The Conflicts of Modernity in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s «Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus» 9783631667804, 9783653064445, 3631667809

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Problem of Ontology in the Tractatus
1.1 Anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus
1.1.1 Anti-metaphysical interpretation and the tasks of philosophy
1.1.2 The context principle in the Tractatus
1.1.3 In defence of semantic atomism
1.2 The Argument for Substance
1.2.1 The argument from the false judgement, or thinking what is not
1.2.2 The argument from the determinateness of sense
1.2.3 Zalabardo’s objections
Summary
Chapter 2. The Simple Objects of the Tractatus
2.1 Phenomenalistic interpretation of the simples
2.1.1 The question of Russell’s influence on the Tractatus
2.1.2 Arguments in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation
2.1.3 Counterarguments
2.2 Materialistic interpretation of the simples
2.2.1 Simple objects as material points, point-masses or physical atoms
2.2.2 Arguments in favour of the materialistic interpretation
2.2.3 Advantages of the materialistic interpretation
2.2.4 Counterarguments
2.3 Resolute interpretation of the Tractatus
2.3.1 The principles of the resolute interpretation
2.3.2 The notion of philosophy in the Tractatus
Summary
Chapter 3. Wittgenstein’s Theory of Judgement
3.1 The context of Wittgenstein’s theory
3.1.1 Russell’s theory of judgement
3.1.2 The notion of the empirical self
3.2 Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s views on judgement
3.3 The Tractatus 5.54-5.5422
3.3.1 Conceptual clarifications
3.3.2 The form of “A believes that p” according to Wittgenstein
3.3.3 Consequences of Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement
3.3.4 The repudiation of the existence of the complex soul
(TLP 5.5421)
3.4 Other interpretations of TLP 5.54-5.5422
3.4.1 Anscombe: TLP 5.54-5.5422 and the extensionality principle
3.4.2 Hacker: Hume’s influence on Wittgenstein’s theory
3.4.3 Jacquette: the distinguishability problem
Summary
Chapter 4. The Transcendental Self
4.1 The transcendental philosophy of Schopenhauer
4.1.1 Schopenhauer and the notion of the transcendental self
4.1.2 Schopenhauer and the safeguarding of values
4.2 The willing subject
4.2.1 E xamples of transcendental interpretations referring to
Wittgenstein’s ethics
4.2.2 Counterarguments
4.3 Solipsistic theses of the Tractatus
4.3.1 The transcendental self as the owner of the phenomenal world
4.3.2 The transcendental self as the linguistic soul
4.3.3 Arguments in favour of Tractarian transcendental solipsism
4.4 Tractarian understanding of death
4.5 General remarks about the transcendental interpretation
4.5.1 Is the nonsense of solipsism illuminating?
4.5.2 Transcendental reasoning
Summary
Chapter 5. E thics in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings
5.1 The nonsense of ethics in the eyes of early Wittgenstein
5.1.1 The absoluteness of moral values
5.1.2 The sense of proposition and the idea of objectivity
5.2 Early Wittgenstein’s subjectivism
5.2.1 Ethical sentences as expressions of attitudes
5.2.2 Ethical subjectivism and Tractarian silence
5.2.3 Wittgenstein’s subjectivism and early Russell’s emotivism
5.3 Solipsistic theses of the Tractatus under a subjectivist reading
Summary
Final Thoughts. The Defence of Human Values by early Wittgenstein
Bibliography

Citation preview

Marek Dobrzeniecki is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Warsaw and at the Centre for Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw.

EST 12_266780_Dobrzeniecki_AM_A5HCk PLE.indd 1

M. Dobrzeniecki · The Conflicts of Modernity in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The author offers a new look at one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He presents the Tractatus as expressing the intellectual anxieties of its modernist epoch. The most intriguing but usually unanswered question concerning the Tractatus is why Wittgenstein had to think that only propositions of natural science have meaning. The author reviews the most popular interpretations of the Tractatus and comes to the conclusion that the early Wittgenstein was an ethical subjectivist. With this insight, he solves the tension between Tractarian theses that influenced neopositivism and its mystical part.

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Marek Dobrzeniecki

The Conflicts of Modernity in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus European Studies in T heolog y, Philosophy and Histor y of Relig ions Edited by Bartosz Adamczewski

18.12.15 KW 51 16:21

The Conflicts of Modernity in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

EUROPEAN STUDIES IN THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY OF RELIGIONS Edited by Bartosz Adamczewski

VOL. 12

Marek Dobrzeniecki

The Conflicts of Modernity in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dobrzeniecki, Marek, 1980- author. Title: The conflicts of modernity in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus logicophilosophicus / Marek Dobrzeniecki. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Peter Lang, 2016. | Series: European studies in theology, philosophy, and history of religions, ISSN 2192-1857; Vol. 12 Identifiers: LCCN 2015050755 | ISBN 9783631667804 Subjects: LCSH: Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. Tractatus logicophilosophicus. Classification: LCC B3376.W563 T73253 2016 | DDC 192–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050755 This publication was financially supported by the Pontifical Faculty of Theology in Warsaw. ISSN 2192-1857 ISBN 978-3-631-66780-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-06444-5 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-06444-5 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2016 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................................9 Chapter 1.  The Problem of Ontology in the Tractatus............................21 1.1 Anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus.......................................22 1.1.1 Anti-metaphysical interpretation and the tasks of philosophy..............................................................................................22 1.1.2 The context principle in the Tractatus................................................26 1.1.3 In defence of semantic atomism..........................................................31 1.2 The Argument for Substance...........................................................................49 1.2.1 The argument from the false judgement or thinking what is not..............................................................................................52 1.2.2 The argument from the determinateness of sense............................54 1.2.3 Zalabardo’s objections...........................................................................58 Summary......................................................................................................................67

Chapter 2.  The Simple Objects of the Tractatus.........................................71 2.1 Phenomenalistic interpretation of the simples.............................................73 2.1.1 The question of Russell’s influence on the Tractatus.........................74 2.1.2 Arguments in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation.........................................................................................77 2.1.3 Counterarguments................................................................................82 2.2 Materialistic interpretation of the simples.....................................................88 2.2.1 Simple objects as material points, point-masses or physical atoms........................................................................................90 2.2.2 Arguments in favour of the materialistic interpretation....................95 2.2.3 Advantages of the materialistic interpretation................................. 107 2.2.4 Counterarguments............................................................................... 110 2.3 Resolute interpretation of the Tractatus...................................................... 113 2.3.1 The principles of the resolute interpretation................................... 114 5

2.3.2 The notion of philosophy in the Tractatus...................................... 118 Summary................................................................................................................... 125

Chapter 3.  Wittgenstein’s Theory of Judgement..................................... 129 3.1 The context of Wittgenstein’s theory........................................................... 133 3.1.1 Russell’s theory of judgement............................................................ 134 3.1.2 The notion of the empirical self........................................................ 139 3.2 Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s views on judgement.......................... 143 3.3 The Tractatus 5.54-5.5422............................................................................. 149 3.3.1 Conceptual clarifications................................................................... 149 3.3.2 The form of “A believes that p” according to Wittgenstein........... 151 3.3.3 Consequences of Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement................... 154 3.3.4 The repudiation of the existence of the complex soul (TLP 5.5421)....................................................................................... 156 3.4 Other interpretations of TLP 5.54-5.5422.................................................. 159 3.4.1 Anscombe: TLP 5.54-5.5422 and the extensionality principle..... 160 3.4.2 Hacker: Hume’s influence on Wittgenstein’s theory...................... 162 3.4.3 Jacquette: the distinguishability problem........................................ 165 Summary................................................................................................................... 167 Chapter 4.  The Transcendental Self...................................................................... 171 4.1 The transcendental philosophy of Schopenhauer..................................... 172 4.1.1 Schopenhauer and the notion of the transcendental self.............. 172 4.1.2 Schopenhauer and the safeguarding of values................................ 178 4.2 The willing subject......................................................................................... 181 4.2.1 Examples of transcendental interpretations referring to Wittgenstein’s ethics........................................................................... 182 4.2.2 Counterarguments............................................................................. 184 4.3 Solipsistic theses of the Tractatus................................................................. 192 4.3.1 The transcendental self as the owner of the phenomenal world............................................................................. 193 4.3.2 The transcendental self as the linguistic soul.................................. 196 6

4.3.3 Arguments in favour of Tractarian transcendental solipsism...... 200 4.4 Tractarian understanding of death.............................................................. 210 4.5 General remarks about the transcendental interpretation....................... 212 4.5.1 Is the nonsense of solipsism illuminating?...................................... 213 4.5.2 Transcendental reasoning................................................................. 217 Summary................................................................................................................... 219

Chapter 5.  Ethics in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings................................ 221 5.1 The nonsense of ethics in the eyes of early Wittgenstein.......................... 224 5.1.1 The absoluteness of moral values..................................................... 225 5.1.2 The sense of proposition and the idea of objectivity..................... 229 5.2 Early Wittgenstein’s subjectivism................................................................. 233 5.2.1 Ethical sentences as expressions of attitudes................................... 233 5.2.2 Ethical subjectivism and Tractarian silence.................................... 238 5.2.3 Wittgenstein’s subjectivism and early Russell’s emotivism........... 241 5.3 Solipsistic theses of the Tractatus under a subjectivist reading............... 246 Summary................................................................................................................... 251

Final Thoughts. The Defence of Human Values by early Wittgenstein................................................................................................ 253 Bibliography........................................................................................................... 263

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Introduction One of the main questions in the following dissertation reads as follows: What reasons did Wittgenstein have to think that only propositions of natural science have meaning? The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences) (TLP 4.11)1.

One could expect such a statement from an admirer of natural science (of its progress, results, clarity or influence on everyday life). One could also expect this statement to be the beginning of some philosophical programme in which the progress of all other branches of culture hinges on a scientific conception of the world. Yet the Tractatus has nothing to do with these kinds of views. In a letter to his publisher, Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein informed him that his work consisted of two parts: the written part – the text that the reader has before his or her eyes, and the unwritten part – topics about which Wittgenstein was intentionally silent2. To Bertrand Russell, who believed that one should implement scientific methods into the practice of philosophy3, he wrote: “How different our ideas are, for example, of the value of a scientific work”4. He was explaining to the first English translator of the Tractatus, Charles Kay Ogden, with respect to thesis TLP 6.5 (“The riddle does not exist”), which could be interpreted straightforwardly as proof of Tractarian positivism, that he did not wish “anything ridiculous or profane or frivolous in the word when used in the connection ‘riddle of life’ etc.”5. Wittgenstein was 1 All English quotations from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (later: the Tractatus) are from the Pears and McGuinness translation (Revised edition from 1974). 2 “My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous of drawing those limits; (…) I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it” (cited in: ProtoTractatus, p. 16). Engelmann, on the other hand, confirms that it was the ethical part which was of greater importance to Wittgenstein than the logical theory: “It could be said with greater justice that Wittgenstein drew certain logical conclusions from his fundamental mystical attitude to life and the world” (Engelmann 1967, p. 97). 3 “It is not results, but methods, that can be transferred with profit from the sphere of the special sciences to the sphere of philosophy” (Russell 1914b, p. 57). 4 Letters, p. 53. 5 Wittgenstein 1973, p. 36.

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afraid that his views would be understood as merely negating the meaningfulness of philosophy. According to Drury’s testimony, he once said: “Don’t think I despise metaphysics or ridicule it. On the contrary, I regard the great metaphysical writings of the past as among the noblest productions of human mind”6 and, according to Carnap’s recollection, the result of the Tractatus, i.e. the thesis that metaphysical and ethical utterances are senseless, was “extremely painful for him emotionally, as if he were compelled to admit a weakness in a beloved person”7. Therefore, there is clearly tension in the Tractatus between theses that could as well have been expressed by the proponents of neo-positivism or scientism8 and its mystical part, where Wittgenstein writes, among others, that “there are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP 6.522)9. One of the explanations for such tension comes from Wittgenstein’s biography. If it was not for his war experiences, the Tractatus would contain only considerations on logic and language. As Ray Monk writes: The Austrian Eleventh Army, to which Wittgenstein’s regiment was attached, faced [in the June of 1916] the brunt of the attack and suffered enormous casualties. It was at precisely this time that the nature of Wittgenstein’s work changed (Monk 1991, p. 140).

It was in the same month, on 11 June 1916, when Wittgenstein noted in his Notebooks the famous entry which begins with the question: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” (NB 11.6.16. p. 72). The mystical-ethical part of the Tractatus (TLP 6.4–7) is strictly connected with the religious conversion Wittgenstein experienced during World War I. Distressed and depressed by the evil

6 Drury 1960/1967, p. 68. 7 Carnap 1964/1967, p. 36. 8 Apart from TLP 4.11, one can mention in this context thesis TLP 6.53: “The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one”. 9 “Anyone who has read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ is struck, indeed is usually fascinated, by two apparently contradictory aspects of it. On the one hand, it seems to confine all sensible talk to the propositions of natural science, and even puts the propositions of logic into the category of senseless; on the other hand it itself embraces extremely non-scientific positions” (McGuinness 2002, p. 55).

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and malicious company of his fellow soldiers and faced with the danger of losing his life, he started seriously considering problems which up to that point he had thought to be “philosophical” in the worst possible meaning of the word. The reference here to Wittgenstein’s biography, however, does not provide a suggestion as to what the correct interpretation is of the solipsistic (TLP 5.6-5.641) or the ethical theses of the Tractatus. In order to address the aforementioned issues one has to put the Tractatus in a broader context of the history of philosophy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the philosophers of that time there prevailed convictions which I will call in this dissertation ‘modernist’. The most important feature of modernist thinking is granting science the primary role in the task of describing reality10. Impressed by new physical achievements, such as Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism (1873), philosophers and scientists began to believe in the possibility of a unitary physical description of the world – one of such projects was taken up by Heinrich Hertz in his Principles of Mechanics (1894). Moreover, Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859) showed that we can explain events of the biological world exclusively in terms of causes and effects without mentioning the notion of an aim, which was always tinged with theological associations. Darwin’s theory explained the rise of the human species in a fully naturalistic way, therefore the explanation for the existence of the human being (with all of its magnificent mental abilities) was done without reference to the special act of God’s creation11. In effect, some philosophers believed that the progress of science would make philosophical and theological doctrines, such as the philosophical doctrine of the immortal soul or the theological doctrine of the creation of the world, useless. Summing up, the first feature of the modernist way of thinking is ascribing to science (and especially natural science) the primary role in searching for the truth about the world. On the other hand, it was exactly this “rise of science” that resulted in anxiety that the scientific worldview might flatten the complexity and sophistication of our perception of the world. Many philosophers, who came from different traditions, 10 “That we are ‘scientific’ in our attitudes and live in a scientific age is wildly held to be both a fact and a ground for rejoicing, an achievement to be celebrated and carried further” (Midgley 1992, p. 3). 11 “Darwin and other biologists, particularly Thomas Henry Huxley, seemed to have established that the existence of human beings had a naturalistic explanation and required no special creation. Among physiologists the dominant opinion, especially stemming from Germany, was equally uncompromising. The processes of life were at root ‘mechanical’ and required no special life force to explain them” (Harré 2008, p. 23–24).

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began to wonder: “What is the place for religion and ethics in a worldview dominated by scientific thinking?” and “How can such notions as the notion of a free will, the notion of the self or the notion of a moral value be accommodated in the scientific worldview?”12. I see, after Charles Taylor, posing these kinds of questions as the second feature of modernism13. My main interpretational hypothesis of the Tractatus assumes that in this book both of these characteristics of modernism are present14. In this sense the Tractatus shared the intellectual interests and anxieties of its epoch. If I am right then the main problem of the Tractatus reads as follows: “How can one safeguard the world of human values from the claims of science?”. I shall call up this question later in my work on the fundamental problem of the Tractatus. The aforementioned tension between some of its formulations will then find an explanation in the fact that the Tractatus is an example of the modernist way of thinking. On the one hand, it acknowledges the progress and success of natural science at the beginning of the 20th century and, on the other, it tries to find 12 In this context one can invoke the example of such different thinkers as the idealist Josiah Royce (“Like other Anglo-American idealists, Royce attempted to find a place for religion in a world of scientific facts” (Allard 2008, p. 57)), and the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (“Peirce saw positivists as committed to a flawed conception of reality which led inevitably to scepticism; and he shared James’s hope for an empirically grounded philosophy which would find room for values and religious belief ” (Hookway 2008, p. 77)). 13 “All this can help explain the particular form of the modernist turn to interiority. Thinkers in the early twentieth century were exercised by a problem which is still posed today: What is the place of Good, or the True, or the Beautiful, in a world entirely determined mechanistically?” (Taylor 1989, p. 459). 14 One can find in the literature associations of early writings of Wittgenstein with modernism, however, in a different meaning of this term. For instance, Janik writes: “Wittgenstein’s effort to get straight about the limits of thought and language in all of the stages of his development and thus to be fair to science, religion, and art account for his place of honour among critical modernists” (Janik 2001, p. X), but he mentions as critical modernists such thinkers as Kraus, Loos, Trakl or Weininger, who fought with the Wiener Moderne – the cultural movement which “attached itself to an irrationalist cult of subjective experience that sought thrill in everything ‘new’, especially in what was obscure and ambiguous. Thus it was in most respects closer to our post-modernism than any classical form of modernism except symbolism” (Janik 2001, p. 208). Michael Fischer (Fischer 1993) also labels Wittgenstein as a modernist philosopher, but his aim is to point out an analogy between his philosophy and modern art. Just as listeners of modern music wonder if it is music at all, the readers of Wittgenstein either revere his work or entirely reject it. According to Fischer, the uncertain reception of Wittgenstein’s writings brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s anxiety about the inheritability of culture.

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a way to express the problem of the meaning of life and of moral values in a world governed by the laws of science. The fundamental problem of the Tractatus in its present formulation needs clarification. First, what do I mean by the world of human values? Roughly speaking, it is the world described from the anthropocentric perspective15. Human values, in this sense, are those objects which occur only in the anthropocentric description of the world. Bertrand Russell, in On Scientific Method in Philosophy, indicated that, for instance, if one describes the development of species from protozoa through primates to human beings as progress, then one takes exactly the anthropocentric perspective16. This is because from a strictly objective standpoint there is no such thing as progress in the development of species, i.e. there are no better and worse species. This means that the concept of progress refers to a human value, and a description of the world which contains this notion is a description from the anthropocentric point of view. In the narrow sense, human values are those which address a group of issues which Wittgenstein named “the problems of life” in the Tractatus17. In this meaning one can include moral and aesthetic values to the human values, as well as values that make life worth living. The next issue to clarify is why these values need to be defended from the claims of science? By answering this question I shall point to the fact that the natural sciences, as an effort to describe the world objectively, sub specie aeterni, contain no concepts which are necessarily connected with the anthropocentric perspective. This fact, combined with the acceptance of the authority of science as the only source of truth about the world, posed a problem for some thinkers. The mechanical worldview which emerges from the convictions that: • the scientific description of the world contains ultimately only concepts of material particles, and • the scientific description of the world is complete; there is no aspect of reality which cannot be captured by science 15 I am adopting here Bernard Williams’ point of view (Williams 2002), according to which the relation between “the human” and “the anthropocentric” perspective is such that “the human” perspective always assumes “the anthropocentric” one. 16 “Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance, and we can have no security that the impartial outsider would agree with the philosopher’s self-complacent assumption” (Russell 1914b, p. 62). 17 “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched” (TLP 6.52).

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seemed to be too depressing. For instance, in the book which contributed the most to Wittgenstein’s religious conversion18, The Gospel in Brief, Leo Tolstoy wrote: When fifty years old, having questioned myself, and having questioned the reputed philosophers whom I knew, as to what I am, and as to the purport of my life, and after getting the reply that I was a fortuitous concatenation of atoms, and that my life was void of purport, and that life itself is evil, I became desperate, and wished to put an end to my life (Tolstoy 1896, p. 8).

In ethics we describe human beings as persons who possess dignity and rights. Physics, on the other hand, describes human beings as a “concatenation of atoms”. This view on the human being as a complex of its material elements, “unimportant agents in an aimless and senseless universe that is ruled by blind natural forces”19, amounts to a reification of persons, treating them like objects among other objects, which could lead, in the eyes of some of the commentators of Wittgenstein, to catastrophic social and political consequences20. In this sense, human values need to be defended from the claims of science. In the second meaning, one needs to safeguard human values because of positivism’s mistake consisting in the conviction that both science and religion or metaphysics have the same goal, which is to describe the world, with the difference being that science does so more accurately. Therefore, in order to acquire the proper worldview, one has to overcome these temporary, i.e. religious and metaphysical, stages of the intellectual development of humankind. Those who want to adopt the scientific worldview must reject naive ethical and religious convictions which are necessarily connected with false and unjustified anthropocentrism. This was the claim of some philosophers, for instance, Russell and

18 As a biographer of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk notes: “The book captivated him (…) He became known to his comrades as ‘the man with the gospels’. For a time he – who before the war had struck Russell as being ‘more terrible with Christianity’ than Russell himself – became not only a believer, but an evangelist, recommending Tolstoy’s Gospel to anyone in distress” (Monk 1991, p. 115–116). 19 Sukopp 2007, p. 91. 20 “When we locate human subjectivity in the world there is always the danger that we end up thinking of human subjects as things in the world just like other things, as objects among objects. That way of thinking can have devastating moral consequences. It is also likely to obscure the very nature of human subjectivity” (Sluga 1983, p. 136–137).

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Schlick21, which provoked Wittgenstein to defend the right to hold ethical and religious convictions22. Apart from distorting the meaning of ethical and religious notions and the claim that ethics, metaphysics or religion represent bad science, or sad testimonies of periods of history when humankind was plunged into the darkness of ignorance, one can also discern the third reason for defending the world of human values from the consequences of the rise of science. One can express this reason, after Wittgenstein, as the danger that a scientific description of the world impoverishes our life and culture23. The basic reason for this impoverishment lies in the fact that the problem of the meaning of life is not a scientific one: Our conception on the contrary is that there is no great essential problem in the scientific sense (CV, p. 20).

Apparently, for Wittgenstein, if our culture and education are dominated by scientific thinking, then we will cease to ask questions about the meaning of life or about moral goodness. This means we will cease to wonder about the most important things in our lives24. It was in this sense that moral values needed to be protected from the claims of science – the danger consisted, in the eyes of Wittgenstein, that enchanted by the success of scientific explanations we will forget to pose questions about the meaning of life. The task, therefore, was to safeguard the notions of ethics and religion from scientific distortion to defend the right of a rational person to hold ethical and religious convictions and to justify the importance of posing the problems of life. In the conclusions to this dissertation I hope to show in which respect Wittgenstein’s solutions either fulfil or do not fulfil this task. What I find, however, 21 “The ethical element which has been prominent in many of the most famous systems of philosophy is, in my opinion, one of the most serious obstacles to the victory of scientific method in the investigation of philosophical questions” (Russell 1914b, p. 63). 22 Carnap reports the difference between Wittgenstein’s and Schlick’s position in the following way: “Once when Wittgenstein talked about religion, the contrast between his and Schlick’s position became strikingly apparent. Both agreed of course in the view that the doctrines of religion in their various forms had no theoretical content. But Wittgenstein rejected Schlick’s view that religion belonged to the childhood phase of humanity and would slowly disappear in the course of cultural development” (Carnap 1964/1967, p. 35). 23 “Science: enrichment & impoverishment” (CV, p. 69). 24 “Our children learn in school already that water consists of the gases hydrogen & oxygen, or sugar of carbon, hydrogen & oxygen. Anyone who does not understand is stupid. The most important questions are concealed” (CV, p. 81).

