issue of languages that are "dead" for thousands of years before being decoded.
On the other end of the spectrum, it's possible to get a dog to follow rules and perform acts based on verbal commands, but the rule following there hardly seems like it can "fix" the content of thought.
Dogs cannot set out the rule they are following. We can.
Probably a good way to derail this thread:
Quoting SEP: Private Language
Elven is not a paradigmatic case of a natural language.
Maybe we should leave it there? There's history here.
This is interesting. Playing against an opponent inherently means that both players want to win; one wins, the other loses. There is no such thing as both winning the game. If you play against yourself, and you win, you also lose. This is different from a draw.
Winning is the point of the game of chess. You can win two ways: 1. you are smarter than your opponent, or more educated in historically established strategies. 2. You make fewer mistakes than the opponent. Both of these are absurd in a one-person game. You can't be smarter than yourself. And if you make a mistake, you can't simultaneously capitalize on that mistake -- although further analysis in due course of time by a singular player of both sides of the game can reveal that he or she had made a mistake, and can capitalize on it.
Therefore I say that a single person can't play a game of chess all by himself. The paradigms are so far removed of the original of the game, that it becomes a different game, not a chess game, although it is still played with chess pieces with the same rules of their movements as in a two-person game.
I think in this sense Wittgenstein becomes a guru, who utters infallible truths in the view of his followers, and nobody notices that in effect he is speaking nonsense.
This is what I noticed on the entire board in the conversations between or among members here who have had some or else extensive formal training in philosophy. They like to discuss things in agreement with each other, they admire the classic greats, and they lose sight of the essence of philosophy in this mutual admiration society, which is the love of truth and wisdom, and which necessarily invokes the uncovering of mistaken lines of reasoning.
And then when one comes along who tells them, "hey, this is wrong, and this is wrong and this is wrong", then the trained gang ostracizes the logical dissenter, they make fun of him, and they bitterly reject him with either silently ignoring his points, or else calling him names.
I think Davidson is only right if the thought is experienced in language. However, language is not essential to thought formation. The necessary need of language for though formation is one of the bigger misconceptions in philosophies concerning language and thought.
This is another humongous error in logic. We think of people as beings who have a mind. Each person has his or her own mind. Yet we don't know what a mind is. We don't know how it attaches to the body. We don't know how it is related to the brain. Yet we speak of it as an obvious and inalienable quality of humans.
It is part of our world, but we lack the language that describes it. We each have an unerringly similar concept of what a mind is, yet the concept is not formed as a consensus achieved by language... it is a concept indescribable by language, therefore it is not possible to harmonize our understanding of the concept using language.
A similar concept may be god. We each "know" what we consider a god, yet nobody can assuredly describe a god knowingly with language. God and mind are concepts that are part of our world, that is, they are found inside the limits of our world, yet both are outside the limits of the language we use.
That's partly my point. Once we know what a rule is, we can make them for dogs, cats, ourselves, etc. Kirpke's point about rule following is ostentatiously false, at least the the way it is presented there. I might buy that we learn "what rules are" through our interactions with others, but it's also clear we can develop and implement private rules.
Anyhow, unfortunately, we can only set out the rules the dog is following. If we could set out the rules that [I]we[/I] follow, then philosophy of language wouldn't be in the state it is in.
I will leave my comments on Davidson's theory there.
Probably for the best.
Above, I call such nonsense "metaphor", language on holiday, idling.
Quoting god must be atheist
I think that this totally misses what "thought" is, as @Count Timothy von Icarus demonstrates. Furthermore, it is completely inconsistent with the traditional form/content distinction. It is the "form" of the thought which is related to a social system, not the content of the thought. The content is the material element, the substance, the idea itself, as proper to the individual, and intrinsically related to the wants, needs, and intentions of the individual. I believe this is an important point toward understanding Marxist materialism, and the material reality of the individual, (replete with ideas), within the social context.
This is the perspective which makes language transcendental. Instead of trying to portray language and communion as something which inheres within thought, as Davidson seems to be doing, we need to accept the reality that communion is something completely different, with completely different organic origins, from thought. In this way, thought is not inherently directed toward communion, it is allowed freedom to roam by the nature of free will. And, despite the fact that language may appear to us as having the sole purpose of enabling communion, through communication, we must also recognize the fact that it is also purposeful for the act of thinking which is not necessarily oriented toward communion. Thinking, and communion have completely different origins, and because each of these has its own use for language, language can be used in ways which are completely non-conducive to communion (deception etc.).
Quoting Banno
Our dog sets out rules for every moving creature in the house. When a cat breaks her rule, it hears about it. When I break her rule I hear about it. We call her "the police dog" because of this enforcement policy which allows us to relax on the couch, even when a cat attempts to jump on the table, because we know the enforcer is on patrol. In the same way that it does not require language to learn, and follow a rule, it does not require language to "set out" a rule.
Perhaps more to the point, do we actually think that people with aphasia have no content to their thoughts, that there is simply "no one home," in there doing "any thinking" once they lose the ability to either produce or comprehend language? If they can produce but not comprehend speech, or vice versa, how does the loss of one half of the speech world affect their status? What about the person with agnosia who has no trouble with language but cannot use sense perception to identify objects or people (and thus cannot name them)?
Sometimes people recover from these conditions if they are brought on by stroke or another form of brain injury. In general, their narratives reveal a radical absence of "essential" elements of conciousness, and yet a continued stream consciousness they can recall. What appears to be "thought" shows up in the absence of linguistic capabilities (e.g., "I must call the ambulance," existing in the absence of an ability to recognize numbers on a phone or to produce intelligible speech once 911 has been dialed, or to understand the other person on the line in neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor's case).
The brain is a system of systems; language is a faculty built on top of prior systems, taking advantage of them. It can seem all encompassing vis-á-vis experience precisely because it utilizes so many systems. When we imagine a scene described by an author, we're employing the same systems we use to process incoming sense organ data. Lions clearly do not have a word for "gazelle," and yet it would be strange if they couldn't recognize one from any other object. People with aphasia don't necessarily have agnosia, just because names seem wed to "object recognition," in healthy people doesn't seem to suggest that you can't lose one without the other. Language as the defining aspect of thought or mental life appears to be a sort of synecdoche, or maybe a fallacy of composition.
It might be worth bringing up Davidson's famous "swampman" argument where he denies most physicalist interpretations of philosophy of mind. In his view, an atom for atom copy of himself couldn't understand language because it would "lack a causal history," associated with language. That is, Swampman would live out the rest of Davidson's life just like he would, speaking and listening, but would have no thoughts. This just seems implausible in light of what we know about learning and language. I don't believe he was ever married, which makes a certain sort of sense here. I'd maintain that it would be difficult to have raised a toddler, having to continually remind them to "use their words," to communicate themselves, and then argue that thought cannot continually outrun the limits of language/exist prior to it.
Fallacy of composition or division? I could see it as a fallacy of division, i.e. 'thought is language all the way down' or "In the beginning was the word." I'm not seeing how a fallacy of composition might be in play, however.
In any case, this is a very interesting topic to me personally. I'd love to see an OP where you delve into the topic further.
Quoting Banno
Kripkenstein says normative meaning is a folktale. It sounds great and it fits a socially-centered narrative, but it's really not more than conjecture.
Back to Kant and what the individual sees and knows (and can't know).
Is there really such a thing, for Kant, as what the individual can't know? Or is it the case that there is only such a thing as what the individual cannot know empirically?
Both, I guess. The fallacy of composition is to assume that because a certain type/element of thought is linguistic, that all aspects of it must be e.g., if there are things we like about a piece of music or art that we can't put into words, this je ne sais quoi isn't contained in "thought."
But there does seem to be a fallacy of division as well, in that it is in language that thought most obviously"hangs together," as a whole, and yet the linguistic nature doesn't reach all the way down.
In general, I think philosophy of language also tends to underestimate the value of language in non-social contexts, the way in which it is a tool for imagination, planning, and problem solving. I've seen some convincing speculation on how our capabilities for language may have grown out of both social and "internal," use, some from Daniel Dennett funny enough.
Interestingly, solipsism was sort of a going concern from the pre-Socratics in the West and showing up as early as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in the East. As far as I am aware, the position that "we do not mean things by words," i.e. that our words don't sometimes reflect our internal mental states or refer to things/people around us, is an entirely modern conception. It seems to grow out of the twin tendencies towards reduction and the elimination of difficult concepts that the limits of the (currently) formalizable represent the limits of possible knowledge.
I lifted from SEP an account of a transcendental argument found in Wittgenstein:
"...it is impossible to make sense of what it is to follow a rule correctly, unless this means that what one is doing is following the practice of others who are like-minded"
It seems that this is the sort of thing that @Jamal has in mind, and yet it is not found in Kant.
