Category Archives: Philosophical Investigations

Beginning and Ending: TLP

October 6, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, reading, Tractatus, Wittgenstein 2 Comments

(Handout.)

“In my beginning is my end.” –T. S. Eliot

Arthur Schopenhauer, who was an early, deep influence on Wittgenstein, says of his own masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, that it is a book necessary to read twice. His reason: not only does the book’s ending presuppose its beginning, but its beginning presupposes its end. This structure of reciprocal presupposition makes two readings crucial, since the beginning’s dependence on the ending cannot be appreciated until the beginning has been read after the ending.

Something of the same is true of both TLP and PI. I will not just now go into structural detail about the two books–I will do that soon enough–but I will insist that the beginnings of each of the two books presupposes its ending. And radically so: it is not that the ending supplies a premise, say, that is necessary to explicate an early enthymeme, and so the question of the beginning’s truth is undecided until the end. Rather, it is that the ending supplies the point, the point, of the beginning, and so the question of the beginning’s meaning is undecided until the end.  This happens differently in TLP than it does in PI of course.

Consider TLP. On a first reading, the book begins by speaking light into the face of the deep: “The world is everything that is the case.” But it ends with a darkling hush:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Notice that the world figures in both beginning and ending, but more importantly (at least for now) the ending tells us something about the point of the beginning. On a second reading, the beginning that seemed a triumphal metaphysical revelation, a sounding of horns, is revalued as elucidation, hushed. “The world is everything that is the case”: a rung on a ladder, ladder-language, to be surmounted, not proclaimed.

We will of course talk much more about these last lines (6.54-7) of TLP. For now I just want to make clear how the book’s beginning presupposes its end. I harp on this by way of warning you. Do not assume that you know what Wittgenstein is up to as he opens either of the books. TLP opens as if it were metaphysics. PI opens as if it were philosophy of language. But Wittgenstein is no more doing metaphysics in TLP than he is doing the philosophy of language in PI.

Wittgenstein is doing something original in each book, something that is neither metaphysics nor the philosophy of language. And what he is doing in TLP is not the same as what he is doing in PI, despite the fact that what he is doing in each is like what he is doing in the other, and despite the fact that in neither is he doing metaphysics or philosophy of language.

In practical terms, this does not mean that you should be agnostic about what Wittgenstein is saying as he opens the books. You have to try to understand what he is saying as he is saying it; you cannot read the books otherwise. But you should regard any understanding you have as potentially sacrificial, as an “understanding” that may be taken from you later. The path up Mt. Moriah is long. Who knows what, among our possessions as we begin, may be demanded from us by the end of the climb?

How to Read TLP?

October 3, 2011 By in logic, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, poetry, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , Leave a comment

(Class Handout.)

(1) How to read TLP? –One proposition at a time, like a logiholic.
 
(2) TLP is a prose poem of logic–it complicatedly inherits a literary tradition inaugurated by Parmenides.

(3) Wittgenstein (from Culture and Value) around 1930, but apropos of TLP (and, mutatis mutandis, of PI):

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all views of one object seen from different angles.

(4) Wittgenstein considered titling TLP something else–Der Satz, The Proposition.  The book isolates the look, the physiognomy, the sound, the structure of the proposition–a literary and a logical task.  It prioritizes the proposition stylistically and philosophically.

(5) Ronald Gregor Smith wrote of Martin Buber’s I and Thou:

To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at the first reading we may say that I and Thou is indeed a poem.  Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part…will then be illumined by the brightness of another part.  For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.

Just so, exactly just so, of TLP too.  I have been stressing the necessity of allowing the total effect of TLP to work on your mind.

A Note on Talking Lions And Cavell

October 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 11 Comments

A quick thought.  Recall Cavell’s wonderful description of Wittgenstein’s famous line that “if a lion could talk we could not understand him”(II, pg. 223).  He describes the line as “penetrating past assessment ” to “become part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds”.  If it does less than that, he concludes, the line is “philosophically useless”.  Shouldn’t we describe one of Cavell’s most famous lines, a question, in the same way, mutatis mutandis?

Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?

Wittgenstein, Detective

September 29, 2011 By in juvenilia, Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 4 Comments

(Digging around in my files, I found what must have been the first handout I ever constructed on Philosophical Investigations (it is dated 5/7/1992). A section of it follows.)

Understanding the Endless Book

Why is the Investigations so “bloody hard”?  Because the book is both a statement of its method and the result of its method.  To quote Cavell:  “The way this book is written is internal to what it teaches, which means that we cannot understand the manner (call it the method), before we understand its work…The Investigations is written in criticism of itself.”

Before even trying to makes sense of these cabalistic pronouncements, it might be a good idea to ask if Wittgenstein gave his reader any hint how to approach the book.  In the Preface he admits that “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking.  But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”  Well and good.  What help does this give us?  Maybe a little, especially if we link it with another remark.

What I want to teach you isn’t opinions but a method.  In fact, the method is to treat as irrelevant every question of opinion…If I’m wrong then you are right, which is just as good.  As long as we look for the same thing…I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe, but to make you do something you won’t do.

Let me delay comment on this remark long enough to point up its similarity (I think the similarity is instructive, thus the delay) to Kierkegaard’s comments in Section 12  of Purity of Heart.  The talk

…in order to achieve its proper emphasis…must unequivocally demand something of the listener.  It must demand not merely what has previously been requested, that the reader should share in the work with the speaker–now the talk must unconditionally demand the reader’s own decisive activity, and all depends on this.

Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, requires more from his reader than merely close attention to the thought–he requires his reader to think the thought as well.  And part of the reader’s “thinking the thought” is the reader having thoughts of his own about it.

To understand, let’s think of the Investigations in a different way.  Wittgenstein had a well-known love for detective magazines.  Interestingly, the letters which follow a detective’s name are “P. I.”–“private investigator”.  Wittgenstein could well have affixed the same letters after his own name:  “P. I.”–“philosophical investigator”.  In fact, Wittgenstein did, in a way, affix them to his name by leaving behind an instruction manual with the appropriate title–Philosophical Investigations.  (Holmes, remember, delighted in calling himself the world’s only “consulting detective”; Wittgenstein may have been the world’s only “philosophical detective”.)  The Investigations is of course more than just an instruction manual, it is also a case book.  When we read it we are watching the detective.  But what we watch is not the completion of cases; nothing is stamped “solved”.  Instead we are given a glimpse into working cases.  We are made privy to conversations with informants, allowed to see mistaken hunches, provided portraits of suspicious characters.  We see reminders, clues not-yet-understood, records of previous crimes.  Interspersed (like voice-overs) are comments on the investigator’s business, how it works, what to do, what not to do, comments on methods that succeed and methods that fail, notes on the variety of temptations that confront the investigator and what happens when he yields to them.  We are taken into confidence, confessed to, told secrets.  In short, we are left with a mountain of pieces, but the puzzles–mysteries, crimes–remain unsolved.  To profit from the book, we must practice the investigator’s technique on the book itself.  We cannot merely read it, memorize it, parrot the book itself.  We must master it.  And mastery requires intense and continuous effort, not only learning the lessons but applying them–on the mean streets, as it were…

Quod Erat Faciendum: Philosophical Investigations and Confessions

September 19, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 3 Comments

I am currently at work on a new essay on Resolute Readings of TLP.  I am coming at the topic sideways, as it were, beginning with a debate over PI between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle.

With that on my mind, I had a brief but useful conversation with my friends Reshef and Dafi Agam-Segal.  We were talking about PI and about Wittgenstein’s comment to his students that he did not want to make them believe anything they did not believe, but rather to do something they would not do.  It occurred to me then that perhaps a useful way of understanding Wittgenstein’s work, PI included, would be to take it to be punctuated by QEFs (quod erat faciendum:  which was to have been done) rather than by QEDs.