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the most intriguing in the Tractatus, and the reason I wrote this dissertation, is that by answering the question: “What is the place of ethics and religion in the scientific worldview?” Wittgenstein did not abandon his conviction, expressed in TLP 4.11, that natural science is the only source of truth about the world. He admitted the rightness of the most radical versions of scientism and naturalism, and it was from this point of view that he tried to see how one can talk about moral or aesthetic values. His point of interest was the question whether one, without giving up his or her rationalism, can still search for the meaning of life or whether one, without undermining scientific claims about the world, can still make sense of his or her own religious experiences? By answering this fundamental problem he did not choose the easy way out, consisting in belittling the value and possibilities of natural science. One could say that in fulfilling the task of safeguarding human values he agreed with his possible positivistic opponent regarding all of that opponent’s views on science and metaphysics. In my opinion, this is what makes his effort so fascinating and worth analysing also today. Wittgenstein reveals himself in the Tractatus as a doubly serious philosopher – he acknowledges the progress and explanatory powers of science and, at the same time, concedes the importance of safeguarding the values of the human world. This conviction about what is especially interesting in the philosophy of early Wittgenstein determines the structure of this work. In its first part I concentrate on proving that Wittgenstein, although he experienced some kind of spiritual illumination during the World War I, did not withdraw from his scientism. In the first chapter I shall discuss the basic, i.e. from the point of view of my work, problem whether the Tractarian theory of meaning is an example of the realistic theories of meaning. I shall argue in favour of this thesis and against the claims of the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus. I find this problem crucial because if proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation are right, and early Wittgenstein was indeed not interested in ontological topics, and if the notion of a simple object was a purely formal one (that is, if Wittgenstein, when writing the Tractatus, had no concrete candidacy for the referent of this concept in mind), then, obviously, there is no fundamental problem of the Tractatus as I formulate it here. Then Wittgenstein could not pose the question about the place of ethics in the scientific worldview simply because he did not raise the problem of a proper worldview at all. The second chapter analyses the two main candidacies for the referents of the Tractarian concept of a simple object: simple units of experience (as the phenomenalistic interpretation of the Tractatus argues) and the most elementary particles of matter (as the materialistic interpretation proposes). I shall defend in that chapter the materialistic 16

interpretation of the Tractatus, i.e. I shall show that Wittgenstein’s position in his early oeuvre could be classified as radical naturalism – a view according to which the world consists only in physical particles and their movements. According to Putnam’s description of scientism, this position not only assumes “that science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself ” independently of an anthropocentric perspective but it also claims “that science leaves no room for the independent philosophical enterprise”25. In my opinion, one can notice in the Tractatus also this second aspect of scientism. Wittgenstein claims, among others, that “philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.)” (TLP 4.111). He also suspects that traditional metaphysical concepts are empty26. Wittgenstein’s scepticism towards philosophy is directed at metaphysics as a doctrine about the world27, i.e. a doctrine which attempts to describe the world more comprehensively than science or which assumes that there is an aspect of reality which is a special subject-matter for philosophy. Wittgenstein fought with this conception of philosophy also in less obvious fragments of his book. In this context I shall present in Chapter 3 Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Russellian theory of judgement (TLP 5.54-5.5422). Obviously, the main topic of this fragment of the Tractatus is to reconcile the existence of propositional attitudes with a strong extensionality thesis28, but I shall argue that Wittgenstein’s solution to this problem: “It is clear, however, that ‘A believes that p’, ‘A has thought p’, and ‘A says p’ are of the form ‘ “p” says p’ ” (TLP 5.542) as its background has Wittgenstein’s conviction that Russell did not confer any meaning in his theory of judgement on the notion of the mind. I will also analyse this topic because it strengthens the view that the author of the Tractatus was a naturalist. In my interpretation, Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement does without the dualistic notion of the self. In contrast to Russell’s theory it is able to explain the fact that propositions

25 Putnam 1992, p. X. 26 “The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions” (TLP 6.53). 27 “Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (TLP 4.112). 28 The view according to which every meaningful sentence is a truth-function on an elementary sentence, including an extreme example of an elementary sentence which is a truth-function on itself.

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communicate content without referring to the realm of the mental, which is allegedly distinct from the realm of the material. In Chapter 4 I shall discuss the transcendental interpretations of the Tractatus. The proponents of this kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s early work agree that its fundamental problem consisted in finding a place for ethics and religion in the world of scientific facts, but, in contrast to what I believe, they believe that Wittgenstein, when addressing this issue under the influence of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, accepted an idealistic or even a solipsistic point of view at the expense of his naturalism. After a close examination of the arguments advanced in favour of this interpretation and the fragments of the Tractatus which supposedly speak in favour of this reading, I shall hope to prove that early Wittgenstein was consequent in his naturalism and did not adopt transcendentalism. If he wanted to “defend” the world of human values against the claims of science, he had to do so in another way. I shall try to reconstruct what his strategy and his answer to the fundamental problem of the Tractatus were in the last chapter of my dissertation. The main difficulty of this effort consists in the fact that an answer to the fundamental problem belongs (invoking Wittgenstein’s letter to von Ficker) to the “unwritten” part of the Tractatus – the book which its author ends with a call to silence. However, on the basis of what we know about the position of the Tractatus (for instance, that one can classify its ontological position as materialism) and Wittgenstein’s later remarks (especially on the basis of A Lecture on Ethics, which, as I suspect, differs from the Tractatus with respect to views on ethics only in that in his lecture Wittgenstein was less consequential and gave in to the temptation of expressing necessarily nonsensical ethical convictions), I shall formulate the hypothesis of Wittgenstein’s subjectivism with respect to ethics. This means that I shall defend the view according to which Wittgenstein held ethical expressions to be nonsensical and aiming to express a speaker’s attitude to the world as a whole. In general, I have read the Tractatus as a modernist oeuvre29. I have read it as a sign of the times when philosophers, having acknowledged the importance 29 This is exactly the opposite view to the one represented by Ronald Hustwit, who reads the Tractatus as an anti-modernist book. As confirmation of his views he indicates theses TLP 6.37-6.6.372, in which Wittgenstein compares the modern conception of physical laws to the ancient myths of Fate or God. Both of these myths provide an illusion of the ultimate explanation: “The modern view uncritically suppose that it holds no starting points beyond the laws of nature, while holding the unacknowledged presupposition of realism that the laws of nature are the description of reality” (Hustwit 2011, p. 568). In contrast to Hustwit, I interpret Wittgenstein’s critique of the laws of nature as a sign of his

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of the results of scientific research, began to question the status of traditional philosophical doctrines. In my opinion, Wittgenstein, in his book, skilfully manoeuvred between Scylla of neo-positivism and Charybdis of transcendental idealism. It is a book worth reading, among others, for the consequence in drawing morals from naturalistic positions it holds. Up until today it shows us what the possible and most substantial position is of someone who, on the one hand, accepts the ontological authority of natural science but, on the other, does not want to see religion or metaphysics merely as past stages in the intellectual history of humankind.

strong naturalism. According to this view, in order to describe the world one needs only the notion of spatial-temporal points and their intrinsic properties, and one does without the laws that govern the causal interactions between these points (for the difference between the strong and weak version of naturalism, see: Papineau 2008, p. 132–134).

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Chapter 1. The Problem of Ontology in the Tractatus In the following chapters (Ch. 1–2) I shall analyse the hypothesis that TLP 4.11 (“The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural science)”) is a consequence of Wittgenstein’s materialistic views on the world30. Briefly speaking, I intend to defend two hypotheses: in Chapter 1 the realist claim31 that in Wittgenstein’s opinion the division of reality into simple objects is an intrinsic feature of reality; and in Chapter 2 the materialistic claim that the simplicity of objects means their physical indivisibility. In my opinion, the problem of thesis TLP 4.11 can be solved by answering the question about the worldview entailed by the theses of the Tractatus. The question reads as follows: “What, in one’s view, does the world have to look like in order for one to be convinced that the only truths about it are to be found in statements of natural science?” This means that the first problem I have to address is the problem of the ontology of the Tractatus. But is it possible to draw ontological morals from the Tractarian theses at all? There is a vast group of commentators who, for different reasons, claim that there is no metaphysics in Wittgenstein’s early oeuvre32. Some say that the Tractatus puts forward merely views on logic, language, the conditions it has to fulfil in order to be meaningful, and that early Wittgenstein was simply not interested in metaphysics. According to such a view the claim that simple objects exist is merely the consequence of a linguistic requirement that any language can be analysed in the simple elements. Others claim that the Tractatus belongs to the Kantian tradition of philosophy, therefore, because we are imprisoned in our representations, one cannot say anything about reality in itself33. At best one can say something about the way we represent the world, for instance, that in order to describe the world we need the notion of an object. It does not determine, however, if there are objects in

30 I shall use term “materialistic” as synonymous with “physicalistic”. 31 It is realism both in the epistemological sense allowing us to be able to know the intrinsic features of reality as well as realism with respect to a theory of meaning claiming that the referents of names are objects “ready” to be named, i.e. bits of reality which are not formed by language or any other form of representation. In my interpretation I shall focus on realism with respect to the theory of meaning. 32 McGuinness 2002, Atkinson 2009. 33 Meyer 1986; Bergmann 1973.

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the world as it is, i.e. independently of any systems of representation. Referring to the interpretations which favour the aforementioned claims, I shall use the terms: “anti-metaphysical” or “formalistic” interpretation of the Tractatus.

1.1  Anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus Accordingly, in the first part of the first chapter (1.1) I shall present the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus by focussing on two pivotal points: first, on the question whether Wittgenstein had any views on what there is, or, in other words, if there is any ontology in the Tractatus (section 1.1.1)? The second point refers to the anti-realist theory of meaning preferred by the proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus (section 1.1.2). The damaging effect of a possible negative answer to the first point is clear: if Wittgenstein had no views on the nature of objects, then he could not have been a proponent of materialism. The connection between an anti-realist theory of meaning and my interpretation of the Tractatus is less clear, and I will try to explain it later in section 1.1.2. In section 1.1.3 I shall argue against the anti-metaphysical interpretation by: (1) opposing the widespread opinion regarding Wittgenstein’s alleged lack of interest in metaphysics (2) defending the thesis that, according to the Tractatus, names have a reference also outside the context of a proposition (the thesis which from now on I shall call the ‘thesis of semantic atomism’).

1.1.1  Anti-metaphysical interpretation and the tasks of philosophy I shall begin my presentation of the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus by considering its main supposition: early Wittgenstein was not interested in metaphysics, hence considerations about the nature of the referents of names would be entirely alien to him. In the Preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein stated that we pose philosophical questions because we do not understand the functioning of logic and language34. Philosophers pose questions such as, for instance: “Is there a world outside our ideas?”, which to ordinary people seem a bit odd. They discuss whether we are trapped in the world of our ideas or if we have evidence for an external reality that is independent in its

34 “The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood” (TLP, p. 3).

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existent. The realists accuse the idealists of holding nonsensical positions, but they tend to forget that if idealism is nonsensical and conveys no content, then realism as contradicting nonsense is also nonsensical (how could one meaningfully contradict something which is not even a thought?). Exactly this kind of discussions are, according to McGuinness’ understanding of Wittgenstein, an example of the misunderstanding of the functioning of language: “There is already contained in language and thought the possibility of all objects that are possible. All logical forms are logically possible within language, within thought. No separate investigation of ‘reality’ is conceivable”35. What is the point of doing philosophy if metaphysical questions are the result of misunderstanding of the functioning of language? According to the defenders of the anti-metaphysical interpretation, Wittgenstein’s aim was to analyse language and reveal the logical form of a proposition which is hidden under the surface of everyday language. “All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’ ” – says Wittgenstein in the Tractatus36, and that statement, in the eyes of the proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation, means that a philosopher does not need to care about the nature of the world. Wittgenstein also claims that “logic must look after itself ” (TLP 5.473)37. One of the consequences of this standpoint, for the proponents of the formalistic reading, is that the result of the philosophical inquiry, i.e. the revealed form of a proposition, is not determined by reality and one cannot infer what kinds of objects exist from the analysis of language. Therefore, if a reader of the Tractatus encounters in the book the notion of an object, then it has to be a purely formal notion which should not awake in the reader any metaphysical associations. McGinn, for instance, emphasises that Wittgenstein asked if simple objects exist only in the context of logic: “Can we manage without simple objects in LOGIC?” (NB 9.5.15, p. 46)38. This notion is essential to the symbolism of logic39, just as the subject-predicate structure of propositions belongs to symbolism. But just as the question whether there is

35 McGuinness 2002, p. 91. 36 TLP 4.0031. 37 The proponents of the formalistic reading indicate that this sentence is a frequent motif in Wittgenstein’s early writings: NB 22.8.14, p. 2; 2.9.14, p. 2; 3.9.14, p. 2; 13.10.14, p. 11; 26.4.15, p. 43. 38 McGinn 2007, p. 210. “The simple objects (…) are not so much a kind of metaphysical entity conjured up to support a logical theory as something whose existence adds no extra content to the logical theory” (Ishiguro 1969, p. 40). 39 “What I want to argue is that the idea that the question about simples is to be understood as a question about the essential nature of a symbolism” (McGinn 2007, p. 209).

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something in the world which corresponds to the subject-predicate structure of a proposition would have been a fatal mistake, the question as to what the ultimate elements of reality are would also be a mistake. The way we represent reality includes the fact that we describe it in terms of objects. We cannot describe it in some other way, and in this sense one can say that the concept of the object is internal to the system of representation. For instance, according to McGinn, if I truly say that the pen on my desk is red, then I do not say anything about things in the world, particularly, I do not state the existence of such things in itself, such as desks and pens. I simply correctly describe in a particular system of representation (by means of such logical devices as names) a state of affairs40. McGinn concludes: In all these cases, we are making the mistake of treating what is internal to a symbolism in which we express propositions that can be compared with reality for truth or falsity, as if it were a question of fact (McGinn 2007, p. 209).

In logic, the concept of the object designates everything which can go proxy for a variable in a propositional function. When the proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation claim that the notion of the object is a purely logical notion41, they mean by that that according to Wittgenstein, an object is anything that can go proxy for x in f(x) (or, in other words, an object is anything that can be referred to by a third-person singular pronoun). If Wittgenstein says that reality consists of objects, he simply means that the world consists of something42. The question: “What is this something?” is not of the philosopher’s concern. Ishiguro writes about the concept of the object that: “The ‘objects’ of the Tractatus are not particular entities in any normal sense, but entities invoked to fit into a semantic theory”43, and McGuinness adds in a similar mode: “An object in the Tractatus which is the reference of a name or simple sign can be viewed as simply truth-value potential of a certain expression”44. The realist theory of meaning assumes that there are some ultimate and fundamental constituents of the world. It claims that there are links between bits of language (names) and bits of reality. One can know the reference of a name without

40 “To say that the object for which the word ‘red’ stands is a constituent of an existing state of affairs is just to say that the state of affairs is correctly described by means of a proposition in which the word ‘red’ occurs” (ibid., p. 214). 41 Ishiguro 1969, p. 27. 42 Soin 2001, p. 35. 43 Ishiguro 1969, p. 21. 44 McGuinness 2002, p. 87.

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knowing the reference of other names. This is so because it is reality which determines what the referents of names are: “It is not up to us what counts as a simple part of reality; it is an intrinsic feature of reality itself ”45. On the other hand, according to the anti-metaphysical reading of the Tractatus, the notion of the object is a formal one – it is internal to symbolism. To claim that the thesis: “There are simple objects” says something about the constituents of reality is the same as to claim that the statement: “Today it is raining or it is not raining” helps me to make the decision whether I should take an umbrella when I go out. For the commentators who are more in favour of the anti-metaphysical reading of the Tractatus, the independent order of reality is inaccessible to us. Consequently, according to McGuinness, such a notion as “the realm of reference” is a myth and “the sort of metaphysics [Wittgenstein] condemns”46. Ishiguro writes in a similar tone: “To ask what kind of familiar entities correspond to the objects of the Tractatus seems to lead us nowhere”47, and McGinn: “A transcendental realm with an intrinsic structure is an illusion”48. The proponents of this reading often refer to the entry from the Notebooks: “It keeps on looking as if the question ‘Are there simple things?’ made sense. And surely this question must be nonsense” (NB 5.5.15, p. 45). It is exactly because of this stance on Wittgenstein’s views on the role and aim of philosophy that this interpretation is called an anti-metaphysical one49. Peter Winch presented the most far-reaching consequences of this position: What has become of the idea that to say something is to stand in relation to some independently reality? We seem to be in a position not essentially different from that of Protagoras or Gorgias. There is no reality; and if there were, no man could know it; and even if a man could come to know it, he could not communicate what he knew to anyone else (Winch 1969a, p. 11)

As I have tried to show in the last paragraph, an anti-metaphysical interpretation raises the issue of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy; it puts emphasis on Wittgenstein’s conviction that philosophy is a critique of language. If he truly reduced the problems of philosophy to problems of language, then indeed the discussion whether simple objects are sense-data or physical particles would be pointless. Apart from discussing the general role of philosophy in the eyes of early Wittgenstein, the anti-metaphysical interpretation brings up the question

45 46 47 48 49

Child 2011, p. 55. McGuinness 2002, p. 84. Ishiguro 1969, p. 47. McGinn 2007, p. 216. Ibid., p. 201.

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whether, according to him, a name has a reference also outside the context of a proposition. The representatives of this interpretation search for the answer to this question in thesis TLP 3.3. In the next section I shall present its solution and how it affects the conviction of the existence of objects that are independent from us.

1.1.2  The context principle in the Tractatus I have reduced for the moment the problem whether there are any ontological consequences of the Tractarian system to the pivotal question if Wittgenstein in the Tractatus was a proponent of semantic atomism. I do so only because when a name also has a reference outside the context of a proposition does it make sense to ask: “What is the object to which I refer, independently of the particular system of propositions or of a particular conceptualization?”. If the answer to the pivotal problem was negative, then one could ask and obtain answers about the referents of names only restricted to a given proposition or to a system of propositions. For instance, the answer could read as follows: “The world consists of mass-particles under the system of propositions of Hertzian mechanics, but the world consists of human beings, animals, plants, chairs, football games, justice, and so on under the system of propositions of ordinary language. What are the constituents of the world in itself, independently of any system of propositions, we simply cannot know”. If this was true with respect to the Tractatus, then my aim of proving that the worldview of young Wittgenstein assumes ontological materialism would be fruitless right from the start. That is why at the beginning of my disquisition about the objects of the Tractatus I shall defend the view that the Tractatus involves semantic atomism. The thesis of semantic atomism reads as follows: (A)  A name has a reference outside a proposition. In other words, a name refers to an object independently of the reference of other names. It seems to me that the thesis of semantic atomism is well represented and defended in the Tractatus50. In TLP 3.203 we read a statement that is the exact formulation of this position:

50 This thesis is also well represented and defended in the Notebooks: “It is quite clear that I can in fact correlate a name with the watch just as it lies here ticking in front of me, and that this name will have reference outside any proposition in the very sense I have always given that word” (NB 15.6.15, p. 60). “We feel that the WORLD must consist of elements (…) The world has a fixed structure” (NB 17.6.15, p. 15).

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A name means an object. The object is its meaning. (‘A’ is the same sign as ‘A’.) (TLP 3.203).

The Tractatus presents a simple vision of the world which consists of facts that are independent from other facts (TLP 1; 2.06; 2.061). Facts are combinations of objects (TLP 2.01). The world is, by virtue of the common logical form between facts and propositions, mirrored in language (TLP 2.12; 2.18). It presents a view on language in which elementary propositions are the most basic bricks of language – they depict and assert the existence of states of affairs (TLP 4.21). Elementary propositions are concatenations of names (TLP 4.22) and they picture states of affairs exactly because of the relation of reference between names and their bearers – objects. The pictorial relation between a proposition and a respective state of affairs exists because of correlations of the elements of the proposition with the elements of the state of affairs (TLP 2.1514). Wittgenstein compares names to feelers (die Fühlers). It is because of these “feelers” that “the picture touches reality” (TLP 2.1515). These scattered remarks are summed up by Wittgenstein in theses TLP 4.0311-4.0312: One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs. The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives.

Semantic atomism is often connected with a realist theory of meaning51. On a realist reading of the Tractatus, the possibility of the reference of names outside the context of a proposition is grounded in the fact that reality consists of objects that are “ready” to be named. This is because reality is already divided into objects, and a name can have a constant referent. Language simply represents the structure of reality (it does not participate in creating it)52. That is why it is enough to know 51 “On one well established interpretation, the Tractatus presents a realist theory of meaning, which conceives the representing relation as consisting of a direct link between bits of language (words) and bits of the world (objects)” (McGinn 2007, p. 200). Pears defines realism with respect to the theory of meaning as an idea that: “when a name is attached to a thing, the nature of the thing takes over and dictates its subsequent use” (Pears 1987, p. 65). Morris describes realism as a claim that “the nature of the world as it is in itself is altogether independent of anything to do with any thought or representation of it” (Morris 2008, p. 96). 52 As Child puts it: “On the realist reading of the Tractatus, the division of reality into simple objects is an intrinsic feature of reality (…). It is because reality has the structure it does that any language adequate to represent reality must have the same structure” (Child 2011, p. 56–57).

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what the referents of names are in order to know what the world consists of. The second claim of semantic atomism is, therefore: (B) The reference of names is determined by objects, independent in their existence from any system of propositions (or any system of representation). For Norman Malcolm (a noted proponent of the realist reading of the Tractarian theory of meaning), this theory was so clear and obvious that he found it “difficult to understand how anyone could study the Tractatus and come away with the impression that objects owe their nature as simple to human convention or choice”53. Despite Malcolm’s difficulties, there were many commentators who contested the established, i.e. realist, interpretation of the Tractatus. In 1969 Hidé Ishiguro wrote a paper titled Use and Reference of Names, in which she undermined the thus common trust in the realist interpretation of the Tractarian theory of meaning. Her objections to the prevailing reading of the Tractatus were soon shared by Brian McGuinness and Peter Winch. Different doubts to the realist interpretation were also raised by such scholars as Rush Rhees, Marie McGinn, William Child and Hans Sluga. The proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus fight not only with the idea of a “ready to be named” reality that consists of some basic bricks – the simples – but also with the idea which is entailed by a realist theory of meaning, i.e. with the claim that a name has a reference outside a proposition. At the fore of Ishiguro’s argumentation comes the so-called context principle: Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning (TLP 3.3).

It was Frege who introduced the distinction between, using his terminology, sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung). The meaning of a sign was, for him, an object which is designated by a name; and the sense of a sign was a mode of presentation of a designated object54. This is the terminology inherited in the Tractatus by Wittgenstein55, so wherever I use in this work the concept of reference, it is synonymous

53 Malcolm 1986, p. 60–61. 54 “It is natural to think of there being connected with a sign (name, combination of words, written mark), besides that which the sign designates, which may be called the meaning of the sign, also what I should like to call the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained” (Frege 1892/1984a, p. 158). 55 “Throughout the Tractatus Wittgenstein makes a distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung in a manner roughly corresponding to Frege’s later works (…) and he took ‘Bedeutung’ in the sense of ‘reference’ ” (Ishiguro 1969, p. 23).