So it is unclear what, if or how this was a "sublimated" from Kant.
Unless one is to suppose that anyone using a transcendental argument owes a debt of gratitude to Kant. In which case Wittgenstein is hardly in a unique position.
Or is it that Wittgenstein is here being viewed through a Kantian lens? Those with a predilection for a particular philosopher will inevitably bring that philosopher's perspective into novel considerations. Here "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" is being restructured by others (and not by any means specialists in Wittgenstein) as "the limits of my form of life mean the limits of my world".
Now influences from Schopenhauer are well document. Wittgenstein made use of several of Schopenhauer's arguments and even some phrases. But apparently summed him up thus:
"Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say, ie though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience."
Schopenhauer made use of Kant, so it would not be surprising to find distillations of Kant in Wittgenstein.
@Jamal , it's s long road from learning that Wittgenstein read Kant to claiming him as a subliminal Kantian.
He says we can't know about that logical orphan: the thing in itself. :grin:
:up:
Schopenhauer leaves us with that question: 'what do the necessities of thought have to do with the way the world is?'
Wittgenstein answers that question, so it's a long philosophical conversation. Witt owed Schop, who owed Kant, who owed Hume, and so on.
Wittgenstein had an infamous disregard for the history of philosophy. Some might say this was in order to think things through without prejudice; others that it was in order to claim credit for the ideas of others.
But Kant does not loom large either in Wittgenstein's own accounts of his influences, or in the accounts of contemporaries and sympathisers. The links seem to be relatively recent scholarship.
So I would urge some caution.
It is true that Kant took it as a given that concepts formed through reason were demonstrations of a universal activity. Wittgenstein's view of what is built through interaction would have puzzled him.
But Kant did approach the insufficiency of Descartes' isolation. In the passage I quoted above, there is:
Quoting CPR, Kant, B421
The parallel the OP draws between the different views of limits is at least two examples of relative humility measured against what can be established as universals.
You can't really read the Tractatus without picking up on the way he's addressing Schopenhauer, though.
Quoting Banno
Kant was Schopenhauer's primary influence. The same basic ideas were probably rolling around?
The alternative? "Not everything that thinks, exists"?
I read the passage to mean that we have no way to confirm the judgment, a neat reversal of the special province of the "I" granted by Descartes.
So, no, not an argument for the opposite proposition.
Perhaps a caveat could be added such as "exists in some sense, not necessarily physical", although the idea of a non-physical existent certainly seems inscrutable, and it is questionable as to whether it is even coherent.
I don't think any rough equating of the thing-in-itself with that of which we cannot speak will suffice here, but I'm afraid that far more scholarship would be required to carry the point in either direction.
Might leave it there.
Just to be clear, are you addressing Kant's statement in that regard? Where he stated it was such a thing?
This goes in a lot of different directions. As a point of departure, how Descartes expresses it as a matter of moving from a center outwards is different from Kant. Kant is asking for something like:
Quoting Janus
I agree.
When a philosopher has read material of another philosopher, there must be conscious interpretation of the material. Therefore such influence cannot accurately be called "subliminal". So the question I asked above remains. Why do some authors intentionally obscure their influences? Or is it just the case that they are not trying to obscure their influences at all, and other people who don't see the appropriate correlations, like to represent them as obscuring their influences?
That's an interesting way of looking at it. It reminds me of recent discussions on TPF, of variation in the extent to which people experience an inner monolog. I wonder if there is much correlation between the degree to which people experience an inner monolog, and a tendency to categorize things that cannot be put into words, as other than thought.
I may get around to replying to you down the line.
So does he. The empirical proposition is initially a derivative of Mendelssohn's materialism; the disagreement is the evolution of the Refutation of Idealism in A, to the Solution of the Psychological Paralogism in B.
In short, the I, previously taken as Descartes thinking substance and Mendelssohn's simple being, cannot exist as conditioned by modal categories, but can only be represented as a non-contradictory transcendental object.
While we all might be quite happy to be informed our respective Is cant be really real, we still might be a little reserved in our happiness from being informed its no more than an intellectual conception.
I had launched a discussion about 3 years ago on this exact "quotation", a totally unrealistic and naive statement.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11545/examining-wittgensteins-statement-the-limits-of-my-language-mean-the-limits-of-my-world/p1
Not a single person could support the truth of it, not even describe it or explain it. They didn't rejected it either.
In fact, I read in some article later --I don't have the reference ready-- that Wittgenstein himself had changed his mind about it in his late years ...
His claim that ethics/aesthetics is transcendental, on the other hand, is about how things are for us. Not as a matter of fact, but of value. Not as something that can be said, but as how we see or perceive things, how we experience the world.
Logic is the transcendental condition for the world. Ethics/aesthetics the transcendental condition for my world.
A form of life includes something that is missing from both Tractarian logic and ethics/aesthetics - what we do, how we live, and how the world is shaped by us. Rather than drawing limits Wittgenstein is now more interested in possibilities:
(PI 90)
He does this not by marking limits to what is possible but by clearing away misunderstandings.
(PI 126)
He has reversed the direction of his investigation. From the conditions for to conditions against, to what stands in the way and prevents us from seeing new possibilities. Related to this is the phenomena of seeing aspects:
(129)
Here the shift is from the condition for the possibility of experience to the experiences themselves.
Quoting Sam26
I was not aware of "Mendelssohn's materialism." Will check it out.
Quoting Mww
Or at least the conception is posterior to the intuitions which Kant confirms are active in each person. Sort of taking half of Descartes' certainty at the expense of the other.
Absolutely. All conceptions are posterior to intuition, in Kant.
Quoting Paine
You mean, cogito at the expense of substance? If so, then yes, Id agree with that.
Thanks for asking.
I should have said more. Kant would like to confirm the "thinking" as what humans do but does not place that on the level of experience that cannot be denied. The world is built upon our 'outward sense' and the simultaneity of events where other beings exist (if we see them that way). That is a bit of a pickle. The leverage of personal experience is used in one way but not another.
Quoting Banno
Yep. Nevertheless, I can say a few things in support of the OP, even if they're far more vague and suggestive than is required to carry the point.
First, I'm not saying that Wittgenstein is a Kantian philosopher or that he is in a unique position in taking a transcendental approach. What Im thinking is that there is a resemblance between Kant and (late) Wittgenstein, at least along a certain dimension. I think its something like a historical point. I'm saying that Kant prefigured Wittgenstein or laid the groundwork, in ways that might be under-appreciated. He was ahead of his time, and more than he knew; without the rationalist baggage, Kant is more contemporary than is often thought, not least because he was one of the first to push back against the Cartesian tradition (which is an important aspect of the transcendental in the hands of Kant).
This matters to me personally because I keep noticing that Kant and Wittgenstein, in similar ways, help me in thinking about things like appearance and reality, sceptical doubt, direct and indirect realism, perception, and related issues. I'm trying to identify why this is so.
I take the important and controversial question to be how Wittgensteins late philosophy can be transcendental given that its significantly anthropological and seemingly empirical, and given that he specifically cautions against the identification of, and the search for, necessity and universality (and by implication, the a priori).
[quote=Kant, CPR, B 25]I call transcendental all cognition that deals not so much with objects as rather with our way of cognizing objects in general insofar as that way of cognizing is to be possible a priori.[/quote]
For Kant this is about synthetic a priori knowledge via concepts, but I think it can be about other things while remaining transcendental.
There are other ways to put it. A transcendental investigation investigates ...
Crucially too, the transcendental is anti-sceptical, and not just as a pleasant side-effect. This is seen at various points in the CPR (the Transcendental Deduction of the categories, the Refutation of Idealism, and the fourth Paralogism in the first edition). Generally what we get is the idea that it doesn't make sense to say that objects as we perceive and know them are such apart from those conditions (there is a sense in which Kant's transcendental idealism is almost a tautology: you cannot experience something except in the way you must experience it). Since I'm more familiar with OC than PI, I wouldn't mind pursuing this angle ("Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application.").
There is debate over whether late Wittgenstein identifies a priori conditions. Here's one way of looking at it:
[quote=G. D. Conway, Wittgenstein on Foundations]Rather than being denied, the concept of the a priori is placed firmly on its feet in the later works. This concrete a priori no longer centers about a Kantian transcendental subjectivity. Here it defines a concrete form of life in a particular world rather than a transcendental consciousness. One must envision the a priori as arising in experience rather than being imposed upon experience.[/quote]
Whether or not that works (how is it a priori if it arises in experience?) Wittgenstein has this in common with other twentieth century thinkers, e.g., Foucault with his historical a priori. Foucault himself is doing transcendental philosophy in that he is investigating intersubjective conditions of the possibility of our societal practices, even though these conditions are not to be seen as universal and fixed. But interestingly, he also argued that Kant had already done something similar. In his essay introducing Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Foucault argues (I think) that after the CPR Kant began to locate the transcendental in the empirical subject, thus bringing the two poles, empirical and transcendental, together. And the move to anthropology notably parallels the direction of Wittgenstein's thinking from the 1930s on.