Since I have mentioned Augustine here recently, I will note that I think this distinction applies, albeit somewhat differently, to Confessions too.  Augustine said of Cicero’s Hortensius that it “changed his way of feeling”.  That phrase describes the work of Confessions–to change the reader’s way of feeling, to encourage Christian inwardness to flower:  “Be it granted, be it fulfilled, be it opened.”

Bringing Philosophy Peace?

September 17, 2011 By in availability/disposability, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Self-knowledge, virtue and vice, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, peace.  When we encounter this aim in PI, it is easy to believe that what he wants to bring philosophy, the philosopher-in-us-all, is knowledge.  And of course there is something right about that, especially if we modulate the claim to one about self-knowledge.  (After all, Wittgenstein cares particularly about the philosophical questions that bring philosophy itself into question, questions that bring the philosopher-in-us-all himself into question.)  Crucially, however, self-ignorance involves alienation from ourselves more than it involves any failure of introspective acuity.  And so acquiring the peace of self-knowledge is less learning something about ourselves than it is acknowledging something about ourselves.  (Self-knowledge is typically bitter for good reason.)

So the peace Wittgenstein wants to bring is the peace of self-knowledge; we might even call it the peace of faith.  But faith in what?

Before answering, I want to help myself to an idea of Marcel’s.  Marcel talks about faith, about fundamentally pledging oneself, as reaching so deeply into the person pledged that it affects not only what the person has, but who the person is.  His term for this, the idea I want, is existential index.  When person’s belief has an existential index, ‘(e)’, the belief absorbs fully the powers of the person’s being.  For Marcel, beliefs(e) are incompatible with pretension:  A person who believes(e) is humbled by that in which he believes(e).

And now I want to say something that I know sounds paradoxical.  Wittgenstein wants to bring the philosopher-in-us-all to belief(e) in himself, so that he is no longer tormented by questions that bring himself into question.  But this will be a belief(e) in himself–a rallying to himself, to borrow another idea of Marcel’s–that involves no pretension.  In fact, it will be a form of humility, a form of true love of himself.  He will have faith in himself, but a faith that acknowledges his own nothingness.  This is a faith that allows the philosopher to be filled with the spirit of truth (although not, notice, with the truth); it is a faith that allows him to be light seeking for light.  Such humility does not protect the philosopher-in-us-all against error.  It does protect him against depending on himself.

When the philosopher-in-us-all is tormented by questions that bring himself into question, his has fallen prey to self-dependence.  He has lost his sense of his own thinking as a creative receptivity, a dependent initiative.  He believes he has to be responsible for himself, that he has to support every response to a question by responding to questions about that question.  To believe that is to fall into the predicament of being unable to make philosophical problems disappear.  Pretension on the part of the philosopher-in-us-all guarantees the appearance of the philosophical problems.  Pretension is a lack of faith, the surety of peacelessness.

(Probably a bad idea to try to write about such things when it is so late and I am so tired.)

The Form of a Philosophical Problem

September 15, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , 2 Comments

Wittgenstein comments that a philosophical problem has the form:  “I don’t know my way about.”  –So much in so little.

But I want now only to say this.  To feel the force of Wittgenstein’s comment, keep in mind that Wittgenstein is not lost in terra incognita; he is no stranger in a strange land.  He is lost at home.  He has to find himself, but to find himself where he is, where he has always been.  Everything around him is so alien and so familiar, so exotic and so everyday.  He is gone but he never left.

Sometimes the hallway to my living room becomes non-negotiable.  A philosophical problem has the form of homesickness in my easy chair.

Topsy-Turvy Frege

September 4, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus Tags: , , , 3 Comments

Davidson’s Truth and Predication–at least parts of it–have been in front of me this weekend.  Good stuff, although I am out of sympathy with many of the details of the stories he tells, both about the history of the problem of predication and about the solution of the problem.