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with the Tractarian notion of meaning. For instance, when Wittgenstein writes that “Der Name bedeutet den Gegenstand” (a name means an object)56, under the conceptualisation I am using he means that a name refers to an object (under my conceptualisation the concepts of meaning and of sense are synonymous). It seems, therefore, that in TLP 3.3, Wittgenstein states that only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have a reference. This claim would contradict (at least at first sight) semantic atomism (which claims that a name has a reference also outside the context of a proposition). How does it contradict semantic atomism in detail? To answer this question one has to go back to the philosophy of Frege. Frege continually reminds us that “what is being said concerning a concept does not suit an object”57. For instance, a concept’s behaviour in a sentence is essentially predicative and it cannot be replaced in a sentence by a name. What is the connection between the object-concept distinction and a claim that a name has a reference only in a proposition? Frege takes as an example the sign: “Vienna”58. He claims that given only this sign, one cannot decide what its reference is, i.e. one needs the context of a proposition to determine it. “Vienna” in the proposition: “Vienna is the capital of Austria” refers to an object, namely to the largest city in Austria (“Vienna” is in the given sentence a proper name), but it can turn out as well that it pertains to a concept, as in the proposition: “Trieste is no Vienna”. In the second case “Vienna” is a concept-word like “city”. This is the central reason why Frege introduced the context principle59. On the other hand, as Ishiguro admits, in the Tractatus there is no distinction between objects and concepts, and Wittgenstein did not think “in terms of saturated and unsaturated, or complete and incomplete sense”60, so clearly the context principle has to have a different function than that in Frege’s writings. According to Ishiguro, the context principle in the Tractatus serves as evidence that Wittgenstein was interested in the question: “How is the reference of a word fixed?”61 What secures the reference of a word? How can I be sure that when I refer to the

56 TLP 3.203. 57 Frege 1892/1984b, p. 190. 58 Ibid., p. 189. 59 “Als Grundsätze habe ich in dieser Untersuchung folgende festgehalten: es ist das Psychologische von dem Logischen, das Subjektive von dem Objektiven scharf zu trennen; nach der Bedeutung der Wörter muss im Satzzusammenhange, nicht in ihrer Vereinzelung gefragt werden; der Unterschied zwischen Begriff und Gegenstand ist im Auge zu behalten” (Frege 1884, p. X). 60 Ishiguro 1969, p. 24. 61 Ibid., p. 20–21.

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apple tree in my garden with the name: “APTree”, I am referring to the tree and not to its shape or to its bark? The proponents of the formalistic reading of the notion of the object claim, roughly speaking, that Wittgenstein had at his disposal two theories with respect to the question of how one can identify an object of reference and secure reference of a name. One can identify an object either by a definite description or by a demonstrative (for instance, by a mental act or by pointing at something). One can identify an object by a description such as: “The highest tower in Fribourg” or by the ostensive definition – pointing at the tower of the cathedral of Fribourg. But because of the characteristics of the simple objects given in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein could use neither of these ways to identify objects62. The simples of the Tractatus are, for example, colourless (TLP 2.0232), in contrast to objects with which one is acquainted or which one can point to. Therefore, the simples cannot be identified by means of ostensive definitions63. A description, on the other hand, pertains to the external features of an object and, according to the Tractatus, external (material) features are produced by configurations of objects (just as, in our example – one can speak of the highest tower only in comparison to other towers), and as such they do not belong to the Tractarian substance of the world (TLP 2.0231) made up of simples (TLP 2.021). By means of a description one can at best identify a complex object, but not a simple one. There is no identification of a simple object through an ostensive definition or through a description – this is what the adherents of the existence of the context principle in the Tractatus concluded. The only way one can identify an object is through the use of a name which designates it64. It is the use of a name which secures the reference. If I asked at the beginning of the paragraph what the guarantee is that if I name an apple tree in my garden using the name “APTree”, I am truly referring to the tree and not to its shape, Ishiguro answers: “There is no such guarantee”. One can recognise the reference of “APTree” only by the later use of the name in question; for instance, if I wanted to cut an APTree because it obscures the view from my window, then the hypothesis that an APTree refers to a shape would be eliminated. One can observe the use of the name – one can refute or confirm one’s hypotheses with respect to possible referents of names – only in propositions, such as, for instance: “The APTree obscures the view from my window. I have to cut it”. In Ishiguro’s opinion 62 Stokhof 2002, p. 161. 63 Ishiguro 1969, p. 28. 64 “In the Tractatus Wittgenstein is anxious to stress that we cannot see how the name refers to an object except by understanding the role it plays in propositions” (ibid., p. 23).

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this is what Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote that a name gains a reference only in the nexus of a proposition. According to Ishiguro, problems connected with identifying objects of reference and the fact that there is no solution which semantic atomism could offer in this respect should lead to the refutation of this position: The Tractatus theory of names is basically correct, however, in so far as it is a refutation of views which assume that a name is like a piece of label which we tag on to an object which we can already identify (Ishiguro 1969, p. 35).

If the reference of a name were fixed by its use, then it would falsify the realist intuition that referents are simply there in the world, waiting to be named. Peter Winch indicated that the line of Ishiguro’s argumentation resembles “the beetle in the box” argument from Philosophical Investigations (PI, 293). The fictitious proponent of a private language has exactly the same problems with establishing the reference of his or her private experiences as does the proponent of semantic atomism, in Ishiguro’s view, with establishing the reference of simple objects. According to Winch, we should remember the lesson from “the beetle in the box” argument: “if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant” (PI, 293). Winch sums up his commentary on Ishiguro in the following way: “The Tractarian objects are quite unnecessary, an idle wheel, the intrusion of which is masking the true workings of the mechanism”65. If Winch was right in his conclusions, then, naturally, the question of the nature of Tractarian simple objects would be senseless. The proponents of the thesis that the system of the Tractatus manifests a realist theory of meaning are challenged by Ishiguro in two ways: first, they have to propose a way to identify objects that would be in accordance with both a realist theory of meaning as well as the requirements that Wittgenstein put on the simples. Second, they have to offer a different reading of TLP 3.3, i.e. a reading that would not assume that Wittgenstein in this thesis raised the issue of how one fixes the reference of names (because if that was the topic of this thesis, then it would be difficult to avoid Ishiguro’s conclusions).

1.1.3  In defence of semantic atomism In the following section I want to refer to the aforementioned arguments and theses of an anti-metaphysical reading of the Tractatus. I would summarise them as follows:

65 Winch 1969a, p. 13.

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1. The Tractatus is interested in logic and treats philosophy as a critique of language. It does not have metaphysical ambitions. This means that, according to this book, in order to set the limits of sense, a philosopher does not make use of metaphysics. 2. According to the Tractatus, an object is a value of a variable. The notion of an object is a purely formal concept. 3. One of the central topics of the Tractatus is the question as to how one fixes the reference of names. The reference of a name is fixed by its use in propositions. Ad 1. Is there no interest of early Wittgenstein in metaphysics? Wittgenstein’s interest was the nature of the proposition. It is not my intention to argue with this claim. As he writes in the Notebooks: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition” (NB 22.1.15, p. 39). However, my intention is to show that in order to fulfil the task of explaining the nature of the proposition, he had to direct his thoughts to reality. For example, exactly in the same entry of the Notebooks he admits that explaining the nature of the proposition leads to an inquiry about the nature of facts, and, consequently, of all being: My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition. That is to say, in giving the nature of all facts, whose picture the proposition is. In giving the nature of all being” (NB 22.1.15, p. 39).

He was aware of this unexpected metaphysical twist of his primarily logical work: My work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world (NB 2.8.16, p. 79).

One can indeed keep track of Wittgenstein’s development in the Notebooks. He began with the repeatable remark that “logic must take care of itself ”66, and the correction of the Fregean criterion of a meaningful sentence: “Frege says: Every well-formed sentence must make sense; and I say: Every possible sentence is wellformed” (NB 2.9.14, p. 2). But in the next month he introduced the picture theory of meaning (NB 29.9.14, p. 7). One of the consequences of this theory on his views on proposition is the conviction that: “In the proposition the name goes proxy for the object” (NB 29.12.14, p. 37). From this statement there is a short path to the topic of simples and complexes, with which Wittgenstein was absorbed in May of 1915. The first remarks with respect to the possibility of giving an example of a simple object are sceptical. As the favourite entry of the proponents of the antimetaphysical interpretation states: 66 NB 22.8.14, p. 2; 2.9.14, p. 2; 3.9.14, p. 2; 13.10.14, p. 11; 26.4.15, p. 43.

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It keeps on looking as if the question ‘Are there simple things?’ made sense. And surely this question must be nonsense” (NB 5.5.15, p. 45).

But soon Wittgenstein divorced himself from this anti-metaphysical attitude. I think that he realised that in order to ensure a solid ground for his linguistic system, one has to anchor it in reality; otherwise, without any example of a simple object, one could accuse Wittgenstein that his ideal language – containing only notions with sharp meanings – is merely a chimera. First, he seriously considered the candidacy of the points in the visual field as the simples. He said, among other things, that the simples are “the simplest things with which we are acquainted” (NB 11.5.15, p. 47), but since he realised that in fact the things with which we are acquainted are complex things, he rejected this view. He did not, however, abandon the search for the simples. At the same time he admitted that the fact that we are acquainted with complex objects encourages us to seek the parts of which these complexes are constructed: Even though we have no acquaintance with simple objects we do know complex by acquaintance, we know by acquaintance that they are complex. –And in the end they must consist of simple things? We single out a part of our visual field, for example, and we see that it is always complex, that any part of it is still complex but is already simpler, and so on (NB 24.5.15, p. 50).

From this moment on Wittgenstein turned his attention to the particles of physics as the most probable candidacy for the simples (I shall track this change of mind more carefully in Chapter 2.): The division of the body into material points, as we have seen it in physics, is nothing more than analysis into simple components (NB 20.6.15, p. 67)

I shall also argue there that the conviction that simple objects are the most basic elements of matter had not left Wittgenstein throughout the time of his writing and editing the Tractatus. This claim does not intend to suggest that Wittgenstein suddenly “discovered” that the world consists of material simple objects; it intends to say that Wittgenstein realised that only the language of physics fulfils the requirements he put on meaningful language (for instance, the postulate of a determinate sense or the postulate of the logical independence of elementary propositions). Concluding, my thesis is that the metaphysical twist of Wittgenstein’s linguistic inquiries took on the following form: The first stage included introducing the picture theory of meaning and seeing a proposition as a picture of a state of affairs (September of 1914). In other words, the central idea of the picture theory is stated as: (1) Meaningful propositions mirror reality. The next steps were the consequences of the first step. In June of 1915 Wittgenstein realised that: (2) Only the 33

language of physics fulfils the requirements of meaningful discourse67. From (1) and (2) it follows that: (3) Only the language of physics mirrors reality. Combining it with a realist theory of meaning which claims that the names of a given language refer to objects that are independent from us in their existence, one arrives at the metaphysical conclusion that: (4) The world consists of physical particles. Of course, it should not escape our attention that, according to Wittgenstein, we discover the simples as a requirement of the logical theory: the concept of a simple object is contained in the idea of analysis, and the best proof for that is the fact that one can come to this idea without providing any examples of the simples68. But on the other hand, the fact that we, so to speak, a priori assume the existence of the simples did not prevent Wittgenstein from formulating, in June of 1916, the thesis of semantic atomism: It is quite clear that I can in fact correlate a name with the watch just as it lies here ticking in front of me, and that this name will have reference outside any proposition in the very sense I have always given that word (NB 15.6.15, p. 60) We feel that the WORLD must consist of elements (…) The world has a fixed structure (NB 17.6.15, p. 15)

McGinn thinks that the intellectual journey of young Wittgenstein led from a realist theory of meaning to the formalistic conception of a name: There are striking and significant differences between the remarks on simples that occur in the Notebooks and the corresponding sections on simples in the Tractatus and the Prototractatus. In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein makes a number of remarks that strongly invite the sort of realist reading I want to argue against (…) Wittgenstein ultimately finds the source for the requirement that names stand for simples objects in the demand for definiteness of sense and the possibility for complete analysis (McGinn 2007, p. 202–203).

This cannot be true: Wittgenstein wrote the remark by stating that the world has a fixed structure just one day after he had admitted that the existence of the simples is the consequence of the postulate of a complete analysis. This means that holding the requirement of a determinate sense, at least for Wittgenstein, was not in contradiction to a realist theory of meaning. And even if one supposes that the requirement of a determinate sense stands in contradiction to a realist 67 I shall elaborate this point in Chapter 2. 68 “It seems that the idea of the SIMPLE is already to be found contained in that of the complex and in the idea of analysis, and in such a way that we come to this idea quite apart from any examples of simple objects, or of propositions which mention them, and we realize the existence of the simple object – a priori – as a logical necessity” (NB 14.6.15, p. 60).

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theory of meaning (I personally do not think that there is any contradiction between these two claims), then one has to take into account that the remarks about the fixed structure of the world follows in the Notebooks the remarks about the requirement of a determinate sense. In other words, even if Wittgenstein saw the contradiction in holding both of these groups of remarks, then the conclusion should be that he, at some point, rejected the postulate of the definite sense and stood by the realist convictions. Both realists and formalists agree that the origins of the Tractatus go back to logic, but they disagree when it comes to the question: “Did Wittgenstein take one step further in the direction of metaphysics?”. The realists would stress the importance of the moment when the picture theory was introduced in the Notebooks69, while the formalists would incorporate the picture theory as a part of the theory of language and would not tie any metaphysical consequences to it70. Why is the moment of introducing the picture theory of meaning of such importance to the proponents of a realist reading of the Tractatus? It is because the picture theory claims that “in order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality” (TLP 2.223), and in the eyes of the early commentator of Wittgenstein’s book, Otto Neurath, the idea of the comparison of a sentence with reality is purely metaphysical71. If Wittgenstein truly wanted to avoid any metaphysical standpoint, he should have rather said that in order to tell whether a picture is true or false, one compares it with another picture or system of pictures72. Each new proposition, according to the line of thought of the anti-metaphysical interpretation, should be compared with the totality of previously coordinated existing propositions. But that is exactly, as will be clear in section 1.2, when I shall discuss the requirement of a determinate sense, which Wittgenstein did not want to say. Summing up, I think that on the basis of the entries from the Notebooks one can describe the development of Wittgenstein’s thought as being marked by a constant growth of interest in metaphysical topics. Second, the argument that the simple objects were first thought of as a requirement of a definite sense does not contradict this observed interest in metaphysics – as we have seen, Wittgenstein 69 von Wright 1955/1967, p. 18; Stokhof 2002, p. 22–23. 70 Rhees 1969/1970, p. 25. 71 “Statements are compared with statements, not with ‘experiences’, ‘the world’, or anything else. All these meaningless duplications belong to a more or less refined metaphysics and are, for those reason, to be rejected” (Neurath 1959, p. 291). 72 “A statement is always compared with another statement or with the system of statements, never with a ‘reality’. Such a procedure would be metaphysical; it would be meaningless” (ibid., p. 292).

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reconciled this requirement with claims that the world has a fixed structure. Finally, the picture theory of meaning, with its idea of a comparison of a proposition with a state of affairs instead of a comparison of a proposition with a system of propositions, also betrays the metaphysical inclinations of early Wittgenstein. That, I think, allows to falsify the claim of the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus that early Wittgenstein’s considerations on language are divorced from reality. Ad 2.) Is the concept of an object a purely formal concept? Why should we reject the conception according to which an object is everything which can be a value of a variable x in a propositional function? For me, the most obvious answer is that it is in disagreement with Wittgenstein’s identification of propositions of natural science with the totality of true propositions (TLP 4.11). The task of natural science is to discover the internal features of the world (features that are independent from observers). But according to the formalistic conception of an object there can be true propositions about justice, beauty or baseball (why not replace x in fx with the notions of an off-side, or a truce?) – notions that are essentially connected with human activities which, by definition, are not subject-matter for natural science. In other words, thesis TLP 4.11, in the light of the formalistic conception of an object, seems to be unjustified and dogmatic, and that is the conclusion one should try to avoid. Moreover, the formalistic conception of the Tractarian object allows different types of things to be referents of names: abstract objects such as economic growth, objects of science such as chemical elements, objects of everyday life such as knives and forks, particulars such as stones, and complexes such as the Swiss nation. We have at our disposal evidence that Wittgenstein’s conviction was exactly the opposite. Commenting on the Tractarian solution to the theory of types he writes in one of his letters to Russell: I think that there cannot be different types of things! In other words whatever can by symbolized by a simple proper name must belong to one type (Letters, 16.1.13, p. 19)

Obviously, proponents of the formalistic interpretation of the Tractatus can defend their position by saying that, of course, all examples of objects, as I mentioned before, belong to one type of things, i.e. to logical objects. In my opinion, however, when Wittgenstein writes: “There cannot be different types of things”, he cannot have in mind something such as: “There cannot be illogical objects”. His letter to Russell is much more comprehensible if we understand under the type of things such categories as abstract and concrete things or, to put it differently, relations and individual things. This is because the letter is clearly a discussion 36

with Russell’s views, on which “atomic sentences at the bottom level of analysis are combinations of names of ontological atoms of different types – individuals, properties of individuals, dyadic relations of individuals, etc”73. Johnston also notices that for Russell a term was an entity which could appear in a complex, and that he discerned two logical types of terms: universals (that is relations of all orders) and particulars (terms which are not universals)74. Therefore, Wittgenstein’s restriction is nothing more than saying that objects of reference belong either to the category of abstracts or to the category of individual objects. Moreover, one can make a probable case that TLP 3.1432: Instead of, ‘The complex sign “aRb” says that a stands to b in the relation R’, we ought to put, ‘That “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.’

opts for the rejection of the ontological category of relations75. It would turn out that Wittgenstein’s conviction that there cannot be different types of things is tantamount to the claim that there is just one category of objects – the category of particulars, and that is the conclusion which stays in opposition to the formalistic notion of a thing as anything that can be referred to by a third-person singular pronoun. Which is not to dismiss that there is a grain of truth in the formalistic notion of the object. This notion is, indeed, in the light of other Tractarian theses, troublesome. This is because the sentence: “There are objects” is a perfect example of Tractarian nonsense: anyone who truly understands it must recognise it as meaningless (TLP 6.54): So one cannot say, for example, “There are objects”, as one might say, “There are books” (TLP 4.1272). To ask whether a formal concept exists is nonsensical. For no proposition can be the answer to such a question (TLP 4.1274).

The Tractatus treats the concept of the object as a formal one76. One can ask neither meaningfully about formal concepts nor about the instances of these 73 Ricketts 1996, p. 69. 74 Johnston 2012, p. 16. 75 “Wittgenstein rejects the reality of relations (…). Relations are not things, are not entities; relations cannot be labelled or designated. Unlike ‘a’ and ‘b’, ‘R’ is not a symbol in ‘aRb’. Instead, roughly put, the holding of a relation over objects is symbolized by the holding of a relation over names of those objects. But this way of thinking is itself misleading for its use of ‘object’ and ‘relation’ as a contrasting pair of common nouns” (Ricketts 1996, p. 72). 76 Formal concepts are those corresponding to formal properties. C.f. TLP 4.126.

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concepts. One also cannot express formal concepts in propositions because, according to Wittgenstein, formal concepts are expressed in propositions by variables (TLP 4.127), and variables show a form (a form cannot be represented – it can only be shown) (TLP 4.1271). According to TLP 4.1272, a proposition: (a)  There are tables is meaningful, and the expression (b)  There are objects is meaningless. The fact that “object” denotes nothing is shown in the sentence by the variables. According to TLP 4.1272, in the logical notation “x” is a proper sign for the formal concept of “object”. The right analysis reveals the form of (b) as follows: (b’)  There are x (b’) is neither true or false. It is a function whose set of values covers concrete objects, but not the genus of them. To say: “It is meaningless” means that the meaning of (b’) is not determined yet. The other example covers the pair of the following propositions: (c)  The table is brown (d)  The table is an object Sentence (c) is meaningful – expression (d) on the contrary77. Sentence (d) says nothing, nothing is learnt by it, it gives no information. The concept of the object is not supposed to give any information at all – it shows the form of the sentence, therefore, it points out what kind of names could be values of x in the proposition. The proper analysis reveals the form of the expression containing the concept of the object: (e)  x is brown. When one expresses proposition (c), one has already put the propositional function (e) to use, and this means that one already knows the meaning of the formal concept: “object”78. It is now clear that no new information about a table is added in (d). What (d) tries to say is already given along with the proper uses of the name: “table”. 77 “When something falls under a formal concept as one of its objects, this cannot be expressed by means of a proposition” (TLP 4.126). 78 Block 1986, p. 141.

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Nevertheless, the Tractaus contains theses such as TLP 2.02 (“Objects are simple”). In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein considered different candidacies for the simples79. We could repeat Sluga’s question: “If Wittgenstein is not seriously entertaining the idea that visual points might be the simple objects he is looking for, then what is the point of raising the question?”80. In the Tractarian system, expressions which state the existence of something are, as we have seen, meaningless. This does not mean, however, that there are no ontological commitments in that system. One should not, however, ascribe them to existential propositions but to the function of a name in an elementary proposition. For example, let us take an elementary proposition: (f) “AB” where “A” and “B” are simple symbols which refer, respectively, to the simple objects A and B. In order to express the existence of A and B, one does not have to say: (g)  “A and B exist” because this is already contained in (f)81. (g) is meaningless because it is equivalent to: (h)  “AB exist exist”82 We can combine the thesis that the concept of the object is formal with the fact that Wittgenstein’s work “extended (…) to the nature of the world” (NB 2.8.16, p. 79) by accepting that expressing meaningless sentences counts among the necessary costs of climbing up the Tractarian ladder in order to see the world aright (TLP 6.54). A statement such as: “There are simple objects” is one of the steps on the ladder. One who has climbed up sees the world aright. But there is no other way to see the world aright than through the process of transcending the meaningless sentences of the Tractatus, and one of these could be the thesis of the existence 79 “It seems to me perfectly possible that patches in our visual field are simple objects” (NB 18.6.15, p. 64); “The division of the body into material points, as we have it in physics, is nothing more than analysis into simple components” (NB 20.6.15, p. 67). 80 Sluga 2012, p. 103. He admits the right to Ishiguro’s commentary. According to him, behind the questions about the simples stands Wittgenstein’s concern if we recognise that the analysis of a proposition is complete (Sluga 2012, p. 104). 81 “That M is a thing can’t be said; it is a nonsense: but something is shown by the symbol ‘M’ ” (NM, p. 109). 82 We could also prove its meaningless by analysing the negation of (f). (f*) “AB does not exist”. In logical analysis of (f*) we get to proposition (f#) Ex (x is AB and AB does not exist). There is something which does not exist.

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of the simples83. This resembles Frege’s dilemmas with the concept of concept. Because Frege discerned sharply between names and concepts, he was convinced that what one asserts about a name cannot be stated about a concept84. One of the consequences of this claim is, as Conant notices, the impossibility of saying anything about concepts85. Every time one tries to ascribe to concepts certain features, the only result is nonsense. For instance, the proposition: “The concept ‘horse’ is a concept that is easily attained” is nonsense. The whole confusion is the result of the fact that in the sentence: “The concept ‘horse’ is a concept that is easily attained”, the linguistic sign: “The concept ‘horse’ ” functions as a name. Names refer to objects. To say that an object is a concept that is easily attained is neither true nor false. It is nonsense but, nevertheless, it is elucidatory nonsense. We know what one is trying to say by means of this proposition. It is only the awkwardness of language, claims Frege, which hinders expressing ideas about concepts in a meaningful manner86. Fregean perplexity is, I suppose, similar to the confusion with Tractarian objects, about which one also cannot assert anything meaningful, and yet those meaningless expressions such as “Objects are simple” serve as a medium to show something substantial about the world. This also means that a proponent of semantic atomism is bound to accept the hypothesis of substantial nonsense (the idea combatted by the so-called New Reading of the Tractatus). Summing up, although the notion of the object is, in the opinion of the author of the Tractatus, formal, and it means that nothing in the world corresponds to this concept, nevertheless an inquiry about the nature of objects is elucidatory. It reveals the truth about the world. Expressions which assert something about objects, strictly speaking, are nonsensical, but they are a necessary stage of seeing the 83 We could also act on the hint of Anscombe and Black and say that we are dealing here with the ambiguity of the concept of the object. “Object” from TLP 2.02 and “object” from TLP 4.126 must not be taken in the same sense. The latter sense is just technical and serves to explain some views on logic and, first of all, the difference between showing and saying, while the former sense is metaphysical, and it serves to explain the ontological structure of reality (Anscombe 1965, p. 122; Black 1964, p. 199). 84 “I do not want to say it is false to say concerning an object what is said here concerning a concept; I want to say it is impossible, senseless to do so” (Frege 1892/1984b, p. 189). 85 “The idea that what such an attempt (to assert of a concept what can only be asserted of an object) ends up saying is not merely false, but senseless, is one which runs throughout Frege’s writings (…). Frege commits himself to the conclusion that what he himself wants to say about concepts is also nonsensical” (Conant 2000, p. 224). 86 “It must indeed be recognized that here we are confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit cannot be avoided, if we say that the concept horse is not a concept” (Frege 1892/1984b, p. 185–186).