Quoting Banno
Sure. Or how about the following, which is Davidson's summary of the private language argument:
Which I take to be equivalent to: distinguishing between using the language correctly and using it incorrectly is possible if and only if language is shared.
And thus we reach our social practices and the form of life that language is embedded within. What are you asking for when you ask how form(s) of life "cashes out"?
Similar to Wittgenstein (and Davidson's "triangulation"), Kant transcendentally flipped inner and outer experience to give primacy to the latter, i.e., to the experience of the "external world" as opposed to self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Descartes and his followers, both rationalist and empiricist, assumed that...
[quote=K. R. Westphal, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Transcendental Chaos]. . . our self-awareness is a given, that our sensory states are exactly what they appear to us to be, and that the philosophical task is to see what else, if anything, we can know on this basis by logical deduction from this presumed evidence base.[/quote]
Notice that this is the basic rationale for epistemology as first philosophy. But with self-awareness demoted, that's called into question.
I think Kant and Wittgenstein demonstrate an anthropological tendency while retaining a transcendental motivation. Whether it carries the point, I hope all this does something to support the view that late Wittgenstein is significantly transcendental, and that ...
Quoting Jamal
(The unmentioned intermediary point being the Tractatus: the locus in language and/or logic.)
Of course, there's a lot of detail missing here.
I don't like your use of "we" here. It implies a type of generalization which is not applicable in the context. If there is something about your experience which you cannot put into words, then you ought to say "I cannot put it in words". With a properly formulated generalization, we'd look at someone else having a similar experience (the same type of experience, by that generalization), and we'd find that it is possible that another person might be able to put that experience into words. Therefore the use of "we" here is not justified.
I believe that this is a very important point when considering the power of language. What is the case for "I", "I cannot put it into words" for example, is not the case for "we". In other words, "I cannot do it" does not equate with "it cannot be done". When we understand this, it gives "possible" and "impossible" a completely different context which is completely separate, independent, from the capacities of the individual.
From this perspective, we can come to realize the fact that language gives us infinite possibility. I cannot restrict "possible" to "what is possible for me", and at the same time, I cannot determine the limitations of everybody. This means that I must leave possibility open, as unlimited, in its real, independent existence. However, as Aristotle determined (cosmological argument), there must be real restrictions to this apparently limitless possibility. The logic of the cosmological argument demonstrates that in spite of the fact that I cannot determine the restrictions, and by inductive reasoning not any single one of us can determine these restrictions, there must be very real restrictions, which are independent from "us". Since restrictions are formal, therefore fundamentally intelligible, this leaves an aspect of "the intelligible" which is unintelligible to "us", thereby opening the door to theology.
Quoting Jamal
I like this image. I believe it is important to understand that the learning process, therefore knowledge in general, begins in our relationships with others, mother, father, and other authority figures. This knowledge is developed through the use of words, therefore the "outer experience" gains primacy in our knowledge. We are taught to resist the inner inclinations, emotions, temptations, and feelings, because they tend to incline us away from the conformity of learning, which would make education very difficult.
The result is that the outer experience is fundamental to knowledge, language, and all the communicative tools. So when we turn to the inner, in the way of Descartes, we employ this knowledge from the outer, and we try to understand the inner by those terms. However, in reality, we need to accept the difference, and not refer to the inner conditions as "knowledge" proper . We need to represent the difference, because the type of thing which the inner is composed of, which appears like a sort of knowledge, the innate, intuition, a priori, is better known as the capacity for, or in Kant, the conditions for the possibility of, the outer experience which composes "knowledge" proper. This gives a completely different perspective on the understanding of "I". Instead of Descartes assertion "I am", we see in the inner, from this mode of understanding, the possibility of "I".
Yep. Wittgenstein and Davidson are much closer to your way of putting it than Kant is, since they emphasize other people, whereas Kant is thinking about the lonely subject perceiving objects. Davidson adds another element to make it a three-way relation, a "triangulation" ...
[quote=Davidson, Rational Animals]. . . that requires two creatures. Each interacts with an object, but what gives each the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language.[/quote]
So instead of subject and object you have an object plus at least two persons who share a language.
So I see Kant as pioneering this approach while being unable to escape his philosophical milieu entirely.
This is misleading. We would not have completely described the world. The reason is twofold:
First, given all the simple objects we know all their possible configurations but do not know their actual configurations. Simple objects make up the substance of the world (2.021) They determine a form and not any material properties. It is the configuration of objects produce the material properties. (2.0231) The substance, the simple objects, subsist independently of what is the case, independently of the facts. (2.024)
Second:
(6.37)
Sam starts out looking in the right direction with the limits of what can be said, but continues in the wrong direction. The limits of my language does not mean that we have completely described the world, but rather, that what can be said about the world is limited by what it makes sense to say, by propositions that have meaning. Propositions picture the world. An illogical picture would represent an illogical world. The world is logical and so what is pictured in language must be logical.
Well, I don't see the need even for an "object" at this point. We have the subject, and the subject's relations to what is outside, or external, to it. The supposition of "objects" or "an object" appears to be a tool of the learning process, we individuate the outside, distinguishing objects which can be named and spoken about. The individuation is based in the temporal extension, continuity of sameness, which validates an object with an identity.
But then the question gets much more difficult, when we ask whether it may be the case that this idea of continuity of sameness which justifies the naming of objects, as "objects", is inherent, innate within the subject, validated by one's relations with oneself (phenomenological approach to "being" I suppose) and this would be why language makes sense to the individual subject. In that case, the primary object would be the subject, as proposed by Descartes. Or, is it the case that the naming of objects is validated by one's relations with the external, the temporal persistence of what is sensed, along with the language, the knowledge, and the learning of identifiable objects which goes along with this. There appears to be a coincidence of the two, which makes assigning primacy to one or the other very difficult. So these routes of analysis, which separate object from subject, tend to hit a road block.
Davidson distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: subjective, intersubjective, and objective, and he doesnt reduce any of these to any of the others. Intersubjective knowledge is not just a subset of objective knowledge or subjectivity multiplied but is something else: knowledge of other minds. Objective knowledge is knowledge of the world that the subject shares with others (or rather, that the subjects share), which has a bunch of objects in it.
Ill avoid your other thorny issues.
To describe the world accurately, in terms of the Tractatus, a proposition, which is a picture, must have the correct form (T. 2.2). The picture, and thus its form must correspond with a fact (an actual state of affairs) as opposed to a possible fact or possible state of affairs. Think of the form of the picture as the arrangement of things in the picture. If a proposition is true, then the picture, which depicts a particular form, correctly matches reality. If the proposition is false, then the picture, and thus its form, incorrectly matches reality. All propositions represent possible states of affairs. Im not talking about true and false propositions (all propositions).
My point, again, is that if you have all the true propositions, then you have completely described the world. Im sure it could have been said more clearly.
Right, but you never will have all true propositions. All that we say does not limit what there is.
Quoting Sam26
The picture does not depict a particular form.
(2.172)
You are conflating form and content.
(2.15)
(2.151)
(2.18)
(2.2)
(2.22)
That's not the point. The point is that all true propositions according to W. would completely describe reality or the world, and that's all I was saying. Quit trying to put words in my mouth.
Quoting Fooloso4
I'm using depict in reference to what the picture displays, i.e., the content of the picture. Wittgenstein is saying that a picture doesn't represent its form, it shows or displays it. I'm not disagreeing here.
So far nothing you've added does anything to falsify what I've said. If you want to say that I'm not using depict as W. did, fine, I agree.
It is pointless to say that what can never be said can be said.
Quoting Sam26
Your words:
Quoting Sam26
Everything that can be said about the world would not give us a complete picture of the world but rather a complete picture of the possibilities of the world, both true and false. From this picture we would not know what is the case.
We cannot determine which propositions are true by looking at language . Within the limits of language we do not arrive at a true picture of the world.
Quoting Sam26
The form is not the content.
Then I do not see how you can make sense of Tract 1.1
For those of us watching at home, are you referring to:
Quoting Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1.1
Yep. If the world is the totality of facts, then how could everything that can be said about the world not be a complete picture? Supposing this would imply that there are facts that cannot be said, which would be anathema to the theme of the Tractatus.
What if one does not know the facts well enough to speak about them?
If there is a fact you don't know, then there is a fact.