But I guess my fundamental disagreement with Davidson centers on the reality of the problematic he investigates.  For Davidson, the unity of the proposition must be explained; explaining it requires solving the problem of predication.  Seeing things this way, when Davidson turns to Frege he understands objects and concepts as constituents of propositions, constituents fashioned, as it were, so as to constitute a propositional unity.  Predictably, Davidson is most fascinated with concepts, since they are–even more than objects–fearfully and wonderfully made:  they are incomplete.   Objects of course are complete–as are propositions (although in a different sense (Frege got confused about this, unfortunately)).  The beginning of wisdom in reading Frege is recognizing the varieties of incompleteness and completeness he thematizes in his thinking–but that is a topic for another post.  What I want to consider here is the way that Davidson turns Frege upside-down.  I believe Frege understands objects and concepts as abstractions from propositions, not constituents of propositions.  Objects and concepts are, shifting descriptions, made from propositions, not made for them.  The proposition, the propositional unity, is prior to objects and concepts.  There is no explaining the unity; and there is no problem of predication to solve.  Davidson’s problematic is unreal.

Of course there is a problematic looming here, but it is more metaphilosophical than metaphysical.  Namely, how do we philosophize without this problem?  What would it be to philosophize constrained by the unity of propositions, recognizing that ultimately our only grip on anything as an object of thought is as what we are thinking instead of as what we are thinking about?  Or, to put this in a more Fregean way, what would it be to philosophize constrained by The Context Principle–and its two companion Principles from Foundations?  Frege’s Principles, as I believe (and have argued elsewhere), are the methodological counterpart to the unity of the proposition.  Taken seriously–kept is Frege’s word–the Principles reorient philosophy itself.  Wittgenstein’s work, both in TLP and in PI, strives to keep Frege’s Principles.  Arguably, Davidson senses this.  Although he shies away from Wittgenstein (saying a bit about why in a long footnote) he does at one point talk of a “deep truth” in a “Wittgensteinian thought”–but he seems unable to see how really to entertain the thought.  That is unsurprising, since the thought impugns the problematic that provides the very structure of Davidson’s thinking.

Easy Pieces? (Zettel 447)

August 31, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , , Leave a comment

(Another past class handout.)

In Zettel Wittgenstein writes:

Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite) longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips. This inversion in our conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it may well bedone, if one means a cross-strip. –But in that case we never get to the end of our work! –Of course not, for it has no end. (447)

This is a paragraph worth frequenting. It is a fine example of the elasticity of Wittgenstein’s philosophical imagination, and of course it’s more than just that. Wittgenstein here disjoins two ways of looking at philosophy, what I will call the longitudinal view and the latitudinal view. On the longitudinal view, the one Wittgenstein believes common, philosophy is divided into (a finite number of) longitudinal strips–each strip a philosophical problem–and each strip itself infinitely long. On the latitudinal view, the one Wittgenstein recommends, philosophy is divided into (an infinite set of) latitudinal strips, each strip only finitely long. Now, on each view, the work of philosophy never ends, but its unendingness is presented under very different aspects. Latitudinally, we can solve individual philosophical problems: they are finite. But we never finish with philosophy, since there are an infinite number of problems.  Longitudinally, we cannot solve individual problems: they are infinite. And we of course then never finish with philosophy either, but only because we never finish with any of its problems. –This last predicament disquiets us. We never finish with any problem and so we never finish with philosophy. We never get nowhere. (You pass no mile markers on The Road to Nowhere, since you are never any closer to nor any further away from your destination.)  On the latitudinal view, there are an infinite number of philosophical problems. That might strike you as showing that what is meant by ‘problem’ on the view cannot be quite the same as what is meant by ‘problem’ on the longitudinal view. In fact, the idea that there are an infinite number of philosophical problems may itself worry you. Yes, such an idea makes philosophical piecework possible, but only a the expense of making mysterious the idea of a philosophical problem. Are there infinitely many? Could there be?