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world aright. According to the materialistic reading, this necessary stage includes asserting the feature of simplicity to objects. This claim, although nonsensical, allows to see the world aright – as the totality of physical particles. The proponents of the physicalist interpretation agree that there are no objects in the world (there are physical atoms, but not objects), but nevertheless they do not consider expressions about objects as pure nonsense that is comparable to childish babbling, or as a manifestation of a belief in a metaphysical myth. In their opinion these expressions form a necessary step in order to acknowledge the truth of materialism. Ad 3) Is the reference of names fixed by their use in propositions? According to Ishiguro, Wittgenstein was moved by the question as to how one identifies objects of reference? This question assumes the existence of a particular point of view – the point of view of a user of a language who has to identify the objects of reference. Hence, she must be thinking about early Wittgenstein as interested in topics engaging subjective points of views. I do not agree with this opinion: Wittgenstein tried in the Tractatus to look at the world sub specie aeterni (TLP 6.45), which means at the world as a whole, without any special, distinctive points of view, including the point of view of a user of language. The basic Tractarian idea is to describe the world objectively, as it is itself   87. The lack of a subjective perspective in Wittgenstein’s project of describing the world is especially clear in the thesis TLP 5.631: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.

In this thesis Wittgenstein examines a project which assumes the subjective perspective – the world as I have found it. But for him even if I tried to accomplish this task and if I described this world meaningfully, then I would not mention a subject in my book simply because a subject of representation does not exist. Wittgenstein’s striving for maximal objectivity is also clear in identification of meaningful

87 According to Shanker, Wittgenstein tried to replace “epistemological approaches to the major issues that had troubled philosophy with a strictly logical point of view” (Shanker 1986a, p. 28), Hacker sees “The Tractatus as an attempt to supply a complete answer to these questions [How a description of the world by means of a system of representation is possible? How symbols can say how the world is?] by developing a rigorously realist theory of meaning” (Hacker 1972, p. 33).

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discourse with the set of propositions of the natural sciences (TLP 4.11). It is clear that the natural sciences describe the world sub specie aeterni without singling out any special points of view, i.e. the world as it is, independently of human beings. The aim of science is to deliver a description which is valid and accessible to all rational beings. Ishiguro accuses the standard interpretation of offering no solution to the problem of the identification of objects. The following example will illustrate that the realistic standpoint does not have to offer any solution in this respect88. Let us imagine a room which one should describe without invoking the subjective perspective, so the way in which I come to the room and describe what I see is excluded. Therefore, the qualities of objects would not occur in the description of the room. This is in agreement with the standpoint of the Tractatus, according to which objects are colourless (TLP 2.0232) and do not have material properties. I cannot use descriptions of objects (such as: “an object standing next to the window”, “the heaviest object in the room”) either because descriptions pertain to material (external) properties, which are contingent. According to the Tractatus, objects form the substance of the world, and that substance does not determine the material properties (TLP 2.0231). Apart from that, in the description of the room one should pertain to existing objects, and if one identifies them by descriptions referring to contingent properties, one is always in danger of speaking about non-existing things. If one, in order to describe the room in an objective manner (this means without invoking any subjective perspective), cannot describe it without coming into it or by means of such object-descriptions, then it seems that an objective description of the room is impossible. Even if we managed to describe it properly, it would be by a pure and inconceivable accident. Normally, we would just use our imagination and the effect of our work would have nothing to do with the real room. What method of description of the room is then left for the realist? He should, so to say a priori, establish that in the description he wants to have names that never lose their designates. As we will see in the next chapter, that condition is fulfilled when one introduces simple objects as the basic structure of the world89.

88 The inspiration for the example comes from the Notebooks: “Let us imagine a white surface with irregular black spots on it. We now say: Whatever sort of picture arises in this way, I shall always be able to approximate as close as I like to its description by covering the surface with a suitably fine square network and saying of each square that it is white or is black” (NB 6.12.14, p. 35). 89 Anscombe 1965, p. 28; Black 1964, p. 28.

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As far as I am concerned, this suits the spirit of Wittgenstein’s line of argumentation from the Notebooks: It also seems certain that we do not infer the existence of simple objects from the existence of particular simple objects, but rather know them (…) as the end-product of analysis (NB 23.5.15, p. 50)90.

Proper names are names which designate simple objects. The conclusion is that a realistic, objective description of the room would include only proper names. That is what the Tractatus exactly says, we should just replace the name “room” with the name “the world”. The full description of the world consists in elementary sentences which are concatenations of names which designate simple objects. One could ask: “If we assume objects to be a requirement of the theory of language, then is it truly a realistic interpretation?”. It is obvious that in order to avoid this kind of accusation and in order to avoid going into (at least for me) the death alley of a Kantian reading of the Tractatus, the next step is necessary. If we said that Wittgenstein was not interested in the question as to what simple objects are, we would be left with a picture in which philosophy imposes some restrictions on reality, such as the existence of simple objects without considering if there truly is such a thing as a simple object91. This would clearly be a postulate of theoretical reason and we would represent a peculiar form of Kantianism92 instead of the coveted realism. What the realist, in my opinion, has to do – after having established the requirements of the theory of language postulating the existence of simple objects – is to inquire if any factual language corresponds to the requirements of the theory of language. In Timm Lampert’s opinion, Wittgenstein was not only aware of this problem, but also his answer was: “The language

90 According to Rom Harré, it also suits the practice of the physicists of the German tradition, with which Wittgenstein was acquainted: “The older generation of physicists held to a qualified realism, in that physics was importantly concerned with systems of masses which we know must exist from certain conditions on the meaningfulness of formulae expressing physical laws (…) In short the catalogue of elementary objects of the world is necessitated not by experience but by the forms of the laws themselves” (Harré 2001, p. 214–215). 91 An example of such a position: “Central to his metaphysical conception is the conviction that there must be such ultimate facts for there to be universe at all. But he will be wholly unable to provide a specimen of an ‘atomic fact’: that there must be atomic facts, if there are any facts at all, is known only a priori, through philosophical reflection” (Black 1964, p. 28); “All we can really know about objects is that they exist” (ibid., p. 57). 92 Peculiar, because Kantianism assumes postulates of practical, not theoretical reason.

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of mechanics suits the best the assumptions entailed by the theory of language”93. Hence, I will defend in the next chapter the physicalistic reading of the Tractatus. Going back to “the room example”, one must simply divide the space of the room into the smallest parts, i.e. points, then coordinate these points with names and finally determine the points by ascribing to them places in the space of the room and in time. The final result, i.e. an elementary sentence, would be, just as Wittgenstein wanted, a concatenation of names: a name for a material point and a spatial and time point [Nn, Sn, Tn]. That would also explain why in the system of the Tractatus there are facts (and not objects) which primarily exist and why simple objects necessarily exist in combination with other simples (TLP 2.0121). These convictions, according to the line of reasoning I am presenting here, would be a reflection of the Tractarian idea that a particle exists necessarily in a given space and time94. Let us now have a closer look at Ishiguro’s proposal, i.e. the thesis that the reference of a name is fixed in its usage in propositions. Ishiguro accepts the Fregean position which ascribes priority to the concept of truth over the concept of reference95. According to her, early Wittgenstein shared the view that first one understands the sense of a proposition and then, on the basis of this understanding, one can grip the reference of names occurring in the proposition. The identification of an object is secondary to the identification of the truth-conditions of the proposition96. I reject the conviction according to which that was Wittgenstein’s view. The indirect pieces of evidence in favour of such a rejection can be found 93 Lampert 2000, p. 228. “Mechanics determines the form of description of the world by saying: All propositions in a description of the world by saying: All propositions in a description of the world must be capable of being got in a given way from a number of given propositions – the axioms of mechanics. In this way it supplies the stones for building up natural science” (NB 6.12.14, p. 35). 94 “Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others” (TLP 2.0121). 95 “What is distinctive about my conception of logic comes out first in that I give top priority to the content of the word ‘true’ and then that I immediately introduce thoughts as that concerning which the question of truth arises. I therefore do not begin with concepts that I put together into thoughts or judgements. Rather, I obtain thoughtcomponents by analysing thoughts” (G. Frege, Aufzeichungen für Ludwig Darmstaedter, as cited in: Ricketts 2010, p. 155). 96 “The identity of the object referred to by a name cannot be settled prior to or independently of the sense of the propositions in which they are used, and agreement about the truth of some of these propositions” (Ishiguro 1969, p. 34).

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in Philosophical Investigations, which were, as the author admitted, at least partly intended as settling accounts with the claims of the Tractatus97. In PI, 115 Wittgenstein writes (most presumably) about his earlier standpoint that a certain “picture [of language] held us captive”. The picture he describes at the beginning of his later oeuvre: These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the words in language name objects a sentences are combinations of such names. —– In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands (PI, 1).

is strikingly similar to TLP 4.0311-4.031298. The rightness of later Wittgenstein’s critique of semantic atomism is of no importance here; what counts is that Wittgenstein himself understood his early work as an example of semantic atomism. We have every reason to think that later Wittgenstein understood his earlier book properly. There are many textual pieces of evidence from the Tractatus that suggest that early Wittgenstein accepted the so-called compositionality thesis, according to which the sense of a proposition is a product of the meaning of its constituents, and one understands the proposition because one understands its elements. The compositionality thesis stays in sharp opposition to the context principle. It is important to note that, according to semantic atomism, there are names which have reference, and the proposition has meaning derivatively because its names have secured reference. On the other hand, according to the anti-metaphysical reading, the direction is reversed: the basic unit of sense is the proposition, and names have reference because the process of analysis of the proposition was performed. This is why the proponents of semantic atomism advocate in favour of the compositionality thesis99, and the proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation back up the

97 “Then it suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old ideas and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my older way of thinking” (PI, p. 4). 98 One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs. The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives (TLP 4.0311-4.0312). 99 “Objects are the foundation for the theory of logical syntax of the Tractatus” (Malcolm 1986, p. 30).

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context principle100. It seems to me that early Wittgenstein rather takes sides with semantic atomism: [A proposition] is understood by anyone who understands its constituents (TLP 4.024). One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group – like a tableau vivant – presents a state of affairs (TLP 4.0311). A proposition must use old expressions to communicate a new sense (TLP 4.03).

In the atomistic view, constituents of a proposition have reference independently of the proposition. This idea seems to be confirmed in the Tractatus, when Wittgenstein describes the process of translation: When translating one language into another, we do not proceed by translating each proposition of the one into a proposition of the other, but merely by translating the constituents of propositions (TLP 4.025).

The opponents of semantic atomism would answer: how can a name refer outside the context of a proposition and how can the reference of a name be fixed before fixing a truth-value of a proposition if Wittgenstein wrote something exactly opposite in TLP 3.3 (“Only propositions have meaning. Only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have a meaning”)?101 In my opinion, in order to avoid this kind of tension between the theses of the Tractatus, one has to retain the compositionality thesis, which is better represented in the book and to re-interpret thesis TLP 3.3 itself so that it will not express the context principle. One way of reconciling TLP 3.3 with TLP 4.24 is proposed by Timm Lampert, and generally consists in putting TLP 3.3 in the broader context. Lampert mentions that the alleged context principle is preceded by thesis 100 “We have seen that Wittgenstein favours a ‘top-down’ view, on which the correlations between words and objects are affected by the ‘theory’ that is built into our use of the language as a whole” (Chlid 2011, p. 35). 101 Child accuses the proponents of the compositionality thesis that they cannot avoid regressus ad infinitum which would consist in the following line of reasoning: in order for a name to pick out the object (α), one has to identify the object of reference. In order to identify the object, one would have to have a thought about it (β). In order to have the thought (β) one would have to have another thought (γ), and so on, ad infinitum (Child 2011, p. 33). I tried to show earlier that the best strategy for an adherent of semantic atomism is to avoid considerations about the way one identifies an object. Semantic atomism in the Tractarian version is connected with the ideal of the impersonal representation of the world, a representation which does not single out any particular point of view.

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TLP 3.263, saying that “the meanings of primitive signs can be explained by means of elucidations”, which suggests that Wittgenstein is in this fragment of the Tractatus writing about propositions of ordinary language, and not about elementary propositions. Accordingly, the claim that “a name has meaning only in the nexus of a proposition” (TLP 3.3) would refer only to propositions of ordinary language. It would be just an indication that sometimes one clarifies the reference of names of ordinary language by a closer examination of the propositions in which a given name occurs. One should not, however, associate any solutions with respect to simple objects with this thesis102. In my explanation of TLP 3.3 I would indicate the Tractarian isomorphism between language and reality. In order for language to depict reality, the logical syntax of language must share its features with the features of reality. Thesis TLP 3.3 is, under such a reading, a linguistic formulation of thesis TLP 2.011, stating that it is essential to things that they occur in states of affairs. But what is meant here by “a state of affairs”? It should be brought to our attention that the concept as defined by Wittgenstein differs from the most popular examples from philosophical literature. At first glance one has the tendency to treat propositions such as: (a)  A book lies on a table as expressing states of affairs; in this case a state of affairs consisting of two objects (a book and a table) and the relation between them (lying on). It is clear, however, that one can think of a book independently of its lying on a table, therefore, when Wittgenstein was writing about objects and their necessary occurrence in combinations with other objects, he could not have had in mind states of affairs such as (a). A better example for a state of affairs would be: (b)  A yellow book An object having a material property (being a yellow book is a material property because the book could have a different colour and still be that book) is depicted by a proposition. On the other hand, what is depicted by a proposition is a state of 102 Lampert 2000, p. 306. He also suspects that the context principle in the Tractatus is not of Fregean provenience but betrays the engineering education of young Wittgenstein, in the sense that in TLP 3.3 names are compared to parts of a machine, i.e. parts which function and serve a purpose only as those parts, and not as independent objects (they, however, can exist independently or as parts of another machine): “Sie sind wie Teile einer Maschine, die zusammenpassen. Sie allein bilden einen Zusammenhang, ein Ganzes, weil jedes einzelne Teil schon die Form der andere Teile enthält” (ibid., p. 278–279).

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affairs, hence, an object having a material property is a state of affairs103. A material point in space and time is a state of affairs. In language, one expresses this state of affairs by means of an elementary proposition: [Nn, Sn, Tn]. In my view, TLP 3.3 expresses, then, in a formal mode what one expresses in a material mode when one says that a material object must be situated in space and time104. This way of reformulating TLP 3.3 has the one big advantage that it retains the coherency of the Tractatus. Please note that it was Ishiguro who challenged thus such a commonly accepted realist interpretation. The challenge was two-fold. First, Ishiguro asked what story a proponent of the realist theory of meaning can tell with respect to fixing the reference of names. My response consisted in proving that the proponent of the realist reading does not have to provide the way of identifying objects of reference. Objects are, according to Wittgenstein, postulates of the theory of meaningful language. What the realist should do is to search if any language corresponds to Wittgenstein’s requirement with respect to meaningful language. If that is true, then the reader of the Tractatus faces a dilemma: does Wittgenstein back up the compositionality thesis, which is well documented in the book, or the context principle, whose presence in the Tractatus is conditioned by a currently weakened reading of TLP 3.3, and in which Wittgenstein was interested in the question of the identification of objects of reference? In my opinion the choice is obvious and favours the compositionality thesis. That also means that TLP 3.3 does not express the context principle and the realist theory of meaning is not threatened. The main problem of the chapter was to answer the question as to why Wittgenstein identified the totality of true propositions with the propositions of natural science. My starting idea was the hypothesis that this claim follows from the materialism of the Tractatus. The basic accusation against such an explanation 103 Later, Wittgenstein realised that there was confusion in the Tractatus concerning the question: “what are facts: things like (a) or things like (b)?”. Later he began to differentiate between complex objects and facts. According to Wittgenstein, the main difference between facts and complexes are the following: (1) A complex can move from one place to another, but a fact cannot (PR, p. 301); (2) A complex is spatial, but not a fact (PR, p. 301); (3) A complex is composed of its parts, on the other hand, it is completely misleading to say that, e.g. the fact that this ball is red is composed of a ball and redness (PR, p. 302); (4) One can point to a complex, whereas one cannot point to a fact (or, in other words, pointing to a fact, contrary to pointing to a complex, means to assert something) (PR, p. 303). 104 Other commentators defending the realist reading of the Tractatus understand TLP 3.3 as a trivial statement that names are linguistic signs and as such are parts of propositions or language: “Wittgenstein’s thought may have been that names have no use except as parts of propositions” (Black 1964, p. 118). Similar: Fogelin 1987, p. 33.

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refers to the fact that the Tractatus is mainly a book on language and logic. There is a suspicion that its author was not interested in metaphysical considerations, including questions such as: “What does the world consist of?”. This suspicion is enhanced if one reads thesis TLP 3.3 as expressing the context principle. One of the consequences of this principle is that one cannot ask about the reference of a name outside the context of the system of representation. One could at best obtain the answer as to what objects are relatively to a given system of representation. The reality that is independent from us is inaccessible. Accordingly, I defended in section 1.1 the following theses: 1. Wittgenstein’s philosophical development shows a change of interest from topics about language to topics about the relation between language and reality. This means that early Wittgenstein did not avoid metaphysical questions such as: “What does reality consist of?”. 2. Assertions about objects, strictly speaking, are nonsensical (they say something which cannot be said but only shown), but nevertheless they are a medium to see the world properly. 3. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein supported the compositionality thesis from which it follows that propositions have sense because their components have reference, and these components retain reference also outside a proposition. The compositionality thesis supports semantic atomism and the realist theory of meaning, according to which reality has a structure that is fixed and independent from our systems of representation. These results, so to speak, pave for me the way to strictly metaphysical questions, such as: “What is there? What are the objects? What is their nature?” The validity of these inquiries is based on my conviction that, first of all, Wittgenstein was interested in such topics and, secondly, he believed that reality has a fixed structure, i.e. a structure that language mirrors and does not impose on the world. In the next section, 1.2, I shall discuss the most famous example of the ontological commitments of Wittgenstein’s views on language, i.e. his conviction that if sense is determinate, there have to be simple objects. In other words, on the next pages I shall analyse the Argument for Substance.

1.2  The Argument for Substance The focus of my interest in the next sections will be the theory that is often called metaphysical atomism. I shall elucidate what arguments Wittgenstein had in order to support his views that not only must there be objects in order for propositions to be meaningful, but also that these objects – the referents of names – have to be 49

simple. I shall present two arguments which we find in support of the existence of the simples (sections 1.2.1-1.2.2). Then (in section 1.2.3), I will discuss Zalabardo’s objections, as he argues that one of these arguments (the argument from thinking what is not) has no textual support in the Tractatus105. In this chapter I assume that, according to Wittgenstein, if a linguistic expression contains an empty name, then this expression is meaningless. This is the assumption which is the cause of Zalabardo’s opposition. Let us begin our considerations about the ontological commitments of the Tractatus with the theses called: “Argument for Substance”, or “The substance argument”106: 2.02 Objects are simple. 2.0201 Every statement about complexes can be resolved into a statement about their constituents and into the propositions that describe the complexes completely. 2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite. 2.0211 If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. 2.0212 In that case we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false).

In the Argument for Substance, in thesis TLP 2.0212, there occurs the notion of a picture: [If the world had no substance], we could not sketch any picture of the world (true or false) (TLP 2.0212).

According to the Tractatus’ picture theory of meaning, a proposition has sense because it is a picture of a state of affairs – there is a parallel between the elements of a state of affairs and the elements of the respective proposition (TLP 2.13); an elementary proposition is a nexus of names (TLP 4.22) and names denote objects (TLP 3.203). Therefore, a proposition has meaning because its names reach (or touch, using the Tractarian metaphor) objects which constitute a state of affairs expressed by an elementary proposition (TLP 2.15121; NB 25.9.14, p. 6). Names form a frame of a proposition. What is within the frame is irrelevant to the sense of a proposition, but it is clear that for a proposition to be a picture it has to have a frame. That briefly summarises the so-called picture theory of 105 “The line of reasoning under consideration supports the claim that the Tractatus advances a version of the Empty-Name Argument with the contention that this is the best way to interpret the substance passage. This exegetical claim is endorsed by many interpreters, and no serious alternative has been put forward. My goal is to argue that this reading is incorrect” (Zalabardo 2012a, p. 130). 106 Morris 2008, p. 355–363.

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meaning. The following table will help to see that without objects names would reach or touch nothing and a sentence would not depict a state of affairs. Table 1107 linguistic expression

relation between a proposition and a state of affairs is true if

state of affairs

“ABCD”

is false if

ACBD

“ABCD”

is nonsensical if

ABC

“ABCD”

ABCD

Wittgenstein discerns between the falsehood of a linguistic expression and its meaninglessness. A proposition is false when it expresses relations between existing objects but reflects them wrongly. A completely different situation takes place when an expression refers to non-existing objects – then it is meaningless. One can reformulate the Argument for Substance in the following way: P1 In order for a proposition to be meaningful, there must be objects P1.1 A meaningful proposition is a concatenation of names P1.2 A name represents an object P2 There are meaningful propositions C There are objects (from P1 and P2)

The excerpt of TLP 2.02-2.0212 is meant to have the structure in which TLP 2.02 is the thesis and TLP 2.021-2.0212 is the justification for the thesis. We saw that our final conclusion, which on the grounds of the theory of representation seemed to be plausible, reads as follows: C There are objects

But thesis 2.02 is the following: TLP 2.02: Objects are simple

The conclusion at which we have arrived is more moderate. It is something different to state: A)  In order for a language to sketch the world there must be objects than: B)  In order for a language to sketch the world there must be simple objects 107 I shall defend later, during the discussion on Zalabardo, that this draft is a justified picture of Wittgenstein’s views.

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The most intriguing question of the analysed fragment is, then: “Why must objects be simple?”. Why did Wittgenstein exclude the possibility of the existence of complex objects (TLP 2.021)? This exclusion is certainly contra-intuitive. If a claim is contra-intuitive, it does not mean that it is false, but certainly one has to give strong arguments to support it. In the next two sections I shall analyse two arguments that Wittgenstein could put forward in order to justify his point of view.

1.2.1 The argument from the false judgement, or thinking what is not108 The reason for negating the existence of complex objects was provided by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, 39: The sword Nothung consists of parts combined in a particular way. If they are combined differently, Nothung does not exist. But it is clear that the sentence “Nothung has a sharp blade” has a sense, whether Nothung is still whole or has already been shattered. But if “Nothung” is the name of an object, this object no longer exists when Nothung is shattered into pieces; and as no object would then correspond to the name, it would have no meaning. But then the sentence “Nothung has a sharp blade” would contain a word that had no meaning, and hence the sentence would be nonsense. But it does have a sense; so there must still be something corresponding to the words of which it consists. So the word “Nothung” must disappear when the sense is analysed and its place be taken by words which name simples. It will be reasonable to call these words the real names.

Wittgenstein in this fragment supposes that it is possible to have a proposition p which 1) has sense and 2) contains a complex name (for example: “ABC”) which denotes a complex object (for instance ABC). But since abc is complex, it is always possible that it would decompose and cease to exist (to, for instance, AB and C).