It's not about things that haven't been said, but things that cannot be said.
Everything that can be said about the world includes saying things that are not true. A complete picture of the world would not include an equal number of true and false statements. What is false is not a fact. From this description of the world that says everything that can be said you would not know what the facts are.
There's an equivocation in this. Everything we might say includes saying things that are not true. But if you say something about the world, it would be odd if what you said about the world were not true...
I'd say that if you tell me something about the world, you are undertaking that what you say is true.
What would be odd is if everything you say about the world is true.
I assume that these three kinds of knowledge are the reason for the triangulation. As you might be able to tell from my post, I object to the objective type. I see "an object" as something created by the systems of a subject, or subjects. Whether a subject could create an object, or it requires many subjects, is not answerable. This brings that line of inquiry to a close, without resolution. That we cannot accurately determine whether a subject could create an object, or it requires a number of subjects to create an object, doesn't warrant a third category "objective knowledge", as knowledge of the world. Isn't that what all knowledge is, knowledge of the world? And doesn't all knowledge have objects in it? The third category is perhaps an attempt to get beyond the road block, but it seems to be just a sort of redundancy, which leads backward instead of forward.
Then I'm not seeing a cogent point in your remark to Sam.
You said
Quoting Fooloso4
But how could the facts about the world not be complete description of the world?
I dunno. I can't make sense of your remark.
Of course the propositions do not give a compete description of the world, but surely the facts do.
Facts are not descriptions.
If we knew the totality of facts we would be able to give a complete description of the world, but we do not have the totality of facts. And so we do not have all true propositions. Without having all true propositions we do not have a complete description of the world.
Is what what I think Wittgenstein is claiming? That facts are not descriptions? That we cannot give a complete description of the world? That we cannot derive the content of the world from its form?
I think he is claiming that facts are not descriptions. That we cannot give a complete description of the world. That we cannot derive the content of the world from its form.
Just to be sure, do you think he is denying one or more of these things? If so, which ones and on what textual basis?
Where?
The problem is that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein was demonstrating a very strange conception of "the world". For a seasoned philosopher it's very difficult to believe as true, the propositions which compose the conception. You would have to accept them in the way you would accept mathematical axioms, as propositions not meant to express truth, but proposed for some other purpose. The questions to be asked of the book then, is what is that goal, and whether Wittgenstein is successful in that intention.
In order to give a complete description of the world one would have to know all the facts of the world. Is there anyone who knows all the facts of the world?
I recommend reading the introduction written by Bertrand Russell to get a sense of the "world" as a boundary rather than as a "thing."
I don't agree with Russell's framing of many issues, but he does reflect the distance from the "totality of facts" given in the descriptions:
Quoting ibid. page 18
One need not put aside the question of truth, but the question of whether what he says is true should not come before the question of what it is he is saying. What he is saying is what is at issue.
Nowhere does Wittgenstein say that we cannot know all the facts. Nowhere is that relevant to his argument.
He does say "The world is the totality of facts".
Hence Sam is correct here:
Quoting Sam26
Note that this is a contingent sentence. Its truth is not dependent on our having a complete description.
We need to consider the age old incompatibility between being and becoming. A proper understanding of "the world" needs to include both. "Fact" refers to what is, and is not, and so that part of the world which consists of being might be understood as facts. However, there is still that aspect of the world known as "becoming".
Aristotle proposed that we allow a violation of the law of excluded middle to accommodate becoming. Others have proposed that becoming violates the law of non-contradiction. In any case, this aspect of "the world" cannot be understood as consisting of facts. But this odes not mean that we cannot speak about, or even understand this aspect. It just means that we need to apply different principles. A good example is the application of statistics and probabilities.
So that's where the problem lies, in the assumption that this aspect of the world (that which does not consist of facts), since it does not consist of facts, is "incapable of being expressed in language". To represent language as being restricted to the expression of truths and falsities, is a very naive representation of language.
But in the end it seems to me that if what is involved in 'sublimating Kant" is just making use of a transcendental argument then the point is pretty trivial.
And that if there is some deeper point, I haven't been able to follow it. Kant places transcendence in experience, Wittgenstein places transcendence in the commonality of language. On this we agree.
I do not share your regard for Kant. So while there are plenty of issues here we might discuss, I see Kant as being of little help.
How does that idea connect with what Wittgenstein says? Do any particular passages bring that issue into the conversation for you?
Immediately before saying the limits of my language means the limits of my world. (5.6)
He says:
(5.571)
The idea of having all true propositions is nonsense.
(5.557)
Logic tells is there must be elementary propositions, but cannot determine what they are. This requires a move from logic to its application, from form to content. The claim that the world is the totality of facts is a priori,. From this we know nothing about any of the facts of the world, what they are, how many there are, or what the totality of them is.
Of course if we did have all the true propositions we would have a complete description of the world! But positing this hypothetical condition does not explain Wittgenstein's claim that the limits of my language means the limits of my world. The limits of my language does not include the totality of true propositions.
My language is limited by my life:
I see the issue as sort of two-fold, the premise and the conclusion. The primary premise is at the beginning of the book where language is characterized as picturing the world with propositions. As I explained above, this is a faulty representation of the world. But what is also presented is a faulty representation of language as a sort of secondary premise, derived from the first. It is assumed that since the world consists of facts, then there is nothing else to language but talk about facts. However, since a large part of the real world consists of what is other than fact, language has naturally developed ways of referencing this part of the world, which does not consist of truth-apt propositions.
What appears to happen in the Tractatus is that Wittgenstein discovers the reality that the primary premise is false, that a large part of the world consists of what is other than fact. But instead of recognizing that language has naturally developed to speak of this other part of the world in ways other than truth-apt propositions, he makes the faulty conclusion that we cannot speak about this part of the world. I think it's around 6.3 where he starts to talk about the problems with the primary premise, acknowledging that the world isn't really limited in the way proposed. Then you'll see from 6.5 onward, where he doesn't adjust the secondary premise accordingly, but instead assumes we cannot speak about this part of the world. "6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the
mystical."
Instead of recognizing that the mystical is referenced in ways other than truth-apt propositions he concludes that we cannot speak about this part of the world. But the idea that language consists of truth-apt propositions was derived from the faulty premise, that the world consists of facts. So when the primary premise is dispelled, the secondary one needs to be rejected as well, as being based on the primary.
Best drop this. It is a side line and rather pointless.
That assertion does not appear in the text.
That's right, the premise I stated is not stated in the text. But it's implied by the conclusion made at 6.5 - 7. That section is stated as a conclusion, it is not stated as a descriptive observation. And without the premise I stated, the conclusion cannot be made. So the premise is implied by the conclusion, whether or not it is stated.
In philosophy we often find conclusions drawn from unstated premises. If for example, the author thinks something to be obvious or self-evident it will not be stated, even though it is a requirement for the conclusion made. Most often this appears as a matter of undefined terms. In which case, a term requires a specific definition to make the conclusion presented. This is the case of "inexpressible" in my quote above, and in general the conclusion of the Tractatus, which makes a statement about what we cannot say. That conclusion requires a special, very restrictive definition for 'speaking about', 'saying', or what people do with language in general.
It is my belief that in some cases the author even recognizes that if the required definition is made, it would obviously be objectionable and would draw attention to the weakness of the argument. Or it's just a matter of habit. In any case, the special definition, which is a requirement as a premise, for the conclusion that is made, is simply not stated, but taken for granted instead. I believe this is commonly known as "rhetoric", when the weaknesses and flaws of what one is arguing are intentionally veiled to make the speech more persuasive. It's actually very common here at TPF, and you can understand it as a sort of inversion of "special pleading". Special pleading argues an exception to a general rule. Invert this, and in the form of rhetoric I am talking about, there is a general rule, a definition which acts as an inductive conclusion, but the general rule doesn't include all the special cases which fall outside, and thereby weaken the inductive conclusion. When the definition, or general rule (inductive conclusion), is very weak, it is nothing more than a presentation of a special case itself, as if the special case made a general rule.
I think it's a matter of taste. But Kant is indispensable for a discussion about Kant, which is what this is (as well as being a discussion about Wittgenstein).
And the point is not simply that Kant and Wittgenstein used transcendental arguments, but that they used them to the same ends. Or put another way, transcendental arguments are not just arguments of a particular logical form but tend to be motivated in a particular kind of direction: the critique of the legitimacy of metaphysics; more specifically, the critique of transcendence, i.e., wondering if the cup disappears, wondering about noumena; and to flip inner and outer and make whats outside the head primary.
Together these amount to a transcendental approach that wrestles with global scepticism (neither of them just dismissed it) and challenges the Cartesian and Humean tradition of inner/outer and appearance/reality. I think thats significant. You on the other hand, with your Wittgensteinian disregard for history, do not. No problem.