Stepping beyond what is actually said in 447, I consider Wittgenstein to count philosophical problems in person-sensitive ways. E.g., there is Kelly’s skeptical problem, Brian’s, Betrand’s, and so on. The Skeptical Problem is the determinable for all of these determinates, roughly as red is the determinable for cardinal, scarlet, candy-apple, and so on. To engage with skepticism is to engage with Kelly or Brian or Bertrand or whomever, qua skeptic. –At any rate, if we count philosophical problems in person-sensitive ways, it becomes easier to see how there might be infinitely many, particularly if we also are willing to count problems in person-(at-a-time)-sensitive ways, as I suspect we ultimately must be. I can solve, say, Brian’s (lunchtime on Tuesday the 11th) skeptical problem. That is to have achieved something in philosophy. There are an infinite number of such tasks to perform; the philosopher will never go out of business. But his or her business is a cheek by jowl struggle with the dynamics of the actual thinking of an actual person, and not distanced, person-insensitive reflection on the geometry of thought.

Essence and Grammar (and Definition)

August 20, 2011 By in logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 7 Comments

Reshef Agam-Segal has asked about the difference between Socrates’ desire for a definition and Wittgenstein’s for grammar.  The two desires meet or can seem to meet in the word ‘essence’.  Socrates wants to know, say, the essence of piety.  Wittgenstein wants to know the grammar of piety (“theology as grammar”); and, according to Wittgenstein, “essence is expressed by grammar”.  So each chases essence.

What Socrates chases is familiar enough (at least as standardly interpreted).  What Wittgenstein chases is not so familiar. To succeed in construing the grammar of piety would be to express the essence of piety.  The grammar of piety would be construed in an a series of grammatical remarks. But the series of grammatical remarks does not tell us the essence of piety.  Rather, the series of remarks expresses the essence of piety.  ‘Express’ in “essence is expressed by grammar” works intransitively.  That is, what grammar expresses is not something that we can tell, can say. If you like, what grammar expresses is inexpressible. (Moving, in that sentence, from the intransitive to transitive.)

We are here at one of those anti-type spots in PI–of which, of course, TLP contains the type.  We are in the ambit of showing/saying, as indeed in Wittgenstein we always already are.  But, as my typological talk is meant to suggest, what we have in PI is something foreshadowed in TLP; but what we have in PI is not what we have in TLP.  Getting the differences straight is more than I can do; I will though do what I can.  Perhaps the best place to start is with a glaring absence in PI:  the absence of the symbolism.  The symbolism glyphs the pages of TLP.  It wards those pages.  Without a real, active and sympathetic inwardness with the symbolism, TLP is a closed book.  (Anyone who has attempted to teach the book to undergraduates will know this.)  But the symbolism is almost nowhere to be seen in PI.  What does that mean?  And what does it mean for showing/saying in PI?  [Pause here to light pipe.]

One thing it means, I reckon, is that showing or expressing is now something done by means of ordinary sentences, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  The crucial issue in PI is the issue of our relationship to those sentences, to those phenomena.  A sentence is a grammatical remark not in and of itself–noumenally, as it were–but rather because of our orientation upon it.  The possibility of the orientation that makes a sentence a grammatical remark, and so one that expresses or contributes to the expression of essence, results from our being in the grip of a philosophical problem.  The problems provide the light, we might say, in which a sentence can shine forth as grammatical, as essence-expression. Without the problem, the sentence is, well, just a sentence.  Philosophy is a battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language.  But the language is only a weapon in that battle–a weapon of peace, ultimately, to be sure–if we orient on it in a way made possible by a philosophical problem.

This makes philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s way both easier and harder.  It is easier in that we need no special magical weapon, no Excalibur, no symbolism, to do what needs doing in philosophy.  It is harder because the weapons we have can always appear to be no weapons at all, to be valueless in the fight.  (“So?  That’s just more words.”)  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem makes the necessary orientation possible, but it does not make it automatic.  Being in the grip of a philosophical problem can also make the necessary orientation look only like so much rigmarole, like a willful way of losing track of what really matters in responding to the problem. Losing our way among words can lead us further afield, but it can also allow words to lead us home in a way that they ordinarily do not.  “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”  [Pipe dies; re-light.]

Having written all this, I am aware that I have still not answered Reshef’s question.  But I hope this opens the way to answering his question.  And I hope to get back to his question again soon.  (Thanks to D. for a recent useful conversation about these topics.)