108 C.f. Malcolm 1987, p. 43. Zalabardo calls it “the Empty Name Argument” (Zalabardo 2012, p. 120).

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TABLE 2 Before decomposition

proposition p “ABC DEF”

state of affairs ABC DEF

After decomposition

“ABC DEF”

AB C DEF

We would have, then, a strange example of proposition p which would be the nexus of names without a denotation. We have learnt from TABLE 1 that if names denoted nothing, then p could have not depicted the world and could have not been a picture of a state of affairs, so p after decomposition of the complex ABC would have been meaningless (it would have ceased to be a proposition). The meaningfulness of p would have been a contingent fact. One can accept this conclusion and state that the fact that propositions are meaningful is contingent, or one could change the premise (2) and say that even if complex names occur in propositions, they do not denote complex objects but rather something more primary. Obviously, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein (as he himself reported in PI, 39 and earlier in the Notebooks) chose the second solution. Independently of the fact whether the sword Nothung exists or not, the expression: “Nothung has a sharp blade” is a proposition. In Investigations we read: “It is clear that the sentence ‘Nothung has a sharp blade’ has a sense, whether Nothung is still whole or has already been shattered”109, and in the Notebooks: “Obviously propositions are possible which contain no simple signs”110. One of the possible views on the proposition in the Tractatus is that it is something which is either true or false. From this it follows that a linguistic sign which is neither true nor false is not a proposition. According to Wittgenstein’s take, linguistic expressions about Nothung, a non-existing object, are nevertheless propositions. This means that they have a truth-value. One of the explanations for this fact could be a straightforward conclusion that, apparently, in Wittgenstein’s view, there are possible propositions containing empty names. The second explanation retains the claim that the meaningfulness of a proposition depends on the fact that all of its names “touch” reality. It states, however, that, apparently, linguistic expressions containing the name “Nothung” are not about Nothung but about something else, i.e. something that lasts despite the decomposition of Nothung. As we will see, Zalabardo thinks that the Tractatus follows the first path of reasoning. I shall argue that early Wittgenstein chose the latter option, according to which as long as a denotatum is a complex object (susceptible to decomposition), there is always a 109 PI, 39. 110 NB 9.5.15, p. 46.

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danger that a proposition will lose its sense, and that is the conclusion Wittgenstein wants to avoid. In our analysis we should get to objects which are in no danger of decomposition, i.e. which are indestructible111. These are the simple objects. In my opinion, Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that the real reference of the name “Nothung” is not a complex object such as the sword which bears this name but the particles which Nothung is composed of. They last even though Nothung has ceased to exist. We could say that the Tractatus in effect enacts the law which allows to put in the right column of TABLE 2 only single letters (A, B, C, etc.). TABLE 3 Before decomposition

proposition p ABC DEF

state of affairs ABCDEF

After decomposition

ABC DEF

DACFBE

The solution presented in TABLE 3 shows that for the sense of p, decomposition of ABC is irrelevant. On the other hand, the cost of the solution is that only simple objects are allowed in the right column by the theory of language. In other words, entities which truly deserve the title of “object” are those that are insusceptible to destruction, i.e. simple ones.

1.2.2  The argument from the determinateness of sense The second argument is well summed up by Peter Hacker: “If the world lacked a substance consisting of objects, then whether a proposition had a sense i.e. was true or false, would depend upon whether another proposition were true i.e., a proposition asserting the existence of a complex”112. Two notions are essential to Wittgenstein’s second argument: the concept of bivalence and the concept of the determinateness of sense; both are connected to each other. The principle of bivalence says that every proposition has exactly one truth-value; it is either true or false. According to TLP 2.21, “a picture agrees with reality or fails to agree; it is correct or incorrect, true or false”. A proposition is a kind of picture (TLP 4.01) and it is true or false only “in virtue of being a picture of reality” (TLP 4.06). Hence, the bivalence principle is held in the Tractatus. In Wittgenstein’s system of language there are two kinds of propositions: truth-functions 111 Of course, one should not mistakenly identify a physical decomposition with the metaphysical one. At least for now I leave the question if being physically indestructible is a sufficient condition for being a simple object aside. 112 Hacker 1986a, p. 79.

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on elementary propositions and elementary propositions (which can also be seen as truth-functions on themselves). The truth or falsehood of truth-functions on elementary propositions depends on the truth-value of the respective elementary propositions. On what does the meaning of elementary propositions depend? If the bivalence principle is to be held, then the meaning of an elementary proposition is determined only by a state of affairs expressed by the respective elementary proposition. That requirement could be called the requirement of a determinate sense113. The meaning of an elementary proposition cannot be dependent on other propositions’ meanings (TLP 5.134). If asked if an elementary proposition “ABCD” is true, one cannot answer: “That depends on what you mean by ‘A’ or ‘B’ ”? For that to be possible, as Wittgenstein puts it, “a proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no” (TLP 4.023). What is the hidden condition imposed on reality by the requirement of a determinate sense? As the Tractatus states it, it is the existence of simple objects: The requirement that simple signs be possible is the requirement that sense be determinate (TLP 3.23).

In other words, Wittgenstein’s demand consists in the idea that the truth-conditions of any elementary proposition would never be determinate if reality were not discrete114. I shall explain this on an example taken from everyday language. According to Wittgenstein, all propositions of this language “are in perfect logical order” (TLP 5.5563). This means that the bivalence principle and the requirement of a determinate sense also apply to this language115. On the other hand, it is clear (and it was clear also for Wittgenstein – c.f. TLP 3.323) that everyday language is full of ambiguities and vagueness. Let us take, for example, the proposition: (A)  This paint is green There are, of course, cases when it is clear if we are dealing with green paint or not. There are also situations when we would hesitate: “Is that shade of colour green or perhaps yellow?” and we would ask for a definition: “That depends on what you mean by green?”. That would also be a sign that the proposition (A) did not restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no, and the requirement of a determinate sense

113 In this work I shall use the term: “a determinate sense“ synonymously with the term: “the definite sense”. 114 “The idea would be that the truth-condition of a sentence could never be perfectly sharp unless reality were discrete” (Carruthers 1990, p. 47). 115 There cannot be any truth-value gaps in everyday language (Hacker 1986b, p. 117).

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would not be fulfilled116. If we were always in a need of an additional explanation if a given concept applied to a concrete situation, this would have unacceptable consequences for Wittgenstein’s system. It would mean the impossibility of elementary propositions, i.e. propositions whose meaning is independent of any other propositions (definitions, conceptual clarifications, hints as to how to apply concepts, etc.) and whose truth depends only upon the agreement with reality117. That is why Wittgenstein identified the requirement of a determinate sense with the existence of the simples. The picture behind this identification is a fine-grained reality, where it is ultimately decided where the last shade of yellow is and where the first shade of green begins. Having once established the border between the colours green and yellow, one avoids the danger of ambiguity. A fine-grained reality was, for Wittgenstein, the necessary condition for linguistic expressions to be sharp. This, in turn, was the condition for a meaningful language, i.e. a language that is able to express states of affairs. The idea of a fine-grained reality was developed later, in Some Remarks on Logical Form, by the notion of degrees of a quality of a given colour. One degree of a quality of a colour could be compared with a simple object. This is just an example, and I do not mean by this that simples are simple units of perception, but it does show well what stands behind the idea of the determinateness of sense and why Wittgenstein, in the Argument for Substance, passed from the antecedent: “If the world had no substance” and by that he meant: “If the world did not consist of simple objects” or “If the reality was not full grained” to the conclusion: “then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true” (TLP 2.0211). It is quite easy to check if the substance consisting of complex objects would fulfil the requirement of a determinate sense. A very simple example will show that it would not. According to TLP 2.0201, every statement about complexes can be resolved into statements about their constituents. If the name “ABC” denotes a complex ABC, then one can analyse the proposition p in which “ABC” occurs by means of propositions in which there occur names denoting objects A, B and B. For example, we could spell out the entailments of the proposition: p: “This chair is wooden”

116 “If the proposition ‘The book is on the table’ has a clear sense, then I must, whatever is the case, be able to say whether the proposition is true or false” (NB 20.6.15, p. 67). 117 “The truth of a proposition containing a complex expression will depend upon the truth of the propositions into which it is analysable. But analysis must come to an end (…) with propositions whose truth depends only upon agreement with reality” (Hacker 1986b, p. 123).

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in the following way: q: “The backrest of the chair is wooden” r: “The seat of the chair is wooden” s: “The legs of the chair are wooden” The truth-value of proposition p depends on the truth-values of propositions q, r and s. This clearly shows that p is not an elementary proposition. If there were no simple objects, we could say the same about q, r and s. Their truth-value would depend on some other propositions. The analysis would never end and we would never arrive at a proposition whose truth would depend on no other proposition, but just on its eventual accordance with the respective state of affairs. The other way to prove that the analysis has to have an end was borrowed by me from Ernest Sosa118. His proof was put in quite a different context, namely his considerations on the nature of subjects, but his main argument can still be interpreted as an objection to the idea that the world consists only of complex objects. The greatest difference between us is that he takes the notion of simplicity to be metaphysical, therefore, he believes that for every object x, when x is material, then x is metaphysically complex, whereas I take the notion of simplicity to be physical, therefore I leave the decision as to whether something is complex and could be reduced and identified with a lower micro-level of reality to the scientists, i.e. I also apply Wittgenstein’s tactics. Because Sosa excludes that there is such a thing as a simple, material object, he uses his argument as an argument against materialism119. Having in mind this difference, let us take, as an example, a complex object: Z.Z is in fact a complex of parts, let us say: X1, Y1, and Z1. One could say that Z is in fact a fiction representing certain other entities: what there truly is are objects: X1, Y1 and Z1. But if there are no simple objects then even though X1, Y1 and Z1 are constituents of the complex, they are complexes too, and they are as fictitious as object Z. From this it would follow that every object is fictional and represents other entities. The problem is that there would be no entities which would be represented by some complexes at a higher level of reality and at the same time which would not be representatives for objects of a lower level. The hierarchy of levels would be endless and there would be no genuine, nonfictitious objects. This conclusion is a very high price to pay for an opponent of the existence of simple objects. The argument shows, above all, that having

118 Sosa 1997. 119 Ibid., p. 74.

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a choice between two worldviews: the first, assuming that there are only complex objects, and the second, assuming that there are only simple objects; one should choose the latter option. To say that in order for a proposition to be meaningful there have to be objects is quite trivial. After all, a proposition is a linguistic expression which is true or false; the truth or falsity of a proposition consists in its accordance with a state of affairs, which is a combination of objects. The demand for the existence of objects seems to follow from the definitions that the Tractatus accepts. But in the last two sections I have tried to show that Wittgenstein’s claim is much more substantial – it says that reality consists of simple objects. If the linguistic theory of the Tractatus is to work, then one has to accept quite a specific assumption about reality, e.g. that it is discrete. The Argument for Substance is, hence, a good example of the ontological commitments of the Tractatus. Moreover, it is also a crucial step in our inquiries about the worldview of young Wittgenstein. If we have established that the world is a fine-grained reality of simple objects, then the next question is quite natural: “what is the example of the simple object?” Before I analyse the possible answers to this question, I want to respond to the objections with respect to one of the arguments in favour of the existence of simple objects as raised by José Zalabardo.

1.2.3  Zalabardo’s objections Zalabardo contests the hypothesis that the Argument for Substance expresses the Empty-Name Argument (ENA) or, as Malcolm called it, the argument from thinking what is not120 – the line of reasoning which makes use of the consequence that is inacceptable to Wittgenstein that if objects of reference were destructible, then it would be possible that propositions were neither true nor false – because for Wittgenstein propositions are always either true or false, so then the only protection from the unwanted consequence is establishing that objects of reference cannot be susceptible to destruction. Zalabardo reconstructs the ENA in the following way: (1*) “If the value that a name of a proposition actually receives under the proxy mapping did not exist, then the proposition, with the sense it actually has, would not receive a truth-value”121. (Premise)

120 “There is no good reason for thinking that the Tractatus puts forward a version of the Empty Name Argument, and, in particular, that the substance passage should not be read in this way” (Zalabardo 2012a, p. 120). 121 Ibid., p. 128.

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where the proxy mapping is “the mapping of names onto constituents of states of affairs”122. From (1*) follows the following thesis: (2*) “If the names of a proposition receive contingently existing values under the proxy mapping, then there will be possible situations that make the proposition neither true or false”123. Together with the second premise: (3*) “If a proposition has sense, then there is no possible situation that would fail to make the proposition either true or false”124. they make up an argument for the simples: the names of a proposition have to receive necessarily existent values. According to Zalabardo, we have no reason to claim that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein held claim (1*). The argument itself is valid, but it depends on the validity of the premise (1*). For many Wittgensteinians this premise is already contained in the picture theory of meaning. It states that in a proposition the names of the proposition are coordinated with objects of the respective state of affairs. If the elements of the proposition are combined in the same way as the elements of a state of affairs, then the state of affairs is the sense that the proposition in question expresses. Zalabardo calls this rule the Proxy Principle125, but he is convinced that the Proxy Principle is neutral with respect to the question whether an expression with empty names is false or neither true nor false126. He discerns between the gappy and the gapless account. According to the gappy account, in a possible situation if constituents of an actual state of affairs would cease to exist, this situation would make the proposition expressing the actual state of affairs neither true nor false. According to the gapless account, in a similar situation the proposition would be false. The gappy account is, in contrast to the gapless account, in accordance with (1*). Zalabardo however, points out that in contrast to the gappy account, it is the

122 123 124 125

Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 126. “Proxy principle: The sense of an elementary proposition p is constituted by the state of affairs in which the values of the names of p under the proxy mapping are combined in the same way in which the names are combined in p” (Ibid., p. 122). 126 “The principle has no direct consequences concerning how the pairing of a proposition with a state of affairs determines the truth conditions of the proposition” (Ibid., p. 128).

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gapless account that finds confirmation in the texts of the Tractatus127. Above all, he cites in this context thesis TLP 3.24: A proposition that mentions a complex will not be nonsensical, if the complex does not exist, but simply false.

This quotation suggests that Wittgenstein was not troubled by the idea of a name without a referent. If the Tractatus supported the gapless account, then it could not have stated what the premise (1*) expresses. If it were true, then we would have to accept that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus made no use of the Empty-Name Argument. One possible solution for Zalabardo’s adversary is to limit TLP 3.24 as referring only to propositions about complexes, and to claim that TLP 3.24 says nothing about elementary propositions. Then the case whether the gappy account holds for elementary propositions would be open. But, responds Zalabardo, this restricted reading of TLP 3.24 is probably motivated only by the desire to save the gappy account with respect to elementary propositions. No independent reason speaks in favour of the restricted reading of TLP 3.24 – the gapless account is still the most probable interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views128. The other solution is to claim that (1*) is proved by the Argument for Substance. But, according to Zalabardo, and I agree with him in this respect, it is a helpless solution. It is rather – and one can notice it also in my interpretation – that the premise (1*) is the silent assumption of the argument; the thesis which helps us explain the unobvious dialectics of TLP 2.02-2.0212 rather than the conclusion that was being proved by the excerpt in question. But do we truly have reasons to see the hidden premise (1*) behind the formulations of the Argument of Substance, asks Zalabardo? What is the motive that inclines us to interpret TLP 2.02-2.0212 in accordance with ENA? Again, in the opinion of Zalabardo there is no such independent reason129. On the contrary, the best way to read this fragment of

127 “It is undeniable that the Tractatus endorses a view that is strongly reminiscent of the gapless account” (Ibid., p. 128). 128 “Defending this strategy would require providing support for the claim that Wittgenstein actually endorsed the gappy account, and for the corresponding limitation on the scope of 3.24. The crucial point here is that the requisite support cannot be supplied by Wittgenstein’s commitment to the Proxy Principle. The Proxy Principle is irrelevant to the scope of 3.24 as to the truth of 1*” (Ibid., p. 129). 129 “We have reached a situation in which we have no independent reason for claiming that the Tractatus endorses the Empty-Name Argument. This claim will be unsupported unless we can establish that the best way to read the substance passage is as

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the Tractatus, according to his interpretation, is in the context of Wittgenstein’s polemics with Russell’s theory of judgement. Let us analyse Zalabardo’s defence. My question is whether TLP 3.24 truly confirms the gapless account? It was already answered by David Pears that TLP 3.24 rather states the problem as to why propositions about complexes which do not exist are false in contrast to propositions about simples which are nonsensical when they contain empty names. Or, in other words, why do propositions about a complex breach the wall of a theory of representation which assumes the existence of referents for all names of a proposition? According to Pears, the answer is similar to what we read in PI, 39. The surface contradiction is the consequence of the fact that the names of complex things in fact refer to respective simple objects: “The existence of the complex simply gave ‘a’ [a name of a complex] a short cut to its sense, which truly depends on the existence of the simple objects mentioned in its complete analysis”130. Zalabardo answers that this restricted (in a sense that it is limited only to propositions about complexes) lecture already assumes what should be proved – the truth of (1*) and the existence of ENA in the Tractatus. I do not think that Pears’ interpretation assumes the truth of (1*); it merely shows that TLP 3.24 is neutral with respect to the gappy and the gapless account. Both the adherent of the gapless account, like Zalabardo, as well as the adherent of the gappy account, like Pears, are able to reconcile this thesis with their reading of the Tractatus. In the case of the interpretation that I defend in this dissertation, there is nothing surprising in the claim that a proposition which mentions a complex that does not exist is false, and not nonsensical. This is the solution that someone who accepts the conclusion of ENA, i.e. that only simple objects are the objects of reference, should expect. For instance, the proposition: “Nothung has a sharp blade” after decomposition of Nothung is false. The name: “Nothung”, according to the view which assumes the gappy account, refers to the particles that constitute the sword. These particles exist even after the decomposition of Nothung. However, they stand in different relations to each other than previously. The name “Nothung” after decomposition of the sword still refers to existing objects, but it assumes a combination of these objects that does not exist. Hence, used in a proposition it makes it a wrong model of reality – a false proposition.

advancing the Empty-Name Argument. I am going to argue that this is not the case” (Ibid., p. 132). 130 Pears 1987, p. 78.

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At best, TLP 3.24 is neutral with respect to the gappy and the gapless account. In my opinion, however, the burden of proof is on Zalabardo’s side and not on Pears’. He should prove that the gapless account is the better reading of TLP 3.24. It is simply because TLP 3.24 when read at face value refers only to propositions that mention complexes. The most apparent interpretation is the restricted lecture of this thesis, which points out that Wittgenstein’s statement (that along with the disappearance of the referent of a name a proposition which contains the name does not suddenly become meaningless but is false) applies only to propositions about complexes. The restricted reading finds its support in the broader context of the Tractatus: thesis TLP 3.25 that follows directly after TLP 3.24 refers to an analysis into elementary propositions (“A proposition has one and only one complete analysis”). Hence, Wittgenstein’s interest in this part of the Tractatus concentrates around propositions about complexes and the question as to what differentiates them from elementary propositions (and as Pears’ interpretation states, these differences are: I. Propositions about complexes have indeterminate sense, and II. A proposition about a complex in a situation when the referent of a complex sign does not exist is false and not nonsensical131). There is no need, in my opinion, for Pears to additionally back up his limited reading of TLP 3.24 and not take the formulations of TLP 3.24 at face value. It is rather Zalabardo who should show that TLP 3.24 also refers to elementary propositions, and that would be difficult if we take into account the Tractarian theory of representation (which Zalabardo calls the Proxy Principle). Perhaps this is why he softens the meaning of the Proxy Principle: The Proxy Principle specifies how an elementary proposition is paired with the state of affairs that determines its sense. Hence it has consequences concerning whether a proposition would have, in non-actual situations, the sense it actually has. But the principle has no direct consequences concerning how the pairing of a proposition with a state of affairs determines the truth conditions of the proposition (Zalabardo 2012a, p. 128).

If I am right in supposing that the Proxy Principle in Zalabardo’s paper is the counterpart of the Tractarian picture theory of meaning, then one has to notice that the concept of a proposition as a picture or as a model entails the gappy account that is contested by Zalabardo. As I have said, the picture can mirror reality only because of the “feelers” with which a proposition “touches” reality132. Wittgenstein says that a proposition “is laid against reality like a measure” (TLP 2.1512). This metaphor makes sense only under the condition that “the end-points of the graduating lines 131 Ibid., p. 76. 132 “That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it” (TLP 2.1511).

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actually touch reality” (TLP 2.15121), i.e. speaking less metaphorically, only if the bearers of names exist. Obviously, Zalabardo is aware of the Tractarian conception of the proposition as a picture that includes not only a combination of signs but also pairings of these with their bearers; it is the notion of proposition which assumes that a proposition has its sense necessarily133. He admits that this view on the proposition confirms premise (1*), but, in his opinion, if one accepts this notion of a proposition, then ENA does not work. The premise (1) of ENA is the following: “If the value that a name of a proposition actually receives under the proxy mapping did not exist, then the proposition would not have the sense that it actually has”134. The second premise of ENA, according to Zalabardo, states that propositions cannot have their senses contingently. In Zalabardo’s opinion, if one takes the notion of proposition on which a proposition has its sense necessarily, then one should rather formulate the premise (1) as stating that if a bearer of a name of proposition p did not exist, then there would be no proposition at all135. Under this reading, however, there is no disagreement or contradiction between premises (1) and (2), and one does not have to conclude that the objects of reference have to be simple objects. The paradox is established only when one reads premise (1) in a way that does not assume the notion of proposition which includes not only combinations of signs, but also their pairings with their bearers. The problem for a proponent of the presence of ENA in the Tractatus consists in the fact that if he decided, in order to save the validity of ENA, to resign from this understanding of a proposition, then he would lose the independent reason to think that early Wittgenstein accepted the gappy account. The dilemma that Zalabardo presents could be summed up in the following way: if one wants to defend the presence of ENA in the Tractatus, then one has to show that Wittgenstein accepted the premise (1*) of ENA and, consequently, the gappy account. One finds the argument in favour of the gappy account in the Tractarian theory of proposition, but if one accepts the notion of a proposition as it is in the picture theory of meaning, then ENA is not valid and its conclusion is not entailed by its premises; there is nothing paradoxical in the premises that would demand a special solution, such as the requirement that only simple objects can be referents of names. On the other hand, if one takes a different notion 133 “Some passages suggest a conception of propositions according to which they include, not only the combinations of signs, but also the pairings of these with their images under the proxy mapping” (Zalabardo 2012a, p. 124). 134 Ibid., p. 122. 135 “In the counterfactual situations in which the images of the names of p under the proxy mapping do not exist, p, thus constructed, does not exist either” (Ibid., p. 124).

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of the proposition (which suggests that a proxy mapping is a result of an arbitrary decision), then ENA is valid – the conclusion follows from the premises, but there is no reason to accept the truthfulness of the premise (1*) and, consequently, the gappy account. In response to Zalabardo, I would generally answer that Wittgenstein’s later assessment of his own earlier argument should not be so easily disposed136. The pieces of evidence taken from the aforementioned PI, 39, but also from PR, 72137, give us not only the essence of ideas standing behind the Tractatus but also a hint of how one should solve the dilemma with which Zalabardo is facing the proponents of ENA. As far as I understand Zalabardo, he complains that there is no contradiction between the following premises: 1) If the value that a name of a proposition actually receives under the proxy mapping did not exist, then there would be no proposition. 2) Propositions cannot have sense contingently. Which is a paradox that would demand a special restriction as to what objects can be the bearers of names. I think that PI, 39 shows what the paradox consists in. The value of a name in the example considered by later Wittgenstein is Nothung. According to the premise 1) and to the conception of proposition that follows from the picture theory, if Nothung did not exist, then there would be no proposition containing the name “Nothung”. The paradox consists in the fact that these propositions clearly exist! According to the gappy account, as long as Nothung exists, such a linguistic expression138 as: “Nothung has a sharp blade” is a proposition, but after decomposition of Nothung the linguistic expression: “Nothung has a sharp blade” is no longer a proposition. That conclusion seems to be for Wittgenstein unacceptable. Disagreement with exactly this consequence led him to the postulate of the existence of simple objects. Therefore, I would formulate the premises of ENA in the following way:

136 Zalabardo claims that “later” Wittgenstein does not present “a line of reasoning” of early Wittgenstein but a later explanation of an earlier held and unsupported conviction (C.f. Zalabardo 2012a, p. 148). 137 “What I once called ‘objects’, simples, were simply what I could refer to without running the risk of their possible non-existence; i.e. that for which there is neither existence or non-existence, and that means: what we can speak about no matter what may be the case” (PR, p. 72). 138 I use the term: “linguistic expression” as including both meaningful combinations of signs (propositions) as well as meaningless combinations of signs (nonsense).