Soon I hope to present my thesis that Wittgenstein was a Hegelian. :wink:
Sure, we can drop it. But what it means for the limit of my language to be the limit of my world is not a side line and is not pointless.
We cannot a priori construct all true propositions and cannot do so a posteriori either unless we knew of all the facts of the world.
As to the claim:
Quoting Banno
it is a tautology. If you could say everything true about the world, then you could say everything true about the world.
It's interesting though to ask, what makes something or someone capable of engaging in "triangulation" with us? Looking back at the SEP quote on Donaldson:
It seems like the term "like-minded," has to do a lot of lifting here if it isn't unpacked. I can train a dog to follow rules, but it doesn't seem like a dog can triangulate and ground the content of my thoughts.
What does the dog lack? What is it about the other human person that makes them able to ground the contents of thought for us? For if we say that the dog, the dolphin, and the chimpanzee fail to [I] understand[/I] our rules, despite following them, and we turn around and say that to understand a rule is to follow the practice of like-minded individuals, we have just circled round the question.
And this might be where Kant comes back in, for Kant's focus leads him to an explanation of the ways in which we are "like-minded," such that we can ground word's meanings for one another. For to say only that "language is use," fails to explain why language is only useful vis-á-vis certain entities. We don't command rocks to move or explain our day to our house plants. "Use" can only become use because of what the other person is, and this leads us back to perceptions and experiences, the "meanings of words," since if words didn't mean anything to our interlocutors, what use could they have? The establishment of use itself seems to have certain prerequisites.
This is why I am skeptical of largely externalists explanations of language and meaning. I think they get something right, but I can't shake the suspicion that there is a large black box at the center of the explanation. The Swampman example seems to pop up because the content of thought is supposed to be entirely contingent on, and to exist in external linkages. But it seems possible to say that the external relations are a prerequisite for/a cause of thought, without having to move to saying thought subsists in or is fully defined in them.
Nah, he's an Islamic Golden Age thinker: :cool:
Third ask. The pointless bit is continuing a conversation where someone says a text says something that the text does not say.
An Hegelian will read with an Hegelian lens.
Where is what used?
l'chaim.
Your use of "fact" and its place (or absence of place) in the world has nothing to do with Wittgenstein's argument. What cannot be said is found through recognizing our condition:
The dimensions of this condition are found through the structure of our representations. The argument of what can be said or not is the description of that structure. That is where the limits of what can and what cannot be done are laid out. The method is the linking of these "cannots."
With these limits established, the arguments can observe differences between logic and the world we talk about:
From this point, what cannot be explained is distinguished from the explanations given through natural science referred to in 6.4312:
How do you suppose that this passage says anything whatsoever about what cannot be said? How could "recognizing our condition" produce any conclusions about "what cannot be said"?
Quoting Paine
If you take these "cannots" to be an indication of what can or cannot be said, it simply confirms the point I made. Wittgenstein is operating under the false premise that the only things which can be said are true and false propositions. But that is simply not at all representative of "our condition".
Quoting Paine
Those are limits of what can be "pictured" in Wittgenstein's schema. The problem is that it is very obvious that language provides us with a whole lot more creativity than just a basic capacity to draw some simple pictures. Therefore this provides us with no information concerning what can or cannot be said.
Notice also that 5.5561 is blatantly false. Empirical reality is not "limited by the totality of objects". There is another completely distinct category of empirical reality which concerns the activities of objects. And a "picture" does not ever capture the activity. This is the fundamental incompatibility between being and becoming which \I referred to earlier. Pictures, statements of fact, provide us with information about what is, and is not, being and not being, but they do not provide for us any real information about the nature of activity, becoming. So there is much more to "the world" than a sum of elements, there is also the function of the elements. But this does not mean that we cannot talk about activity, becoming, or functions in general.
Quoting Paine
So, we have here, at 6.36, a completely unsound conclusion. The premise which produces "that can clearly not be said" is untrue, as I explain above. And 6.3631 just borrows an unsound principle from Hume. Hume stated this position, the foundation of induction is psychological rather than logical. But Hume's efforts to prove this (inductive) principle logically only serve to demonstrate the falsity of it. If this inductive conclusion of Hume's can be proven through logic, then it proves itself to be false. So the best we can say is that it is an unsound premise.
That passage is the result of what cannot be said. It was arrived at by all the previous steps in the argument. Recognizing our condition is how we approach first principles. You are using that approach when you accuse Wittgenstein of excluding a premise to treat it as a discovered conclusion at the end.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is a complete misunderstanding of the argument. No text even remotely makes the statement that language is being depicted as a basic capacity to draw some simple pictures.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The development of the structure of representation has been built up since the description of thought in the second proposition. The role of "objects" in the argument is not referring to a world including a totality of things as you describe. This ties back to the beginning at 1.1 "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." The argument here is not dealing with what a picture can capture. Nothing in the text suggest that is the case. I am getting the impression that the argument has no existence for you because you have written it off as a fallacy from the beginning.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Wittgenstein is not trying to prove Hume's principle. Wittgenstein's statement is:
"There are natural laws.
But that can clearly not be said: it shows itself."
This goes to express the recognition that the limits of explanation are not the limit of what can be experienced through the use of a method. To that end, the argument is a deeper acceptance of transcendence than what Kant expressed.
Not only does the argument have no existence "for me", but plainly and simply, there is no argument. There is persuasive talk, meant to evoke sympathetic emotions, but no logical argument because the necessary premise required to make the conclusion, is missing. As I said it's simple rhetoric. Nothing you said does anything at all to explain how Wittgenstein arrives at the conclusion that there are things which cannot be said. Recognizing "our condition" does not lead to that conclusion. As I will demonstrate below, a clear understanding of "our condition" will produce the inverse conclusion.
What I've already explained is that the premise "there are things which I cannot say" does not lead to the general inductive conclusion "there are things which cannot be said". This is because each individual is very clearly different in one's capacity to express oneself, so I have not the necessary "sameness" to draw any inductive conclusion about what others can say, based on what I can say. Therefore, that conclusion, "there are things which cannot be said" requires another premise. Obviously, that premise must be a proposition about what human beings can and cannot do with language, in general. And if such a premise is proposed, we must be very critical to ensure that it is a true representation, demonstrating a true understanding of what human beings actually can and cannot do with language.
What is the case, is that I've given you a very clear description and explanation of the unstated premise which I believe is indicated by the text, and how I believe that Wittgenstein has come to the conclusion that there are things which cannot be said. On the other hand, all you have done is made some vague, ambiguous remarks concerning a proposed concept of "our condition", as your claim to how he reaches that conclusion.
Obviously though, the proposed concept of "our condition", is completely unsupported as it is derived from reference to personal experiences which are not shared as "ours". So this proposed concept "our condition" would be an unsound premise if it is meant to support a logical conclusion. Then you claim that your explanation of how Wittgenstein reaches the conclusion he does is better than mine, but all you do to support this claim is to assert that I misunderstand the argument. Well of course I misunderstand "the argument", because there is no argument, just some very strange assertions which are not supported by the premises required to support them if it was an argument. In reality, it is you who misunderstands, because you insist there is "an argument" when all there is is emotional rhetoric.
Quoting Paine
The quoted passage here is completely nonsensical. It makes a statement, "there are natural laws". Then right after saying this he states "that can clearly not be said". How is one to make any sense out of this other than to see it as blatant hypocrisy: "what I just said cannot be said"? It is utterly ridiculous if it is supposed to be presenting something serious, because it shows itself as false, by itself.
Because you are deceived by this hypocrisy, which is a false premise, your interpretation completely reverses the reality of the situation. In reality, language transcends each and every experience of any individual, as not being tied to the material here and now of the individual's condition, one's physical composition and one's circumstances of being. But you are claiming that what is experienced by the individual, as one's material here and now, in one's circumstances of being, transcends the limits of explanation (what can be said).
Clearly what you are arguing is not the reality of the situation, as language is known to have existed and evolved for thousands of years, transcending the experiences of millions of people. What you are arguing is nothing but an unsound conclusion produced from faulty premises concerning the nature of language. This concept (misconception) "the limits of explanation", is the product of a false understanding of the nature of language, created by imposing artificial boundaries on the concept "language", what can and cannot be said. But these proposed boundaries are not consistent with language in its natural use, therefore as a premise, the proposition is false.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For fucks sake. Check what Wittgenstein actually wrote before you go off on one of your rants:
I get you 100%.