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1) If the value that a name of a proposition actually receives under the proxy mapping did not exist, then there would be no proposition. 2) Linguistic expressions cannot have sense contingently (this premise excludes the possibility that a proposition just ceases to exist, it becomes merely nonsense)139. These two premises do contradict each other. They demand a solution, namely blocking the possibility of the antecedent of the first premise, which is the possibility that the value of a name ceases to exist. This is exactly what ENA concludes: the referents of names should be indestructible, simple objects. Under my proposal, ENA is not only valid, but the notion of the proposition it uses is such that it gives us reasons to accept the premise 1). Finally, I want to argue against Zalabardo’s conclusions, indirectly, by showing the consequences of the point of view in which the Tractatus favours the gapless account. Nonsense, according to Conant’s description, consists in a case in which linguistic signs do not produce any sentence140. One can ask what can go wrong in constructing propositions? When the linguistic signs fail to produce any sense? It seems that if we accept Zalabardo’s remarks (that a proposition in which empty names occur is nevertheless meaningful), then the only thing that can go wrong with respect to the sense of a proposition is when a linguistic sign is used “otherwise than in its proper semantic role”141. It seems that Wittgenstein’s examples of nonsense – “Socrates Plato” or “Socrates is identical”142 – confirm that theory. In order not to speak nonsensically, it is enough to be careful with the semantic roles of expressions. For example, “( ) is identical” is a two-argument predicate; it marks a symmetry relation that holds between objects. In Wittgenstein’s example: “Socrates is identical”, the role of this particular predicate is violated. “( ) is identical”

139 The other steps of ENA are the following (I reformulate the argument given by: Zalabardo 2012a, p. 122–123): 3) If a bearer of a name of a proposition was susceptible to decomposition, then it would be possible that a linguistic expression has sense contingently. 4) (from 2, 3) Therefore names of a proposition cannot refer to objects susceptible to decomposition. 5) Complexes are susceptible to decomposition (premise) 6) (from 4,5) Therefore names refer to simple, indestructible objects. 140 “Mere nonsense – a string composed of signs in which no symbol can be perceived, and which hence has no discernible logical syntax” (Conant 2000, p. 191). One of the examples of a symbol was, for Wittgenstein, a sentence (TLP 3.31). That is why I write about nonsense as a collection of signs which does not produce any sentence. 141 McGuinness 2002, p. 89. 142 NM, p. 115; TLP 5.4733.

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pretends here to look like a relation of a name (Socrates) falling under a concept. Hence the speaker of this expression does not succeed in producing a thought143. But if this is all one has to give attention to in order to speak meaningfully, then why, according to Wittgenstein’s advice, should we restrict ourselves to expressing propositions of natural science (TLP 6.53)? Why does only natural science succeed in producing thoughts? If a sentence is constructed in accordance with logical syntax, then, for example, a sentence taken from a work of fiction such as: “Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep” should be treated as meaningful. Indeed, it made sense to Frege. It did not refer to anything (in Fregean terminology this means that it lacks truth-value) but, according to him, the lack of truth-value has no impact on the sense of a proposition144. Clearly Wittgenstein, who for some reason dismissed even perfectly logically constructed sentences of ethics and aesthetics as senseless, did not adopt the Fregean attitude in this respect. This is why, in my opinion, we have to complement the Tractarian theory of sense so that it contains, apart from the requirement of being an expression constructed in accordance with logical syntax, also the requirement of the existence of referents of all elements of a proposition. In other words, I do not agree with the pervasive interpretation of the Tractatus according to which the only source of nonsense is the usage of expressions not in accordance with their roles in logical syntax. I emphasise also the (frequently omitted) second source of nonsense, i.e. usage of empty names in propositions145. One reads about this source of nonsense in TLP 5.4733. According to this thesis, the fact that a proposition does not have sense could also be caused by the fact that “wir einigen seiner Bestandteile keine Bedeutung gegeben haben” (TLP 5.4733). There is no reason why we should not understand here “Bedeutung” as in the rest of the text, i.e. as the concept that is synonymous with the concept of reference. In other words, theses like TLP 5.4733

143 Or, as Hacker puts it: “The reason why ‘Socrates is identical’ is nonsense is that we have given no meaning to ‘identical’ as an adjective” (Hacker 2000, p. 358). 144 “The sentence ‘Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ obviously has sense. But since it is doubtful whether the name ‘Odysseus’, occurring therein, means anything, it is also doubtful whether the whole sentence does” (Frege 1892/1984a, p. 162). 145 In the recent literature also Michael Morris underlines the importance of this second condition: “Languages depend for their meaningfulness on correlations between certain linguistic items, on the one hand, and extra-linguistic terms, on the other (…) The extra linguistic items with which linguistic items have to be correlated for languages to be meaningful are items in the world (objects)” (Morris 2008, p. 60–61).

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or TLP 6.53146 indirectly provide us independent reasons to think that the Tractatus holds the gappy account. If there are such reasons, then one should not reject the premise (1*) of ENA (under Zalabardo’s formulation). Although Zalabardo’s objections against the presence of the Empty-Name Argument in the Tractatus are very challenging and demand a closer look at what Wittgenstein truly had to say in the Argument for Substance (from which one can only profit), they cannot, however, question the claim that the argument from thinking what is not is one of the reasons for which Wittgenstein stated that reality consists of simple objects.

Summary One of the main theses of my interpretation of the Tractatus is that one should take the Tractarian identification of true propositions with propositions of natural science seriously. In this chapter I tried to present what the consequences are of a serious reading of TLP 4.11. It is, for instance, admitting to the fact that early Wittgenstein was a proponent of ontological materialism. In this chapter I have attempted to prove the truthfulness of this hypothesis. In the first part of the chapter I showed that in contrast to popular opinion, Wittgenstein was interested in metaphysical topics (sections: 1.1.1; 1.1.3). This interest in the “nature of being” was the consequence of his initial logical inquiries into the nature of the proposition. According to the picture theory of meaning, a proposition is a model of the respective state of affairs. This theory introduces the idea of a comparison between a proposition and reality and, consequently, the idea of reality (hence the presence in the Tractatus of such notions as the notion of fact, state of affairs or the substance of the world). Naturally, the claim that the picture theory of meaning brings reality into the scope of interests of young Wittgenstein depends on our decision as to how we classify this theory: is it anti-realist (agnostic to the question as to what objects of reference are in themselves) or realist (assuming that objects are ready-to-be-named bits of reality that are independent of any system of representation)? Only if one considers the picture theory of meaning as a realist one is one entitled to say that metaphysical problems were of early Wittgenstein’s concern. That is why in sections 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 I took up Ishiguro’s challenge, according to which the slogan: “meaning is use” was present already in the early writings of Wittgenstein. I hope to show that, in contrast to

146 In the Notebooks, on the other hand, Wittgenstein wrote: “We must be able to construct the simple functions because we must be able to give each sign a meaning” (NB 15.4.16, p. 71).

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Ishiguro’s opinion, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus held in fact the compositionality thesis which supports a realist reading of the picture theory of meaning. In the second part of the chapter (section 1.2) I tried to show what the ontological commitments of the Tractarian theory of proposition were. I wanted to answer the question as to what it means that Wittgenstein raised ontological topics in the Tractatus. In my opinion, it means that he realised that in order for his theory of language to work (a theory that entails that language consists of elementary propositions that are logically independent from one another and their truth-functions), reality has to be determined in a certain way; it has to consist of what he calls: “simple objects”. I also think that because he believed that he had correctly described the functioning of language, he inferred that the world indeed consists of simple objects. In support of my hypothesis I invoked two arguments in favour of the existence of simple objects (sections 1.2.1 and 1.2.2). The discussion regarding Zalabardo, who rejects the idea that the Empty-Name Argument is in the Tractatus, brought in effect another ontological commitment of early Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, namely the requirement that in order for a linguistic expression to convey sense, all of its constituents have to refer to existing objects (section 1.2.3). This means that the requirement that all constituents of a linguistic expression occur in their proper syntactical roles is not enough to state the meaningfulness of the given linguistic expression. In other words, ontology enters into Tractarian considerations through the fact that in order to state that an expression conveys content, one has to reach beyond propositions and look out into reality. The intention of this chapter was to explain why Wittgenstein identified all true propositions with propositions of natural science. My hypothesis includes the fact that Wittgenstein was an ontological materialist. I defended the thesis according to which he indeed fought with metaphysical questions. My investigations in this chapter have resulted, briefly speaking, in the conclusion that, according to the Tractatus, reality consists of simple objects. If only we could prove that simple objects are objects of physics, then we could rightfully conclude that all true propositions ultimately express physical states of affairs, and all true propositions are propositions of physics. Only these propositions have secured reference (simple objects of physics are not susceptible to decomposition), so only they fulfil one of the requirements that was put on linguistic propositions in order for them to convey content – they do not contain empty names. If other propositions, e.g. propositions of everyday language, have sense, it is only because they are about physical states of affairs; facts which under a complete analysis of language would be more precisely expressed by propositions of natural science. 68

In order to conclude that the hypothesis of ontological materialism and the naturalistic worldview of the Tractatus is true, one has to check if there is any evidence in Wittgenstein’s early writings that would allow to presume that one can identify Tractarian simple objects with physical atoms (the most elementary particles of matter). This topic will be the subject-matter of the next chapter. The current point of my concern reads as follows: “What are the simple objects of the Tractatus?”.

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Chapter 2.  The Simple Objects of the Tractatus The main question in the following chapter reads as follows: is the ontology of the Tractatus materialistic? Are the simple objects of the Tractatus material particles, or something else? If we accept a realist theory of meaning, and if we assume that it is possible to ask about the reference of names outside the context of a proposition, then there are two positive and probable (considering Wittgenstein’s early writings) answers to the question: “what is the reference of simple names?” at our disposal, i.e. that there are simple units of perception (the phenomenalistic interpretation of Tractarian objects147), or that they are physical particles (the materialistic interpretation)148. In this chapter I shall present arguments in favour of and against both of these proposals (sections 2.1 and 2.2). I am also going to argue that the materialistic interpretation offers stronger arguments in its favour (sections 2.2.2 and 2.2.3). In section 2.3 I will analyse the resolute interpretation. I have decided to analyse this way of reading the Tractatus because of the conception of philosophy that it ascribes to Wittgenstein. In my opinion, the resolute interpretation mistakenly identifies the target of Tractarian critique of philosophy, thus a discussion on the resolute interpretation gives me an opportunity to introduce the second hallmark of Tractarian scientism, i.e. Wittgenstein’s claim that in the task of solving “the problems of life”149, or in the task of defending the values of the human world, philosophy is of no avail.

147 In Wittgensteinian literature we also find the term: “phenomenological” (Lampert 2000, p. 14; Bradley 1992, p. 69). 148 Obviously, in the literature about the Tractatus one can find other interpretations of Tractarian simples: For Keyt and Hacker (although the latter author suspects that the notion of a simple object is incoherent), the simples of the Tractatus resemble Platonic forms (Keyt 1973, p. 295; Hacker 1986a, p. 81). Copi represents the view on which Tractarian objects are bare particulars: “with the possible exception of Parmenides, I know of no historical philosopher who discussed absolutely bare particulars” (Copi 1973, p. 184). Klemke thinks about the simples as of “peculiar metaphysical objects – objects which can never be apprehended by any experience, but which nevertheless are real and which form the substance of the world” (Klemke 1971a, p. 117). Morris suspects that in the notion of a simple object Wittgenstein wanted to comprise the Aristotelian intuition that to be an object is to be independent in its existence from other things (Morris 2008, p. 28). All of these conceptions are less represented in the commentaries about Wittgenstein, and I shall not analyse them in detail. 149 C.f. TLP 6.52–6.521.

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Before I start analysing arguments and counterarguments of different interpretations, I owe a clarification as to what it means when one claims that Wittgenstein was an ontological materialist. When one discusses the physicalistic interpretation, one should not commit the mistake of imposing notions taken from modern discussions within the philosophy of mind on an understanding of materialism during the time when the Tractatus was written. The most significant difference is the fact that what is nowadays seen as a challenge to physicalism was not seen this way in the times of early Wittgenstein. For example, Kim writes: It is perhaps no accident that what many regard as the most important obstacle to physicalism is called the problem of “explanatory gap”. The problem (…) is that of explaining (…) phenomenal consciousness, or qualia, in terms of physical/biological phenomena (Kim 2008, p. 96).

Kim indicates that physicalism has problems with explaining why consciousness accompanies mental events150. According to Chalmers, the lack of logical supervenience of consciousness on the physical (and he argues in favour of that thesis with help from arguments of the logical possibility of zombies, of the possibility of the inverted spectrum, from the epistemic asymmetry of the first- and the third-person perspective, from the so-called knowledge argument and from the absence of analysis) tells us that the explanatory reduction of consciousness has no chance of success. In other words, according to Chalmers, God, having created the physical facts and the natural laws, had to create something more, namely conscious states connected with the respective physical laws151. A non-physicalistic approach in the contemporary philosophy of mind takes, therefore, often the form of defending non-reductive explanations. It is claimed that as long as there are facts that cannot be explained reductively, physicalism, as a project of reducing everything to a material basis, fails. On the other hand, some maintain that an explanatory reduction is something different than an ontological reduction152. In the intellectual circle of Wittgenstein it was also not decided if a reductive explanation (understood as a reduction of 150 Chalmers 1996, p. 47; p. 106. 151 Ibid., p. 41. 152 Ontological reduction of A to B, according to Crane, “involves the claim that A=B”, whereas explanatory reduction is “a relation between theories (…). One theory (…) gives us an insight into the underlying mechanisms which explain how the entities of the reduced theory work” (Crane 2001, pp. 54–55). Crane also notices that one could have just an ontological reduction without the explanatory reduction. It would entail holding “an identity theory of the entities in question without holding that the theories of these entities can stand in an explanatory relation” (ibid., p. 55).

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laws of psychology and biology to physical laws) is possible. In order to accept that a physicalistic reduction is successful, it was sufficient to argue in favour of the thesis that “all psychological statements refer to physical events (viz. physical events in the body, especially the central nervous system of the person in question)”153. Wittgenstein and some members of the Vienna Circle could therefore agree with Chalmers that physicalism does not explain the occurrence of consciousness and phenomenal states, but the reductive explanation was simply not in the scope of their interests. Maybe it is true that such a reductive explanation is unachievable, but materialism, in their eyes, was a successful project, as long as we are not forced to introduce non-physical objects into our explanations. When we talk about consciousness, perhaps we cannot explain why phenomenal states have to accompany some states of the brain but, nevertheless, consciousness supervenes on states of the brain and the neural system and, hence, it is still something of a material nature that we are talking about. If everything in the range of scientific and philosophical research is of a physical nature, then materialism, in the eyes of its early 20th-century adherents, is fine and intact. If an anti-materialist accepted this response to the problems of a reductive explanation but still wanted to reject early 20th-century physicalism, he would have to undermine the conviction that there are only physical objects.

2.1  Phenomenalistic interpretation of the simples Up until the 1950s the prevailing answer to the question of the nature of Tractarian simples was phenomenalistic. “Most philosophers took it for granted that both Russell and Wittgenstein were talking about the same sorts of atoms, namely, sense-data”154. It is also one of the most popular interpretations among scholars 153 Carnap 1931/1995, p. 71. One has to be very careful in ascribing ontological reduction to Carnap because of his rejection of metaphysical questions as such (the mindbody problem was for him, for instance, not a question about the relation between two spheres of reality but a question about the relation between the terms of physics and psychology). His physicalism consisted in theses that 1) all statements in science can be translated into physical language, and 2) physical language is a universal language, i.e. it can describe every state of affairs. Carnap also claimed that although every biological and psychological statement refers to a physical state of affairs, it is not certain that we will find a translation of biological and psychological laws (which he understood simply as a generalisation derived from singular statements) into physical law. In other words, he saw the claim that the explanatory reduction is unachievable as possibly true (Carnap 1931/1195, p. 66–69). 154 Bradley 1992, p. 3.

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nowadays, e.g. M. & J. Hintikka (1990), J.W. Cook (1994) and P. Frascolla (2007), to name but a few representatives. The main thesis of the phenomenalistic interpretation is that simple objects of the Tractatus are simple units of experience, named also sense-data.

2.1.1  The question of Russell’s influence on the Tractatus Phenomenalism is a metaphysical theory that says that reality consists of sense-data and that there are no material objects “behind” them. If the phenomenalistic interpretation of the Tractatus is right, and Tractarian simple objects are sense-data, then there are only sense-data which build up the substance of the world. There is nothing besides sense-data. Phenomenalism is a consequence of an empirical epistemology which claims that sense-data are the only entities whose existence we can be sure of. The rest (i.e. for example, material objects, Cartesian Ego, Kantian things in themselves) is speculation. A phenomenalist is rather interested in the epistemological question: “what are the foundations of our knowledge?”, than in the ontological question: “what is there?”155. Among the phenomenalists there is contention whether epistemological empiricism is compatible with the ontological belief in the existence of material objects. Locke, for example, thought that there has to be a cause for the existence of sense-data and postulated the existence of things independent in their existence from the human mind. Things are the causes of the existence of sense-data. Could an empiricist be pleased with the Lockean theory? Not entirely. The tenet that the appearance of sense-data is caused by a physical thing is not empirical. By definition, it is impossible to be acquainted with one term of the relation between sense-data and things. One is acquainted only with sense-data, and external things are always beyond the perceptive capacities of human beings. Therefore, the Lockean tenet is not empirical – it should be treated by an empiricist as an unverifiable theory. One of the trials to resolve this deadlock and to reconcile the common-sense claim that there are material objects with epistemological empiricism was taken up by Bertrand Russell, who tried to show that objects postulated by physics could be exhibited as functions of sense-data156. He believed that hypotheses of physics

155 “Although it is primarily a metaphysical view, phenomenalism is a theory with import ant epistemological implications and, indeed, it is often accepted by philosophers for its alleged epistemological advantages” (Fumerton 2010, p. 586). 156 “We may lay down the following definition: Physical things are those series of appearances whose matter obeys the laws of physics. That such series exist is an empirical fact, which constitutes the verifiability of physics” (Russell 1914a, p. 22).

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which go beyond sense-data are not in opposition to the empirical language of sense-data but, on the contrary, they are in concordance: one can interpret the language of physics in terms of sense-data language: “If your atom is going to serve purposes in physics, as it undoubtedly does, your atom has got to turn out to be a series of class of particulars [sense-data]”157. The same procedure goes with objects postulated by everyday experience; for example, what we call a “table” is not, in fact, an independent and separate external object but a series of classes of particulars. The particulars – sense data – are the real things, the table – a logical fiction158. The table presents at each moment a number of different appearances (it has different appearances for different people), so at a given moment all the appearances make up a class of appearances. In a certain time all the appearances from that period of time make up a series of classes. When one says that he or she sees a real thing, as opposed to a phantom, what he or she truly means is that a class of appearances of an alleged object which is given to him or her at a given moment connects with the other classes of appearances in such a way that it answers his or her expectations159. In general, physical things “are those series of appearances whose matter obeys the laws of physics”160. Russell was trying to show in this way that propositions and hypotheses of physics could be translated into the phenomenalistic language of sense data and that these languages do not contradict one another. With the help of this method, on the one hand, physics could find its basis in the sense-data language and, on the other hand, one could save the requirements of the empiricist epistemology (often accused of being unrealistic for the ordinary practice of scientific research). For Russell, phenomenalism was also a part of his philosophical position which he called: “logical atomism”. Just like Wittgenstein, Russell saw in the logical analysis of language the most important, or maybe even the only, task of philosophy. Many philosophical crazy, irrational theories and alleged paradoxes are, according to Russell, the result of misunderstanding and confusion about the morals one should draw from semantics or about the functioning of the syntax of language. The most typical example of linguistic confusion, says Russell, is supposing that every noun stands for an object. In the case of abstract nouns this often leads to the acceptance of the existence of universals, such as 157 Russell 1918, p. 274. 158 “The things that we call real, like tables and chairs, are systems, series of classes of particulars, and the particulars are the real things, the particulars being sense-data when they happen to be given to you” (ibid., p. 274). 159 Ibid., p. 275. 160 Russell 1914a, p. 22.

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triangularity or rationality161. A misunderstanding of the syntax is displayed when a philosopher thinks that all propositions in a language are reducible to the most basic form of a proposition, which is a subject and a predicate. This form, simply a feature of Indo-European languages, has, according to Russell, an enormously bad influence on philosophy, especially when a philosopher who has succumbed to the impression of the reducibility of all forms of propositions to the subject-predicate form, thinks that this form reveals something essential about reality. Generally, it can be said that this bad influence is expressed by the unexpectedly great popularity of ontological monism162. Famous thinkers such as Leibniz, Spinoza and Hegel were overcome by the idea of a basic form of a proposition and the metaphysical conclusions one should draw from it. In the time of Russell’s philosophical activity, ontological monism was confessed by Hegel’s followers from Great Britain (e.g. F.H. Bradley, E. Caird, T.H. Green). They maintained that although common sense tells us that there are many different and independent from one another things, in fact there is only one object – Reality (the Absolute), and the rest are just mere appearances. According to Russell, this statement is a result of the completely false Hegelian logic. It states that all propositions are of the form: a subject plus a predicate. A predicate, according to this theory, stands for a quality. Secondly, according to Hegel’s doctrine, in order to understand a thing, one has to have knowledge about all the qualities of that thing. Moreover, an adherent of Hegelian logic also interprets relational propositions as propositions about objects and their qualities. A disciple of Hegelian logic sees all relations of an object as its qualities. Because from a certain point of view one thing is ultimately, directly or indirectly connected (stands in relation) with the whole of the universe, he or she jumps to the conclusion that in order to know a particular, one has to know everything163. In the order of cognition Reality is first, and then follow its appearances which in everyday language are called things. The direction of Russell’s thought is opposite. If one wants to understand the totality of things, one has to understand its constituents in the first place. First, one has to be acquainted with particulars. The role of a philosophical analysis is to reveal 161 “I do not wish to maintain that there are no universals, but certainly there are many abstracts words which do not stand for single universals –e.g. triangularity and rationality. In these respects language misleads us both by its vocabulary and by its syntax” (Russell 1924/1971, p. 331). 162 Ibid., p. 331. 163 “There is, as you know, a logical theory according to which, if you really understand any one thing, you would understand everything” (Russell 1918, p. 204).

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what the simplest objects are with which one is acquainted164. Fundamental to Russell’s atomism was, therefore, the defence of the common-sense belief that there are many separate things165. The answer to the ontological question: “What are the simples?” in Russell’s philosophy boils down to the epistemological question: “What are the simples with which one is acquainted?”. The logical analysis helps in the philosophical considerations in such a way that it reveals proper names as logical atoms166. A proper name names a simple object – which is trivial, but Russell also asked: “Under what condition can a speaker name something?”, and he answered: “Only when he is acquainted with it”. This claim has peculiar consequences: since nobody in the world is at the moment, for example, acquainted with Socrates, then nobody can name him, and therefore “Socrates” is not a name. In Russell’s theory this is a description167. The only names in the logical sense are, for Russell, expressions such as: “this” and “that”. In Russell’s view, these expressions stand for sense-data. According to him, we do not have a direct acquaintance with objects postulated by physics, such as electrons, or suggested by everyday experience, such as a piece of chalk. What we truly perceive are the appearances of the aforementioned things – such things as “little patches of colour or sounds, taste, smells, etc.”168. They are the simples – the bricks of which the world prima facie consists of.

2.1.2  Arguments in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation The considerations above about Russell’s philosophy provides the first and one of the most important arguments in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation of the Tractatus. It reads as follows: Wittgenstein started his philosophical work in the time of Moore’s and Russell’s fervent discussions on idealism. Russell

164 That explains the label: “atomism” for his theory. He calls it “logical atomism” because the simplest objects with which one is acquainted with are the last residue in logical analysis – they are logical atoms (ibid., p. 179). 165 “The logic which I shall advocate is atomistic, as opposed to the monistic logic of the people who more or less follow Hegel. When I say that my logic is atomistic, I mean that I share the common-sense belief that there are many separate things” (ibid., p. 178). 166 Ibid., p. 200. 167 Ibid., p. 201. Diamond showed that Russell was convinced that it is because of the theory of description that one can answer to the idealistic challenge. Using Diamond’s example, I do not have access to the object which Bismarck denotes with the pronoun “I”, nevertheless I can know Bismarck by means of the propositions that describe him (Diamond 2000b, p. 265). 168 Russell 1914a, p. 5.

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challenged idealism by advocating in favour of ontological pluralism. At the core of his argumentation stood logical atomism, which assumes the phenomenalistic ontology with simple units of experience as simple objects. Wittgenstein, as a disciple of Russell and one of the protagonists of the refutation of idealism, simply adopted his master’s view in the Tractatus. Phenomenalism was the background for all logical and semantic solutions of early Wittgenstein. There are many similarities between Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s atomism169. According to both: –– the world consists of facts (TLP 1.1; Russell 1918, p.  183), which are complexes of simple objects (TLP 2.01; Russell 1918, p. 189); –– objects subsist in the way that Aristotelian substances subsist (TLP 2.021, 2.024; Russell 1918, p. 202); –– the existence of simple objects is established by logical considerations, but establishing what exactly simple objects are belongs to empirical inquiries; –– the meaning of a name is an object for which it stands for (TLP 3.203; Russell 1918, p. 187), the meaning of a proposition is a fact, but propositions are not names for facts. It is impossible to name a fact – it could be merely expressed (TLP 3.221; Russell 1918, p. 186–187); –– the meaning of a proposition is a result of the meanings of its elements (the compositionality thesis) (TLP 4.024; Russell 1918, p. 193); –– the truth or falsity of a proposition depends on obtaining or not the facts that are expressed by propositions (TLP 4.062; Russell 1918, p. 182); –– molecular propositions are truth-functions on atomic propositions (TLP 5; Russell 1918, p. 210); –– it is meaningless to say that an object exists (TLP 4.1274; Russell 1918, p. 232– 233). The adherents of the phenomanalistic interpretation claim that if Russell influenced the author of the Tractatus in so many ways, then he probably also influenced him with respect to the view that simple objects are sense-data170. J.W. Cook says that it is better to describe the philosophical inspirations of Wittgenstein’s atomism as being indebted to the neutral monism professed by William James and Ernst Mach171. Neutral monism can be summarised as the view according to which: 169 I use here the list of similarities as prepared by Raymond Bradley (Bradley 1992, pp. 6–9). 170 Hintikka 1990, p. 92. 171 Cook 1994, p. 14.

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• • • •

the world consists only of our sensations sensations are not mental or “in” mind there is nothing that is subjective the material constituting the mental is the same as the material constituting the physical172.

With respect to the topic of my interest, it is irrelevant if Wittgenstein’s atomism bears the stamp of neutral monism or of Russell’s logical atomism. I reject both of these proposals173. In my view, both theories acknowledge that simple objects are sense-data, that sense-data are the basic bricks of the world and that things of everyday experience are nothing other than classes of sense-data. I think that Cook misunderstood Russell by imputing to him that he held the notion of sense-data according to which sense-data are something mental, private and incommunicable. Russell stressed very clearly that sense-data are not mental174. The mind does not produce sense-data; it merely adds awareness to sense-data. He himself did not see his own ontology of logical atomism in opposition to the ontology of neutral monism. On the contrary, in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism he wrote: “I feel more and more inclined to think that [neutral monism] may be true”175, and in The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics: “What I have to say in the present paper is compatible with their [Mach and James] doctrine and might have been reached from their standpoint”176. Therefore, independently of whose debtor Wittgenstein truly was, i.e. Russell’s or Mach’s and James’, the first argument in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation reads as follows: Tractarian objects are sense-data, because Wittgenstein inherited his ontology from his great

172 Ibid., p. 8. 173 I do not want to say that Cook’s interpretation has no point of originality. I intend to stress, however, that it is not different from the classic phenomenalistic interpretation with respect to the interpretation of simple objects of the Tractatus. It may be, however, though I do not want to ponder that question here whether Cook offers a better explanation for some theses of the Tractatus (TLP 5.542, TLP 5.64) than the phenomenalistic sense-data theory. 174 Russell 1914a, p. 7. 175 Russell 1918, p. 279. 176 Russell 1914a, p. 8. Of course, Russell did not entirely agree with the neutral monists. His greatest concern was the theory of beliefs and desires – the paradigmatic examples of mental phenomena. Usually, neutral monists reduce such phenomena as beliefs to bodily behaviour, and behaviourism implicated by neutral monism was for Russell a difficulty that hindered him from full endorsement of neutral monism (Russell 1918, p. 221–222).

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predecessors. He did not mention explicitly sense-data as simple objects because it was obvious what kind of metaphysics prevailed in his intellectual environment. Obviously, this is not the only argument in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation. Evidence from Wittgenstein’s texts can be grouped into three categories: (a) Although sense-data are not mentioned explicitly in the Tractatus, there are many hints in this work – claim the adherents of this interpretation – that sensedata are the only possible candidates for that label. (b) Apart from that, there are some more direct indicators in works which were never meant to be published, as in the Notebooks. (c) Finally, there are some strong arguments in later works, e.g. lectures and discussions (mostly from the 1930s), in which Wittgenstein interpreted the Tractatus himself. Ad (a) The passage TLP 5.62-5.63 contains famous remarks on solipsism: For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. The world and life are one. I am my world. (The microcosm.) (TLP 5.62-5.63).

If we keep in mind that the simples make up the substance of reality, and if simultaneously we want to make sense of the above-mentioned remarks, i.e. that life and the world are one, or that the world is my world, we have to assume – claim the proponents of the phenomenalistic interpretation – that the world consists of my experiences (which also build my life). If the world consists, on the one hand, of simple objects and, on the other hand, of experiences, then it is highly probable that we should identify the simples with simple units of experience. One can read TLP 6.431 (“So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end”) in a similar way. Death means the end for possibilities of experiencing. If the end of the flow of experiences means the end of the world, that entails that Wittgenstein identifies the world with experiences. Some commentators, therefore, conclude that the solipsism of the Tractatus supports the phenomenalistic interpretation of the simples177. With the help of the phenomenalistic interpretation it is also easier to understand why, according to Wittgenstein, solipsism coincides with realism. As we remember, for Russell sense-data were the basic bricks of the universe and the physical things were the logical constructs – series of classes of appearances. It seems that Wittgenstein shared this particular view in the Tractatus178. He could 177 For instance, Hintikka 1990, p. 86–89. 178 In favour of such a thesis, according to Hintikka (Hintikka 1990, p. 86), speaks TLP 5.552: “The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that

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sum up the contention between realists and solipsists in the following way: realists were wrong in their claims that there are objects outside one’s experiences (it is even nonsensical to ask if there are any objects beyond experience since experiences make up the world), but they were right in their claims that the existence of objects is independent of the existence of a subject (for Wittgenstein there was no such thing as a subject of experience), and here is the point where solipsism and realism coincide. There is no difference between the realists and solipsists since the only thinkable difference (i.e. that the realists believe in the external world) is not even expressible in language. Ad (b). It is certain that Wittgenstein was not clear and straightforward in the Tractatus with respect to the metaphysical category of simple objects. He never gave any example of the simples there. Fortunately, he was more direct and specific in the entries of his Notebooks, where he tried different solutions to problems and often illustrated them with examples. May and June of 1915 were laden with entries of interest to us: But how am I imagining the simple? (…) As examples of the simples I always think of points of the visual field (just as parts of the visual field always come before my mind as typical composite objects (NB 6.5.1915, p. 45) We single out a part of our visual field, for example, and we see that it is always complex, that any part of it still complex but is already simpler (NB 24.5.1915, p. 50) It seems to me perfectly possible that patches in our visual field are simple objects, in that we do not perceive any single point of a patch separately; the visual appearances of stars seem certainly to be so (NB 18.6.1915, p. 64).

The examples are clear: during the process of creating the Tractatus, Wittgenstein if not accepted then at least seriously considered the candidacy of such things like points of the visual sense (sense-data) for the simples. Ad (c). The other group of testimonies is formed of Wittgenstein’s retrospection. The most popular example of Wittgenstein’s flashback comes from his lectures in the early 1930s. One of Wittgenstein’s students, Desmond Lee, asked directly about Tractarian simple objects and got the following answer: “Objects, etc. is here used for such things as a colour, a point in visual space, etc.”179. The other excerpt comes from Philosophical Remarks, where Wittgenstein admitted that: “I do not now have phenomenological language, or ‘primary language’ as I used to call it, in

something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that however is not experience”. 179 Lectures 1930–1932, p. 120.

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my mind as a goal. I no longer hold it to be necessary“180. The latter quote is less convincing and it cannot be used as direct evidence because we do not know what period of interest in the phenomenological language Wittgenstein was mentioning: did he have in mind the time of writing the Tractatus or his conversations with Friedrich Waismann or Moritz Schlick in Vienna in the late 1920s?

2.1.3 Counterarguments This set of arguments sounds quite solid. Can we then assume that the simples of the Tractatus are sense-data? The case is not so simple. Let us keep a close eye on the first argument. It is truly difficult to decide who had influence on whom. Hintikkas and Cook make their judgement too easily by assuming that the influence was not reciprocal. Obviously, Wittgenstein as a young student, although an astonishingly independent thinker for his age, took advantage of Russell’s or Frege’s philosophy, but he was very critical of his mentors, too181. Cook claims that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is rooted in Mach’s neutral monism182. He seems to forget what Wittgenstein truly thought of Mach’s works (he shared his view with Russell in one of his letters to him): I was very interested to hear your views about matter, although I cannot imagine your way working from sense-data forward. Mach writes such a horrid style that it makes me nearly sick to read him (Letters, p. 20).

This does not sound like an act of admiration; and it challenges, by the way, the aforementioned arguments that only the phenomenalistic interpretation makes sense of Tractarian solipsism. The basis for this argument was the conviction that Wittgenstein regarded, just like Russell, physical things as functions of sense-data. As we can see, at least in 1913 (when he wrote the letter quoted above) he did not. For the sake of the argument the adherents of the phenomenalistic interpretation focus only on Russell’s works prior to the Tractatus, i.e. mainly on: The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics (1914) and The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918). But what about works written after publishing the Tractatus (1921)? In 1924 Russell wrote a paper titled Logical Atomism, in which he clearly changed his views with respect to the simples. He abandoned his conviction that one has to be acquainted with simple objects (“When I speak of ‘simples’ I ought to explain that I am speaking of something not experienced as such, but known only inferentially as the limit 180 PR 1, p. 51. 181 Expressions such as: “In contrast to Russell” (NB 30.10.14, p. 21) are nothing unusual in his works. 182 Cook 1994, p. 14–28.

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of analysis”183). Philosophy, according to Russell, should build its theories on science. And what is important is that he had in mind physics, not psychology184; constructions of psychology are for him, as compared to physics, “purely provision”185. Sense-data are not bricks out of which the world is built186; they are replaced by something which Russell called “event-particles”187. And all of these views are preceded by the remark: I am much indebted to my friend Wittgenstein in this matter. See his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. I do not accept all his doctrines, but my debt to him will be obvious to those who read his book (Russell 1924, p. 333).

We have two narrations then: according to the first, Russell’s logical atomism influenced Wittgenstein’s early work, and we infer from that that Tractarian simples are sense-data. But, on the other hand, we could say that the work of early Wittgenstein influenced Russell in such a way that he ceased to believe that sense-data are the simple objects. I am not going to advocate on behalf of the second narration. My aim is simply to show that the first argument in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation is too weak, and we have too little data to decide without a doubt what the actual directions of influence were between the two famous philosophers. Certainly we are not entitled to judge that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein was indebted to early Russellian ontology. What about the second argument? It surveys three groups of texts, i.e. hints in the Tractatus, direct indications in the Notebooks and Wittgenstein’s memories. With respect to the third group I have already said that we will never be sure if his statements from the 1930s are not distorted by the topic of his interest from that time, which was the possibility of a phenomenal language188. In almost every book devoted to the problem of early Wittgenstein’s metaphysics we find a record of his conversation with Norman Malcolm, in which he admitted that at the time of writing the Tractatus he thought of himself as a logician,

183 184 185 186

Russell 1924, p. 337. “Psychology is scientifically much less perfected than physics” (ibid., p. 330). Ibid., p. 330. “Such pure empiricism, exemplified by Hume [and early Russell – one would like to add], leads straight to skepticism rather than to support of scientific doctrines, as it supposed to lead” (ibid., p. 323). 187 Ibid., p. 329. 188 In fact, Anthony Kenny was convinced that Wittgenstein misrepresented his own thoughts in his own later statements about the Tractatus (Kenny 1986, p. 67).

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so deciding what a simple thing is was for him “purely empirical matter”189. This is a different statement than in his response to Lee, because the natural sciences refer to physical objects and not to units of perception. Perhaps what neutralises the previously mentioned excerpt from the dialogue between Wittgenstein and Desmond Lee most effectively is the testimony about Tractarian simples taken from Philosophical Investigations. In his later work Wittgenstein often criticised his former ideas, including the idea of simple objects. He asked, among others, “what lies behind the idea that names truly signify simples?” (PI 46). After a longer quotation from Plato’s Theaetetus, where Socrates considered the doctrine of primary elements of reality, he recalls: Both Russell’s “individuals” and my “objects” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) were likewise such primary elements (PI 46).

This means that he contrasted the simples of the Tractatus with what was thought by Russell to be the primary elements of reality. In the later phase of his philosophical work he threw doubt on the meaningfulness of the concept of the absolute simple object, but nevertheless he discerned the Tractarian simples from simple units of experience. Later, Wittgenstein admitted that he committed a mistake with respect to the simples, but the mistake did not consist in the acceptance of the phenomenalistic ontology. As far as we are concerned with the direct indications from the Notebooks, one has to put attention to the character of this work. Wittgenstein never meant to publish his notes, i.e. it was rather a draft in which he tried different positions and solutions. He changed his opinions a number of times, as statements written in the Notebooks occur reformulated in the Tractaus, so, for instance, we read in the Notebooks: The simple thing for us IS: the simplest thing that we are acquainted with (NB 11.5.1915, p. 47).

But only 12 days later: But it also seems certain that we do not infer the existence of simple objects from the existence of particular simple objects, but rather know them – by description, as it were – as the end-product of analysis, by means of a process that leads to them (NB 23.5.1915, p. 50).

189 “I asked Wittgenstein whether, when he wrote the Tractatus, he had ever decided upon anything as an example of a ‘simple object’. His reply was that at that time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business, as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simple thing or a complex thing, that being purely empirical matter” (Malcolm 1984, p. 70).

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The change is great. First, Wittgenstein acknowledges that we know the simples by acquaintance and this is a confirmation of the phenomenalistic interpretation, but then he claims that it is by a description that we identify the simples (and that is problematic in the light of this interpretation). Apart from the fragments quoted by the adherents of the phenomenalistic interpretation, one can also find such records as the following: The division of the body into material points, as we have it in physics, is nothing more than analysis into simple components (NB 20.6.1915, p. 67).

It seems that Wittgenstein allowed (at least in this fragment) for a physical analysis of complex things into simples to be an example of logical analysis. It does not prove that Wittgenstein contradicted himself, but it does prove that the Notebooks are just a draft and that one should be very careful with inferring strong conclusions on its basis. We are left with hints of solipsism in the Tractatus. This is probably the strongest argument in favour of the phenomenalistic interpretation. I will defer the task of arguing against the way in which the phenomenalistic interpretation understands the so-called solipsistic theses of the Tractatus until Chapter 5, but I think that in order to refute this interpretation it is enough to point to the characteristics of simple objects in the Tractatus. For example, Wittgenstein attributes to the simples the quality of timelessness. Objects are “unalterable and subsistent” (TLP 2.027). The eternality of sense-data is a very strange conception; the attribution of timelessness rather eliminates sense-data as candidates to Tractarian simples. Then there is the attribution of colourlessness to the simples (TLP 2.023). Patches of colours are phenomenalistic paradigms of simple objects190. Instead of this, Wittgenstein thought that being coloured is a form of an object (TLP 2.0251). His characteristics are a great challenge to the phenomenalistic interpretation191. The proponents of the phenomenalistic interpretation sometimes defend their views by claiming that the Tractatus presents a philosophical journey: the Tractatus begins with the characteristics of the simples that rather excludes a phenomenalistic reading, but it ends with stating the truthfulness of solipsism. It was not the point

190 Locke 1690/1999, p. 104. 191 “If Hintikkas had paused to reflect on 2.0232: ‘Roughly speaking: Objects are colourless’ they would surely have seen that this is appropriate not to entities that are or could be perceptible, but to objects of physics (…). Following the Hertz/Wittgenstein line we would be obliged to drop even that connection to what is perceptible. 2.0232 alone should suffice to show that the Tractatus is not in any way phenomenological nor are its simple objects among those known by acquaintance” (Harré 2001, p. 224).

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of Wittgenstein’s book to present a consistent system of claims but rather to confront us with a certain path of thinking. The particular stages are not important – it is the path itself which is important, and the goal towards which this path leads. According to this reading, the early theses of the Tractatus about simple objects are cancelled by the later section about solipsism. I would answer, however, that even if we accept this reading of the Tractatus, then one has to notice that the Tractatus ends not with asserting solipsism but with the claim that the correct method of philosophy is to say nothing more than is said in natural science (TLP 6.53). Scientists would be very astonished if they heard that the ultimate subject-matter of their inquiries are sense-data. In order to save the phenomenalistic interpretation, its proponent would have to clarify his claim in a Russelian way: the natural sciences deal with physical objects, but since physical objects are nothing more than series of classes of sense-data, then, in fact, the natural sciences deal with sensedata. A philosopher would then tell a scientist what the real object of his interest is. This is intelligible for Russell, who saw the task of philosophy in criticising and clarifying notions that are fundamental to science192, and he found nothing special or shocking in philosophy giving new meaning to the terms of science193. It seems to me, however, that such an intervention of philosophy in natural science is radically contradictory to Wittgenstein’s intentions, as he also liked to see philosophy as an activity of clarifying propositions194, but at the same time he wanted to separate philosophy from science: Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them) (TLP 4.111).

According to him, philosophy has nothing to do with science, it should then not decide what the subject-matter of scientific research is. Therefore, even if we accept this way of reading the Tractatus, under which the latter theses of the book invalidate the earlier claims, the final conclusion of the Tractatus does not support the phenomenalitic interpretation. At last, I want to mention Anscombe’s famous argument that “there is hardly any epistemology in the Tractatus”195. As we remember, Russell’s logical atomism responds to the challenge which reads as follows: “How do you know that there is an external world; that there are independent objects; that there is something behind sense-data, if the basis of your knowledge are merely sensations?” Logical 192 193 194 195

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Russell 1924, p. 341. Ibid., p. 339. TLP 4.112. Anscombe 1965, p. 27.

atomism showed how the objects of physics are constructed from the simplest units of experience. The whole project was thought of as a defence of scientific knowledge from a sceptic’s attacks; its aim was to indicate the foundations of our knowledge. Russell himself admitted that “the special importance of sense-data is in relation to epistemology, not to metaphysics”196, and that “if we could construct an impersonal metaphysics, independent of the accidents of our knowledge and ignorance, the privileged position of the actual data would probably disappear”197. Anscombe argues that there is neither trace of fight against scepticism in the Tractatus nor of any other traditional epistemological problems198; there are no remarks on acquaintance with objects or on sensible verification. Moreover, adds Anscombe, it seems that in TLP 4.1121199, Wittgenstein explicitly expressed the intention of avoiding the theory of knowledge “by cutting it dead and by concentrating on logic”200. On the other hand, the phenomenalistic interpretation is sustainable under the condition that the Tractatus is concerned with epistemological problems201. Since this is not the case, we have no reason to presume that Tractarian simples are sense-data. In the last section I argued against the phenomenalistic interpretation of simple objects. The arguments it presents to support its principles do not hold. Both the characteristics of the simples in the Tractatus as well as Wittgenstein’s later understanding of them (expressed in Philosophical Investigations) contradict the thesis that sense-data are the primary elements of reality. Moreover, the assumptions one has to accept in order to advocate in favour of the phenomenalistic interpre196 Russell 1914a, p. 7. 197 Ibid., p. 6. 198 Wittgenstein simply dismissed scepticism: “Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked” (TLP 6.51). 199 “Psychology is no more closely related to philosophy than any other natural science. Theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology. Does not my study of signlanguage correspond to the study of thought-processes, which philosophers used to consider so essential to the philosophy of logic? Only in most cases they got entangled in unessential psychological investigations, and with my method too there is an analogous risk”. (TLP 4.1121). 200 Anscombe 1965, p. 152. 201 It is also admitted by the proponents of the phenomenalistic interpretation such as John Cook, who writes: “Better sense can be made of the Tractatus if we recognize that its author was very much concerned with epistemology, especially skepticism, and that his linguistic doctrines were intended to subverse his epistemological convictions” (Cook 1994, p. xv).

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tation (the most fundamental questions in philosophy are epistemological ones; philosophy reveals the real subject-matter of scientific research) are incompatible with what the Tractatus says about the relation between philosophy and science, and with early Wittgenstein’s interests in the area of philosophy.

2.2  Materialistic interpretation of the simples In the next sections I shall present a view according to which although early Wittgenstein did not explicitly give an example of simple objects, he nevertheless had an idea what these objects had to be. In the last section I rejected the interpretation which says that these objects are simple units of experience. My own answer is that Tractarian simples are of a physical nature. They are physical atoms in the sense of the most basic and indivisible units of matter. This answer explains why there is no example of a simple object in the Tractatus. The reason is exactly the same as the one expressed during Wittgenstein’s conversation with Norman Malcolm: it is the job of the physicists to determine what the primary element of matter is. Perhaps scientists are close to the definite answer, but it is not a problem a philosopher can assess or judge. Secondly, the answer to the question of the simples given by the materialistic interpretation has the advantage that it is the only one that provides a clear answer to the question as to why early Wittgenstein identified the totality of true propositions with propositions of natural science. The only true sentences are sentences of natural science, because reality consists only of physical atoms (other “objects” are complexes of these simple elements), and meaningful sentences contain names which refer only to existing objects. Somebody who wants to know the truth about the world should ask not a logician, a philosopher, a poet, an ethicist or a priest about it, but a physicist. In recent times a number of new approaches has emerged to the Tractatus. The most famous interpretation is labelled “the resolute interpretation”, “the New Wittgenstein interpretation” or the “American school of interpretation”202. Apart from it we are witnessing the growth of “another new”, as Alfred Nordmann put it, way of reading the Tractatus. In this attempt one underlines the engineering and scientific background of Wittgenstein’s education. Nordmann discerns three ways of showing how this background shaped the Tractatus203. The first emphasises

202 I am going to challenge the theses of this interpretation later in the chapter (section 2.3). 203 A detailed elaboration of all three of these interpretations in: Nordmann 2002, pp. 358–382.