But step back for a moment and think some. From a different angle than accustomed or comfortable. From your "natural law", perhaps it could be said. "Things exist". This is a fact. Do you know how a thermonuclear fusion reactor works or how a solar system functions in every excruciating and implicit detail? Likely not. You see it, it must be governed by something, hence its existence, which is the key proposition here, true or not. Simply reporting a fact "that can clearly not be said" may refer to a relative state of affairs and absolute accurate assessment of a given situation not an absolute limitation for all knowledge or context of it. The first man who observed fire, for example. It clearly exists, it clearly has laws, but at the time, for whatever reason, also, simply could not be explained. That's one possibility.
I can relate to your mindset, I feel yours and mine are more similar than they are different. What is natural? Preexisting? Since when? For all time or due to a recent change? The waters seem to follow the moon. This is a natural law. What if the moon did not exist or where to vanish? Then this "natural" law can be changed thus validating the claim that what "exists" may cease to or otherwise change and therefore cannot be pinned down with any degree of absoluteness ie. "cannot (or perhaps should not) be said/declared". No?
I don't see your point. He is exactly saying "that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest", right after he has explicitly said it; "there are laws of nature". If you somehow think that he is not saying what he claims cannot be said (hypocrisy), then please explain yourself.
As far as I can see, he says if there is a law of causality we would say it as "there are laws of nature". Then he says "of course that cannot be said". I ask you, by what principles does he conclude "that cannot be said", especially since he has just said it. The passage makes absolutely no sense.
Quoting Outlander
I don't see how you get from "you see it" to "it must be governed by something". That's a big step which is completely unsupported.
Quoting Outlander
How is this not blatant contradiction to you? How would you be "reporting" something, if you are not saying it?
Quoting Outlander
Why do you assert "it clearly has laws"? Such an assertion requires a definition of what "a law" is, and an explanation of the phenomenon to show that it fits the criteria of "has laws". You are demonstrating exactly the issue I took up with Paine. You have an unstated premise, an understanding or definition of "laws". And you are asserting "fire clearly has laws" according to your personal, subjective understanding of "laws". But this is absolutely meaningless because "laws" could mean whatever you want it to mean. So to support your assertion "fire clearly has laws" you need to say what "law" means, and describe fire in a way so as to fulfill the conditions. Simply asserting "fire clearly has laws" when "laws" is an extremely ambiguous term really provides nothing meaningful.
Quoting Outlander
How is this not blatant contradiction to you? How would you be "reporting" something, if you are not saying it?
But he does not explicitly state that there are laws of nature. He says we could say there are laws of nature if there were a law of causality. He does not say P; P cannot be said. He says If X then we could say P; but we cannot say P.
Context might be helpful:
Does he have things backwards? Do we know cause first, in experience, and then abstract logical necessity from that? Arguably; I would say yes. But the statement in question makes more sense when you know where he is coming from.
I'd argue that the ancients didn't have this problem because reason was seen as inheritly transcendental, or even ecstatic (Plato). So, Plato approached the mind/nature, appearance/reality distinction differently. The transcendental argument in the first sailing of The Republic lies in the unity of the Good vis-á-vis Being and Reason, the Goods role as something that is both absolute and relational. There is not, as Wittgenstein puts it, something "unassailable" that we run up against, but something transcendent and without limit, which, in having no limit, must necessarily include the whole, and thus both sides of mind/nature and appearance/reality (and in this, we get something closer to Hegel's solution to the same issues).
Why can't this be said? Of course he can say the words, he just did, but:
(5.1361)
(6.37)
(6.32)
The form is the method used to describe the world not what is described.
(6.34)
Fair enough. I suppose.
If you observe something, sure, perhaps it could be an illusion. A puppet of a man looks like a man. A mirage of water looks like a body of such. Neither are truly as they seem. But eventually there has to be something, some concrete principle or law other than what would be the only other option "randomly changing nonsense" or some sort of Twilight Zone.
Vision requires functionality of a sensory organ. Think about that. If it is not governed by healthy functionality, it is not to be trusted. Makes sense?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, I recommend taking a step back from your world view and looking at things from a different angle. I see (I think) the A-B logic your suggesting. How could you suggest something if you then say it cannot be pinpointed. What is 0? When you think of it? I leave open the possibility of semantics, as you surely must as well. It's not the same as saying, for example, "the door is open, therefore it is closed". Let's start from there. Surely an absolute object (a physical door) cannot be in two states at once? This invokes Schrodinger's cat. Which reminds me I need to check on mine. But yes, the door can be open or closed for someone wishing to use it for its intended or expected purpose, but surely, there very well might exist other purposes where a closed door is actually an open one and vice-versa. Not trying to be cheap with you here but sometimes the simplest explanations are often the most, not only profound, but encompassing.
This distinction is made in the context of limits to establishing possibility apriori but is also a moment in Wittgenstein's ongoing argument against Russell attempts to establish universal rules about logic that can be recognized independently of their use. The theme of "saying" being necessarily connected to "showing" is expressed in:
Quoting ibid. 5.557
The discomfort Russell expressed with this result would probably have been shared by Kant. In regard to your OP, I think there is a continuity here between the Tractatus and the later Wittgenstein:
With the older and newer expressions placed side by side, Cometti can be seen to be missing the mark when stating:
Quoting Jean-Pierre Cometti, 'Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and the question of expression'
Wittgenstein is observing the same limits of 5.557 in both works. The use of "form of life" is not a replacement of a previous schema.
Interesting.
Quoting Paine
Are you suggesting that the idea of a form of life is an elaboration of the earlier position?
So what's the point? What does that mean, we can only say it if it's true? That's obviously false, as we make false statements quite often. What I am arguing is that he is using an unstated (false) premise, about what we can and cannot do with language, to come to this conclusion that there are things we cannot say.
That makes sense, but in this instance we might better portray Wittgenstein as sublimating Hume rather than Kant.
In any case, your response does not address the issue which is giving me the problem. How does he come to the conclusion that there are things which are inexpressible? I agree with the point made by Wittgenstein in the quote you provide, modern people have replaced God and Fate with "natural laws", such that there exists the modern illusion that natural laws are unassailable, just like God used to be.
Notice, that this is described as an illusion though, that the natural laws are unassailable is an illusion. Illusions can be broken, so this does not support the claim that there are things which cannot be said hidden behind that illusion.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So here's the point I mentioned earlier. This "something transcendent" which you mention, is really language itself, as I've been arguing in this thread. This is evidenced by the nature of mathematics, and the fact that the thing "without limit" is numbers, which constitutes our capacity to measure. This is how we measure something, by using the unlimited capacity afforded to us by language, to encompass the whole. Perhaps one could argue that the use of mathematics is not a form of "saying", but some form of "showing". However, I think that would be just a matter of putting unnecessary restrictions on one's definitions.
From a philosophical point of view I find that the Tractatus is mostly garbage, and that's why I "rant", in Jamal's word. However, within the text Wittgenstein does make some very insightful and interesting remarks concerning the nature of numbers and mathematics in general.
Quoting Outlander
Isn't "concrete principle" an oxymoron? We make assumptions about "substance", and tend to support substance with matter. But matter is what is supposed to support an object or thing, and here we are talking about the laws concerning what a thing can and cannot do. So the issue is, what is the substance which supports these supposed laws.
Quoting Outlander
It's not a matter of "it cannot be pinpointed". It is explicitly expressed by Wittgenstein as "cannot be said". And later he goes on to say "inexpressible", so clearly he is not taking this to be a matter of we cannot say it because it is false.
Quoting Paine
I think this is very good Paine, but you need to go further to capture the inversion I mentioned. "Form of life" is a replacement, for the previous schema, because to understand it requires completing the inversion. The representation presented in the Tractatus, 'the world forces a boundary on what can be said', is fundamentally wrong. Wittgenstein later comes to grips with this mistake, and sees the need to invert the principle. In the Philosophical Investigations he portrays language as fundamentally unrestricted, but it shows itself as restricted by the "forms of life". The important point to grasp, is that the restrictions are self-imposed, for various purposes. I can create a boundary to the concept of "game", for a particular purpose.
Now the inversion is complete. Language is not a part of the world, it transcends the world as having infinite capacity, limitless possibility. However, we restrict it to conform to the world. That produces the illusion toyed with in the Tractatus, that the world forces a limit on what can be said. So it is not the case that the world forces a boundary on what can be said, that is an illusion. What is the case, is that we, as active living agents, produce those boundaries and enforce them in our attempts to deal with the world.
Wittgenstein is a product of his time, and the thing in philosophy at that time was to call all sorts of things "meaningless." I think Putnam makes a good point that it would be more charitable to swap in "useless" in many of these cases. It's not that someone has no idea what you're talking about when you explain Plotinian hypostases or something, it's that there are "bad paradigms," "blind allies," and "poor ways of thinking." But because of the conversations around philosophy of language at the time and around propositions, you get claims about "meaninglessness," and "incoherence."
There are a number of ways to interpret the Tractatus. Some of the contemporary interpretations see it as a rejection of metaphysics. The idea is that there's a way of philosophizing that seems meaningful, but on closer inspection, it's a misuse of language.
Wittgenstein didn't really call "all sorts of things" meaningless. He liked the idea that meaning is found in language use (as opposed to being revealed by dictionaries, for instance.) As much as Wittgenstein talked about rule following, Kripke found in his writings reasons to reject the idea that meaning arises from it. It's fun to think about what paths unfold from there.
Maybe, but it was certainly a very large trend in the enviornment he was writing in. That said, plenty of students of Wittgenstein who bought into the "anti-metaphysical" stance certainly came away with the perception that he had declared, convincingly, that whole areas of inquiry, and their contents, were meaningless.
But if that's a misreading of the Tractus, particularly 7.1, it's a misreading that is partly a product of that same environment, where it wasn't uncommon to deem things meaningless, incoherent, unsayable, etc.
I don't really know what environment you're talking about. I've been focusing more on the evolution of ideas. I'll defer to your knowledge of 20th Century anti-realist environments. :up:
The article on Logical Atomism linked by Banno taught me enough about Wittgenstein's changing view of the former work to be unable to call the later work an elaboration. I don't want to (or could) shrink the analytic discussion that developed after Tractatus into a digestible snack.
But the questions cited in Philosophical Investigations reflect the unwillingness to accept a "nexus of causality" as a given through logic. That is expressed in the Tractatus.
The distinction between the 'saying' and what is 'shown' remains a feature throughout.
The sense of the following is reiterated in Philosophical Investigations:
Quoting ibid. 4.002
The discussion immediately following PI 324 and 325 concerns the relationship between thought and language.
On the basis of these ideas, I question Cometti's statement that the boundaries of "my world" have been transposed into the boundaries encountered in participating in a 'form of life'. The later work retains many of the conditions of the former. The formation of language through human activity has not replaced the vanishing point of a person's horizon:
Quoting Jamal
Do you agree that the a priori pure intuitions of space and time provide the basis for Kant's transcendental idealism? As the conditions required for the possibility of sense experience, these ideas (if they can even be called ideas) are prior to, and therefore transcend all such experience. This I believe is the essence of transcendental idealism.
The question which arises, is where do these transcendental intuitions come from, where are they seated. We cannot look at them as concepts or ideas learned through education, because then they would be posterior to the sense experience which constitutes learning. So they must be innate, perhaps a part of, or arising from the physiological nature of the human being. In any case, the transcendent here is the internal, what comes to the individual from an internal source, the a priori.
On the other hand, I believe Wittgenstein shows the opposing perspective. What transcends the individual, and is the source of all knowledge, is language and the individual's communion with others. Wittgenstein downplays the internal, as mystical, and not a true source of knowledge in any way. So knowledge is a product of the interactions of human beings, and this makes knowledge dependent on language as the means of interaction, such that language is transcendental in the sense of transcending knowledge.
This can be compared to the traditional realist/nominalist debate. Kant holds the realist perspective, and the pure a priori intuitions transcend internally, like eternal ideas, in the way of Plato's theory of recollection. Wittgenstein takes the nominalist approach, claiming that conceptions and knowledge are a feature of language. The problem Wittgenstein comes up against is that he cannot ever account for the capacity to learn, what precedes the learning process in the human being, as required for learning, because it lies outside his terms for "knowledge", as internal to the human being, and prior to knowledge. This give him all sorts of problems for dealing with skepticism, because the base for knowledge is not itself knowledge. "Certainty" is fundamentally an attitude. So he proposes some sort of bottom, a foundation, bedrock, or something like that, which provides the required attitude, and is supposed to ground certainty. But this cannot quell the skeptic.
Quoting Jamal
I think there is no real place for skepticism within the transcendental idealism, and I take this to be one of its flaws. If for example, the intuitions of space and time are the required conditions for sense experience, it makes no sense to doubt them. That would require doubting the entire sense experience, leaving one with nothing reliable. All we can do is doubt that idea, that these are the required conditions, but this is to doubt transcendental idealism, forcing us outside it. Again, it's similar to Platonic realism, we cannot doubt any Ideas if we accept them as eternal truths.
Quoting Jamal
I don't agree with this, because the a priori intuitions are necessarily "inner" as the conditions for the experience of the outer. The concept of a priori pure intuitions gives primacy to the inner, as the conditions required for the possibility of an experience of an outer.
I think Ive mentioned the tension several times. Its important to distinguish between (a) a priori concepts and forms of intuition, and (b) inner/outer experience. Although Kant is obviously stuck in a cognitivist and Cartesian paradigm, he is pushing against it in exactly the way I described. Flipping the priority of inner and outer experience is an important aspect of the CPR, expressed first (in A) in the fourth paralogism, and then (in B) in the Refutation of idealism. The latter especially is a paradigmatic case of Kants transcendental arguments.
(Note that in the following passage, by idealism he means Cartesian doubt as to the existence of the external world)
[quote=B 277]Thus, consequently, inner experience is itself only indirect and is possible only through outer experience.[/quote]
I dont really want to address your other comments except to say that Ive pointed out many times here that a fundamental difference between the two philosophers is that Kant is all about whats in your head whereas late Wittgenstein is all about what people do together. (Also, using transcendent to refer to the transcendental without pointing out the potential confusion is dangerous, and may indicate that youre not clear on Kants different uses.)
I believe the priority is flipped due to a switching from ontology to epistemology. When ontology (metaphysics) is the priority, being and existence, the temporal continuity of sameness in general, is the subject matter. When epistemology is the priority the subject matter turns to activity, change, what things are doing in the world. The necessary condition for an understanding of activity is the external, space to move in, while time is only incidental, as the speed of change in relation to other changes. But the necessary condition for being is time, temporal extension, and in this perspective space becomes incidental. Notice that Kant identified "time" as the internal pure intuition, and "space" as the external pure intuition.
The so-called flip of priority is a function of which of the two is assigned the overall priority, the epistemological approach to the external (space), or the ontological (metaphysical) approach to the internal (time). The "flip" is due to the switch between one prioritizing time, and the other prioritizing space. You'll notice that in relativistic spacetime mathematical representations, time becomes a sort of inversion of space. This is analogous with the distinction between looking inward, and looking outward, and turning around in general. When you turn around what was on your right becomes on your left, and we can assume a similar inversion between looking inward an looking outward.
Despite the fact that we see external objects as existing, and displaying a temporal continuity of sameness, we still cannot derive from observation, the principles required to understand this temporal continuity. And, we do not really need to provide these principles, because we can just take the temporal continuity for granted, as the laws of nature. Newton's first law stipulates the continuity we know as inertia. This, taking it for granted, creates an illusion of necessity, which is not a true logical necessity, as Hume argued.
So when we look inward we see the reality of possibility, through an understanding of freedom of choice, intention, etc., and this effectively annihilates the "necessity" derived from what is taken for granted, as the laws of nature, exposing it as less than a true necessity. This produces a completely different (and what I would call true) understanding of time. In any case the difference is significant. The outward epistemological approach takes temporal continuity as demonstrated to us through sensation, for granted, and this renders what lies beneath that necessity, the substance of it, as something we cannot talk about, it just is, as it is demonstrated to us. To question it would be to deny its necessity. The inward ontological (metaphysical) approach recognizes that to get beyond this wall which is created by the assumed epistemological necessity, we need to employ the principles of possibility which are derived form the internal self.
Kant, I believe, set up the conditions for the division, (the epistemological/phenomenological divide) by distinguishing the internal intuition from the external intuition. Wittgenstein fixated himself on the incompatibility between the two. So Wittgenstein is extremely difficult to understand because all he is doing is pointing to a multitude of little problems which are arising due to this incompatibility.
. scepticismthe principle of a technical and scientific ignorance, which undermines the foundations of all knowledge, in order, if possible, to destroy our belief and confidence therein . (A424/B452)
. Thus, the critique of reason leads at last, naturally and necessarily, to science; and, on the other hand, the dogmatical use of reason without criticism leads to groundless assertions, against which others equally specious can always be set, thus ending unavoidably in scepticism . (B23)
Apparently, there isnt a place for scepticism in transcendental philosophy anyway, insofar as to support our belief or confidence in our knowledge is exactly what the a posteriori aspect of the thesis promises, and, the exposure of flaws in the use of reason without proper critical restrictions on its authority is exactly what the pure a priori aspect demands.
I suspect you might mean as one of the flaws in transcendental philosophy, insofar as the philosophy as a whole is dedicated to defeating scepticism, is the sceptical method .
..This method ( ) of originating a conflict of assertions, ( ) to discover whether the object of the struggle ( ) each side strives in vain to reach, but which would be no gain even when reachedthis procedure, I say, may be termed the sceptical method. ( ) For the sceptical method aims at certainty . (Ibid a)
.which is part-and-parcel of the nature of reason itself. Im just saying I dont think it responsible to fault a predicate of a philosophy that addresses the very thing the human intelligence is prone to doing, and in acknowledging it, guarding against its interference, is possible.
Might be interesting to be informed as to what you think scepticism actually is, and therefrom, where in transcendental philosophy it resides, as a flaw in it.
Solipsism: The I alone. Solus - alone Ipse - self.
The Tractatus begins:
(1)
In order to determine if the world is limited we would have to know all the elementary objects and all their possible combinations. This is not the limit Wittgenstein draws. The limits he draws are to my language and my world (5.6) and to logic and the world (5.61). The limits of my world are the limits of my language and not the limits of logic and the world. We cannot say a priori all that is the case.
(5.634)
The limits of my world are not the limits of the world, the limits, if there is such, of all that is the case and all that will be the case. This distinction is important for understanding what Wittgenstein will say about solipsism.
(5.632)
The subject is the "philosophical self", the "metaphysical subject" (5.641). It is not a part of the world. It is not a fact. That which sees is not something seen. Just as the eye is not in visual space, the subject is not in logical space. The subject that represents is not something represented.
Just as the limits of my world is not coextensive with the world, the limits of my language is not coextensive with language.
(5.62)
I alone, solus ipse, am a limit of the world, of my world, the limit of what I can say and think, and see and experience. This is not a fixed limit, since it is always possible to learn something new, but a limit nonetheless. We cannot step out beyond ourselves and our understanding.
Tractarian solipsism does not lead to skepticism in the modern sense of doubt about the existence of the world or the possibility of language. There is only one statement about skepticism:
(6.51)
This should be understood in light of what follows:
(6.53)
Since what can be said, propositions limited to natural science, have nothing to do with philosophy, the whole of philosophy is nonsense. Philosophical statements say nothing about what is the case. But the failure of philosophy to say, to give meaning, to picture the facts of the world, leaves open and untouched the metaphysical subject. Although propositions about the metaphysical subject are nonsense, this does not mean there is no metaphysical subject, only that the metaphysical subject is not to be found within the world.
Wittgensteins own skepticism has much in common with Ancient and Pyrrhonian skepticism. His philosophy was and remained a practice of inquiry, of investigation. And, along with Pyrrhonism, sought a state of tranquility free from troubling questioning. It is in this sense therapeutic.
It leaves open the question of what can be known and in that way differs from dogmatic skepticism. It also leaves open matters of belief that are not matters that can be decided by natural science, matters of ethics and aesthetics.
What I meant, is that skepticism (best represented by the Socratic and Platonic methods) is itself beneficial. It is good and useful to any philosopher. So a philosophy which excludes skepticism is flawed, for that reason.
Reasonable, to be sure.
On the other side of that methodological coin, I kinda think endorsement of the LNC makes even beneficial scepticism over-rated.
Anyway .I was just curious, so, thanks.
I think the matter is put more forcefully than that:
Quoting ibid. 5.64
That may have a shared purpose with other expressions of doubt. But it is also cojoining what many have struggled to keep apart.
The book begins by declaring it is not an inventory. The act of naming is what is being investigated.
I decided not to get into the question of what he meant by "pure realism".
Your reluctance makes sense. The discourse following the statement goes in many different directions.
As far as I know, Wittgenstein does not abandon the point of view.
I know it's probably a minority view, but, I prefer his earlier stuff. Better yet if he combined some aspects of the former into the latter.
Yep.
I like the bold language of the earlier work too. But I did not notice the moment of abandonment you refer to.
Is there a particular bit of text that brings this thought home to you?
As far as I can recall, I think it was Bryan Magee's book on Schopenhauer, specifically the chapter on Schopenhauer's influence, talk about this.
What does this mean? It is often repeated, but how close does the Tractatus map to the writings of Schopenhauer? A few major points where they seem to differ:
Wittgenstein's claim that logic is transcendental.
Wittgenstein's "pure realism" vs. phenomenal and noumenal distinction.
The role of representation.
Will vs. independence of facts.
It's not a matter of mapping. In the Tractatus his very wording tells us we're in the setting of the WWR (although I have to note that I'm not in a mood to write an essay on that, so if you disagree, that's fine). He's not a disciple of Schopenhauer. He's solving a problem left behind by him.
I don't remember off the top of my head exactly what was Wittgenstein took from Schopenhauer, but it has the flavor.
For instance, the metaphor of reading his book is like climbing a ladder and then kicking it down was taken directly from Schopenhauer who says the same thing.
His last part of the Tractatus, the mystical side, certainly echoes Schopenhauer's views about art, wherein we catch glimpses of a pure idea, but such experiences are very poorly explained in propositional form.
Not how the world is, but that it is, is what's mystical, reminds me of Schopenhauer's claim about the riddle of the world.
As for differences, plenty. Schopenhauer does not deal with the sophisticated logic Wittgenstein dealt with, nor did he particularly care about the nature of language, or reference.
As for representation, I don't know exactly how it fits in, nevertheless, Schopenhauer begins his book by saying "The world is my representation.", Wittgenstein says "The world is everything that is the case." There may be something to that.
As for will, I don't remember Wittgenstein dealing with this in his early work. For more specifics, you might want to see Magee's book.
Although they both used the metaphor of the ladder they are talking about different things.
Quoting Manuel
Schopenhauer traces the sense of wonder back to Plato and Aristotle. Although Wittgenstein claimed he never read Aristotle, he did read Plato. In the Theaetetus (155c-d ) Socrates says that wonder is the origin of philosophy. It is also here (203a) that we find an analysis of elements and their combinations.
Quoting Manuel
This too can be found in Plato - the place of thinking (dianoia) on the divided line, exstasis (divine madness), and eros (ladder of love).
Quoting Manuel
It is here that we can see the difference. What is the case, the facts of the world, are independent of my representation of them.
Added: None of this is meant to imply that Plato is the source of origin of these ideas. Influence is not always direct or linear, and similarities or commonalities are not always the result of influence. The neat and tidy stories found in histories of ideas are often simplistic distortions.
Yeah, the ladder is used in different context, but it's the same metaphor.
I'm not saying that Schopenhauer is being specifically original in many of his ideas, but you find all these aspects together in Schopenhauer.
To be fair, you can find almost everything in Plato though. Whitehead had a point.
Quoting Fooloso4
In a certain sense yes, in another sense, the stated facts about the world amount to extremely little in comparison to "what we cannot talk" about. Is this noumena? Or ethics? Or sensations? The Manifest image?
That's left open for us to explore.
I don't think so. We can know the facts of the world independent of us. He does not make a distinction between phenomena and noumena in the Notebooks or Tractatus.
Quoting Manuel
Ethics and aesthetics are matters of experience. They are outside the bounds of the world and language.
Quoting Manuel
I do not know why he does not say anything about sensations.
I don't recall him making that distinction either. Though I do find his mystical stuff to verge on something close to such a distinction, but my interpretation may be wrong.
Yes. According to the Tractatus ethics and aesthetics don't quite fit seem to fit into what "is the case", but he apparently considers them the most important thing of all, are at least, way up the list.
Quoting Fooloso4
It's a good point and I wonder what he could have said about the topic during his early views.
My main issue here is that he lets go of too much in the Investigations. I don't believe that transcendental philosophy, can be eliminated through proper language use.
Now, if someone wants to say that the distinction between say, a dogmatist and a skeptic is mostly a "verbal" issue, then that's already found in Hume.
Btw, I found the book online, the relevant chapter is 14, starting on p. 310 (which is p.318 in the pdf):
https://www.docdroid.net/ER9hZXg/computer-science-homework-cs206a-pdf#page=318
I think Wittgenstein's view of solipsism differs significantly from that of Schopenhauer. This difference centers on their different conceptions of representation.
Magee ascribes to Wittgenstein the idea of:
Wittgenstein did not say the world is worthless. He says that no value exists in the world. Worthless is a negative value.
Wittgenstein's claim that the rewards and punishment are in the action itself is not the same as saying that the will rewards or punishes itself.
Magee goes on to credit:
Again, it is the exercise of the will, doing good or bad, that changes the world as it is for me. It changes me.
Wittgenstein says in that passage:
The most important difference can be found in what Magee says at the start of making the comparison:
The objectification of the Will is central and fundamental to Schopenhauer, but not to Wittgenstein.
With regard to both representation and will the differences are far more significant than the commonalities.