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that Wittgenstein received an engineer’s education with a thorough knowledge of physics. Kelly Hamilton, for example, recognises in Wittgenstein’s conception of the relation between language and reality the mind of an engineer. She traces, for example, the beginnings of the Tractarian theory of unalterable things and changeable states of affairs in the education of designer engineers. In order to design a machine (a counterpart of the Tractarian state of affairs), an engineer had to know the alphabet of elements of that machine (the counterparts of Tractarian objects), and had to have the ability of imagining how those elements can combine with one another. An engineer when designing a machine had to use a large amount of visual thinking based on his or her knowledge of the basic elements204. This engineering practice gives us insight into how Wittgenstein understood his dictum that we use a proposition “as a projection of a possible situation. The method of projection is to think the sense of a proposition” (TLP 3.11). The representative of the second group of commentators – David Hyder – seeks the influence of Wittgenstein’s education on the Tractatus somewhere else, and he finds it in Helmholtz’s and Hertz’s conviction that mind and nature are dynamic models of one another. According to Helmholtz, in order to model the reality, an experience has to have the same multiplicity as an event in the world. He and his successors (with Hertz among them who, as Nordmann writes, “turned Helmholtz’s perceptual manifolds into a mathematically refined and epistemologically purified space of representation”205) developed the representational device of spatial manifolds. It was this work, claims Hyder, that inspired the Tractarian theory of isomorphism of language and the world: “[According to Hertz] the semantic relation at the heart of scientific models consists in a mapping relation between purely geometric theories of matter and appearances in a perceptual manifold. This relation is indeed a form of ‘picturing’, and I claim that this is the interpretation that Wittgenstein gave to his theory of logical space once he extended it beyond its logicist origins”206. I am not going to discuss the above theses that a better understanding of pre-Russelian inspirations of young Wittgenstein helps to better understand the basic ideas of the Tractatus. In the context of the discussion about the status of simples I am interested only in the third group of the aforementioned family 204 “This alphabet of objects, whose configurations produced a variety of working inventions, gave the engineer working knowledge of the basic component parts of machines and the principles underlying the forms of machines. This allowed an engineer to visualize these elements recombined into new configurations” (Hamilton 2001, p. 70). 205 Nordmann 2002, p. 381. 206 Hyder 2002, p. 14.

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of interpretations, namely the one which argues in favour of the thesis that the answer to the question as to what simple objects of the Tractatus are lies in Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics. Tractarian simples are supposed to be exactly the same as the primary elements of the Hertzian system207. This interpretation, developed by Gerd Grasshof (1997) and Timm Lampert (2000, 2003), says, therefore, that the simples are material points or mass-particles. According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus represented physicalism and, hence, with respect to this interpretation I will use the terms: “the physicalistic interpretation” or “the materialistic interpretation”. As I have said before, I sympathise with this interpretation although I do not support it completely. In the following passage I shall present the differences between Grasshof ’s and Lampert’s interpretation as well as the differences between my point of view and their version of the materialistic interpretation. Next I shall discuss the arguments and counterarguments in favour of the materialistic interpretation. I shall also analyse its advantages.

2.2.1 Simple objects as material points, point-masses or physical atoms I shall start the presentation of the materialistic interpretation with a conceptual clarification. Every author who advocates in favour of this interpretation has slightly different ideas when it comes to the question: “what are the simple objects of the Tractatus?”. The basic difference between my view on Tractarian simples and the materialistic interpretation of Grasshof and Lampert is that whereas I claim that the simples of the Tractatus are of a material nature, they are the indivisible parts of matter, although it is the matter of scientific progress to determine what particles are truly elementary, Grasshof and Lampert think that Wittgenstein literally inherited Hertzian ontology and what was thought by Hertz to be the elementary particle of matter is at the same time the simple object of the Tractatus208. I claim that under the weight of evidence one has to admit that early 207 With respect to Hertzian mechanics, Harré writes: “Here we have a much more plausible source of Wittgenstein’s picture theory and the doctrine of simples in a point of view with which he must have been very familiar than from anything Russell had to offer him at that time” (Harré 2001, p. 217). 208 “The Prinzipen der Mechanik of Heinrich Hertz were Wittgenstein’s leitmotif and philosophical stimulus. With a full grasp of its metaphysical content, Wittgenstein used it as the foundation for the philosophical architecture which is built in close connection with the logical theory proposed by Russell and Frege” (Grasshof 1997, p. 87). Another difference between my own and Lampert’s interpretation consists

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Wittgenstein was clearly impressed by the achievements of contemporary physics and that he saw in the language of mechanics a language capable of mirroring the complexity of reality, but he did not necessarily have to see Hertzian mechanics as a finished system (which neither thought Hertz). He could, for example, assume that on the basis of what one knew in his times about physics, one could determine that elementary physical objects are the only ones which fulfil the requirements of the postulate of a determinate sense, but this does not mean that he excluded the possibility of scientific progress, in result of which it would turn out that the elementary particles of physics are something other than mass-particles. My understanding of the Tractatus assumes that its worldview is materialistic and at the same time agnostic with respect to the exact determination as to what the simple objects of physics are. It is specifically work for the physicists to establish it. It is no wonder then that Wittgenstein did not fix the reference of the simples and left this task to empirical research209. With respect to the simples of the Tractatus, I would use the notion of a physical atom (tantamount to the notion of a physical particle or the most elementary particle of matter). In my view, the role of this notion is merely to indicate the physical character of the simples. In this sense my reading of the Tractatus is close to the reading of Griffin (1964), who also thought that the simples are material particulars and who was also aware of the fact that Wittgenstein could not, as a philosopher, determine what the ultimate elementary constituent of the universe is210.

in the fact that for Lampert, and in contrast to me, the Tractarian thesis about the existence of simple objects is not motivated by the principle of a determinate sense (Lampert 2000, p. 329). It also seems that his physicalistic interpretation assumes only that the propositions of other languages are translatable into the language of physics, but he does not tie with this thesis any metaphysical claim that, for instance, the world consists of mass-particles: “Unter einer physikalistischen Interpretation wird vielmehr in Anlehnung on Carnaps Begriff des Physikalismus verstanden, nach der Wittgenstein im Tractatus die Auffassung vertritt, sämtliche Sätze seien unter Voraussetzung bestimmter Übersetzungsregeln in Sätze einer physikalischen Sprache zu übersetzen” (Lampert 2000, p. 14). 209 “Philosophy gives no pictures of reality, and can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigation. It consists of logic and metaphysics, the former its basis” (NL, p. 93). 210 “Never in the Tractatus does he give or intentionally suggest an example of an elementary sentence or of an object, and the Tractatus is neutral on all questions which would require knowledge of an example for their solution; furthermore, he does at places give certain very general forms of objects and of elementary sentences” (Griffin 1964, p. 164); This position is also similar to Bradley’s interpretation (1992). However, although Bradley thinks that the simples of the Tractatus are material points,

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In contrast to this opinion, Lampert and Grasshof are convinced that Wittgenstein thought that simple objects are material points (that is the opinion of Grasshof) or mass-particles (Lampert’s thesis). What is the difference between these two views? Both of these concepts – “material points” and “mass-particles” – come from Hertz’s Principle of Mechanics. According to Hertz’s definition, a massparticle (ein Massenteilchen) is a space-time location with a particular property; it is a property of space and time211. As Grasshof underlines, it follows from this that a mass-particle is not an object in space and time, and one should not associate with the notion of a mass-particle, for example, the idea of being heavy212. These associations are allowed, however, in the case of another basic concept of Hertzian ontology – the concept of mass. The mass of any given space s1 is defined by Hertz as the number of mass-particles in any space s1 compared with the number of mass-particles in some other space s2 at a fixed time213. Finally, a material point (ein materieller Punkt) is mass contained in an infinitely small space214. From this

211

212 213 214

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he discerns a metaphysical “material point” from physical atoms. The former is such that its division into smaller parts is inconceivable (in contrast to physical atoms): “I’m not saying that Wittgenstein’s metaphysical simples are physical atoms, or any other material particles. He chooses his words, here, rather carefully, speaking of points rather than particles. The ‘material points’ – or ‘point-masses’ – of physics are different from both atoms (as traditionally conceived) and from particles (as currently conceived). They are such that one cannot even conceive of their being divided into parts. They are extensionless points, and hence, for purely logical reasons, they are indivisible” (Bradley 1992, p. 78). “Ein Massenteilchen ist ein Merkmal, durch welches wir einen bestimmten Punkt des Raumes zu einer gegebenen Zeit eindeutig zuordnen einem bestimmten Punkte des Raumes zu jeder anderen Zeit. Jedes Massenteilchen ist unveränderlich und unzerstörbar. Die durch dasselbe Massenteilchen gekennzeichneten Punkte des Raumes zu zwei verschiedenen Zeiten fallen zusammen, wenn die Zeiten zusammenfallen” (Hertz 1894, p. 54). “The function of mass-particles at this point is just to mark uniquely a space-time location, so that such points are countable. That is only what is required to define a concept of mass” (Grasshof 1997, p. 105). “Die Zahl der Massenteilchen in einem beliebigen Raume, verglichen mit der Zahl der Massenteilchen, welche sich in einem festgesetzten Raume zu festgesetzter Zeit finden, heißt die in dem ersteren Raume enthaltene Masse” (Hertz 1894, p. 54). “Eine endliche oder unendlich kleine Masse, vorgestellt in einem unendlich kleinen Raume, heißt ein materieller Punkt” (ibid., p. 54).

definition Hertz draws the moral that a material point consists of mass-particles connected with one another215. Grasshof points out that in the Tractatus or in the Notebooks, Wittgenstein uses the notion of a material point: Wir dürfen nicht vergessen, dass die Weltbeschreibung durch die Mechanik immer die ganz allgemeine ist. Es ist in ihr z. B. nie von bestimmten materiellen Punkten die Rede, sondern immer nur von irgendwelchen (TLP 6.3423). Die Zerlegung der Körper in materielle Punkte, wie wir sie in der Physik haben, ist weiter nichts als die Analyse in einfache Bestandteile (NB 20.6.15, p. 67)216.

That is why he thinks, given that Hertz’s ontology influenced early Wittgenstein’s worldview, that there are material points which play the role of the simples in the Tractatus. Moreover, he notices that Tractarian simples are external objects, and whenever Hertz referred to external objects he used the notion of a material point. In contrast to this concept, the notion of a mass-particle was an a priori notion in Hertzian mechanics. This means that in defining what is mass, one presupposes the existence of such entities as mass-particles. Mass-particles are only features of space-time. They are like, as Andreas Blank says: “factors of particularity that allow one to associate a given point in space at a given time with another point in space at another time”217. The notion contains no empirical content and that, in Grasshof ’s view, would speak against mass-particles as candidates for Tractarian simple objects. On the other hand, as Keyt and Blank argue218, taking into account the Hertzian definition of a material point which states that material points consist of a number of mass-particles, one should rather say that the former notion better suits the notion of Tractarian states of affairs. This is because material points, in the understanding of Hertz, display complexity. Perhaps it is for this reason that Lampert is inclined to choose mass-particles as the simples of the Tractatus219. First, the characteristics of the concept of mass-particles entail no complexity. The other 215 “Ein materieller Punkt besteht also aus einer beliebigen Anzahl mit einander verbundener Massenteilchen” (ibid., p. 54). 216 The Pears-McGuinness translation uses in this context a confusing notion of “point-mass”, which one can mistake for the Hertzian notion of Massenteilchen – mass-particles. 217 Blank 2007, p. 252. 218 Keyt 1965, Blank 2007. 219 “Wittgenstein’s ideas of a physical language were more specific than Carnap’s: it is the physical language based on Heinrich Hertz’s definition of a mass-particle in the first part of his book The Principles of Mechanics” (Lampert 2003, p. 286).

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reason is that the characteristics of simple objects in the Tractatus correspond to what Hertz ascribed to mass-particles. For example, Hertz writes that massparticles are invariable and indestructible (Hertz 1894, p. 54), and Wittgenstein writes similarly that objects are unalterable and subsistent (TLP 2.027). One of the consequences of the Hertzian definition of a material point is that it requires the existence of more than one mass-particle. The concept of a single mass-particle has no empirical sense. It acquires empirical content only in connection with other mass-particles (in connection with other mass-particles it forms a material point, and the notion of a material point is empirical). Wittgenstein by echoing that conception says that “there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others” (TLP 2.0121). It is true that the concept of a mass-particle is a priori, but so was the concept of a simple object in the Tractatus. After all, Wittgenstein did not discover the simple objects with a microscope, but he asserted their existence as the end product of the logical analysis of a proposition. Moreover, in Chapter 1, in what I called “the room example”, I tried to show that the fact that the notion of a simple object is a requirement of the picture theory of meaning does not shatter the conviction that this theory falls under the type of realist theories of meaning. It turns out that the fact that the notion of a mass-particle gains an empirical meaning only in connection with the notion of a material point is not an argument against a mass-particle as a candidate for a simple object, as Grasshof thought. Quite the opposite – it suits even better the Tractarian description of the simples. Despite the differences in opinions as to what the simples of the Tractatus are – physical atoms as elementary particulars of physics or maybe constituents of reality described as in Hertz’s system, i.e. material points or mass-particles – what is common to all representatives of the materialistic interpretation are the following theses: (1) The simples are of a material kind (even if the notion of a mass-particle itself is an a priori notion, mass-particles in Hertz’s mechanics form, after all, objects of physics). (2) A physical analysis serves as a paradigmatic example of the Tractarian analysis of complex objects. (3) The language of physics is the only one that possesses the multiplicity that is needed to mirror in language every change in the world. (4) The language of physics is the language of science. This means that every scientific statement can be translated into a statement of physics. (5) Wittgenstein’s elementary propositions express material states of affairs and as such are translatable into the propositions of physics. 94

2.2.2  Arguments in favour of the materialistic interpretation The materialistic interpretation argues in favour of identifying the simple objects of the Tractatus with the elementary constituents of material reality. It is hardly imaginable that Wittgenstein, having constructed such a meticulous and detailed system of meaningful language as in the Tractatus, did not consider what would best fill the empty brackets of the notion of an object (at least in the Notebooks the inability to mention a simple object was for Wittgenstein a difficulty220). In the Notebooks he considered two main candidates for the simple objects: simple units of experience (or sense-data) and material points. Because the characteristics of the simples from the Tractatus are in disagreement with the candidacy of sense-data, the hypothesis that the Tractarian ontology is materialistic becomes very appealing. What are the arguments in favour of such a hypothesis? The presentation is divided into three parts: arguments one could draw on the basis of the lecture of the Notebooks, arguments which point at materialistic assumptions of some of the Tractarian theses, and Wittgenstein’s accusation of plagiarism against Rudolf Carnap. 

2.2.2.1  Arguments from the Notebooks In this section I shall focus on entries of the Notebooks coming from June of 1915. As we know, one of Wittgenstein’s main concerns during the time of his writing the Tractatus was which requirements one should put on language in order for it to be meaningful. The requirement of the determinateness of sense says that propositions of a meaningful language “restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no” (TLP 4.023). In order for a proposition to have a definite sense (and in this way to depict reality), its notions have to have sharp meanings (“It seems clear that that what we MEAN must always be sharp” (NB 20.6.15, p. 68)) – only then would the truth-conditions of a proposition be so determined that it would allow a “Yes” or “No” answer to the question: “Is this proposition true?”, whatever the case was. We also know that the consequence of the requirement of a determinate sense is the postulate of simple objects – the constituents of propositions have sharp meaning only if they refer to the simples221 – but this particular consequence is not of my 220 “Our difficulty was that we kept on speaking of simple objects and were unable to mention a single one” (NB 21.6.15, p. 68). This entry follows after two months of considerations about the nature of the simples. The idea that Wittgenstein was uninterested in ontological questions is untenable. 221 “The demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense” (NB 18.6.15, p. 63).

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immediate concern in the context discussed here. What is important is that Wittgenstein searched for a language whose propositions have a determinate meaning. The crucial step in these inquires was undertaken by Wittgenstein on 24 May 1915. On that day Wittgenstein rejected the hypothesis that it is the language of sense-data which fulfils the requirement of a determinate sense. He realised that sense-data are always given to us as complex parts that can be divisible into simpler parts. Hence, units of experience cannot be simple objects (what is simple, concludes Wittgenstein, cannot, therefore, be known by acquaintance), and the phenomenological language, i.e. language whose names refer to sense-data, cannot have a determinate sense. Its propositions will always be more or less vague: Even though we have no acquaintance with simple objects we do know complex objects by acquaintance, we know by acquaintance that they are complex. – And that in the end they must consist of simple things? We single out a part of our visual field, for example, and we see that it is always complex, that any part of it is still complex but is already simpler, and so on (NB 24.5.15, p. 50).

In this respect the language of physics has a clear advantage over the phenomenalistic language. Its constituents refer ultimately to elementary constituents of reality, which are simple: The division of the body into material points, as we have in physics, is nothing more than analysis into simple components (NB 20.6.15, p. 67).

As Timm Lampert sums up: “A physicalistic analysis involves analysing the world in the greatest of detail. It is impossible to make any further distinction after having specified points or infinitesimally small units of a physicalistic analysis”222. The language of physics fulfils the most basic condition for being the candidate of language whose constituents have definite meanings, i.e. the condition that names of such a language refer to simple and indestructible objects. Wittgenstein does not want to, however, admit too quickly that it is only the language of physics which is capable of picturing the world and that the physicalistic analysis is a model of an analysis into simpler parts. After all, this would mean that only propositions of physics have meaning, and that conclusion would be very strong, especially when one takes into account that we normally understand perfectly clear the propositions of everyday language, and that, in turn, suggests that also everyday language is a meaningful language. Does this mean, therefore, that an analysis of the propositions of everyday language into simple signs reveals another type of simple objects? Could it be that the referents of the simple signs of 222 Lampert 2003, p. 295.

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everyday language are the simple objects next to the elementary particles of physics? This depends on the question whether it is possible to conduct a full analysis of a proposition of everyday language, i.e. an analysis which results in a proposition with a determinate sense. This is why Wittgenstein considers the problem if the proposition (a) “The book is lying on the table” has a clear sense as “an extremely important question”223. The possible negative answer would ultimately weigh in favour of the physicalistic worldview. These are the topics of the extended (and unfortunately also slightly tangled) entries from 20 until 22 June 1915. It seems that Wittgenstein provides at least one argument in favour of the thesis that propositions of everyday language can have perfectly clear sense. This argument refers to the fact that in the case of vagueness, the meaning of a proposition can always be precisified by means of an ostension: If someone were to drive me into a corner in this way in order to shew that I did not know what I meant, I should say: “I know what I mean. I mean just THIS”, pointing to the appropriate complex with my finger (NB 22.6.15, p. 70).

Wittgenstein, however, claims that the elements of propositions precisified by means of ostensive definitions are not simple. The precisification of sense by means of the ostensive definitions amounts, for Wittgenstein, to the claim that in the proposition (a) the referent of the name: “book” functions as the simple object. This means that for the purposes of such and such a conversation, for such and such interlocutors, the name “book” refers to a simple object. It is a relatively simple object: “This object is simple for me!” (NB 22.6.15, p. 70). In the thesis which is a summary of Wittgenstein’s disquisition we read: It always looks as if there were complex object functioning as simples, and then, also really simple ones, like the material points of physics (NB 21.6.15, p. 69).

Therefore, in Wittgenstein’s view there are objects which sometimes function as simple (books, watches, Socrates), and objects which are truly simple (the physical atoms – the end-products of physical analysis). But why did he decide to ascribe the feature of relative simplicity to the end-products of analysis of sentences of everyday language? After all, if the proposition: “The book is on the table” has the definite sense, then should we not consider the referents of the names of this proposition to be just simple? According to Wittgenstein, however, the propositions of everyday language, despite the precisifications we pursue, do not have a determinate sense: 223 “When I say, ‘The book is on the table’, does it really have a completely clear sense? (An EXTREMELY important question)” (NB 20.6.15).

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It is obvious that a proposition like “This watch is lying on the table” contains a lot of indefiniteness (NB 21.6.15, p. 69).

Sometimes we are not certain how to call certain positions of the watch, or it is doubtful that the notion of “lying on” describes the relation between the watch and the table in the best possible way. Wittgenstein believed that even if for the sake of a conversation one stipulates the meaning of the proposition (a) by an ostensive definition, it would not change the character of the objects one refers to by expressing (a): Now when I do this and designate the objects by means of names, does that make them simple? All the same, however, this proposition is a picture of that complex (NB 22.6.15, p. 70)

It turns out that for Wittgenstein what counts, apart from the requirement of a determinate sense, is also the nature of objects. He has certain metaphysical views on objects that result in the conviction that a book could at best function as a simple object. I shall try to reveal these views. One can think about objects in two ways. Following Michael Jubien’s distinction, we can see reality as consisting of objects such as horses, statues and puddles224. Horses and statues are naturally physical objects but, according to this way of thinking, being a horse is a more fundamental feature of an object than being composed of physical particles. In the second view one can see reality as made up of physical objects which merely happen to be, for example, horses or statues. The metaphysics of the first point of view is silently assumed in the everyday language. The metaphysics of the second point of view is the metaphysics of physicalism225. The deficiency of the metaphysics of everyday language, from Wittgenstein’s point of view, consists in the fact that it assumes that objects instantiate essences. The world, under this conception, consists of matter (the physical material of an object) and essences (what makes an object what it is – a horse, a statue or a puddle). The notion of essence belongs to the old Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics, which describes the world from our human perspective. In contrast to this tradition, the Tractatus tried to describe the world sub specie aeterni, i.e. how it is independently of any points of views226. 224 Jubien 2007, pp. 108–109. 225 “Helmholtz, Hertz and Boltzmann (…) like their predecessors in England, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, took the really real world to be a domain of masses in motion. That was all there was to the world” (Harré 2001, p. 225). 226 Therefore, I agree with Sluga that the Tractatus pursued the project of describing the world in entirely objective terms, and this meant that it rejected “the old Aristotelian

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Note also that Wittgenstein believed that typical metaphysical concepts have no meaning at all: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions (TLP 6.53).

These arguments should incline us to think that Wittgenstein rather professed the metaphysics of the second type. This metaphysics is also the one which makes possible Wittgenstein’s project of constructing a language whose propositions would have a determinate sense. Let us summarise: the fact that Wittgenstein discerns between relative and absolute simple objects suggests that he indeed was interested in the nature of objects and, secondly, that the condition that objects are the referents of the names of a proposition with a determinate sense is not enough to ascribe to those objects the feature of simplicity. It seems that Wittgenstein had another condition in mind, namely an absolute indivisibility of objects. Only in the case of absolute simple objects is further analysis into simpler parts impossible, and the reason for vagueness of propositions is eradicated for good. It follows then that he accepted a materialistic worldview, and that by “the simples” he understood the elementary constituents of matter. In this section I have also tried to show, with the help of Jubien’s distinction, what Wittgenstein’s worldview could look like (that it assumed that the world consists of physical particles that just happen to be objects of familiar kinds). From these considerations it follows that indeed such a worldview suits better early Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy because it is a worldview which assumes only the existence of objects of science and does without metaphysical essences.

2.2.2.2  Arguments from the Tractatus In this section I shall analyse two arguments in favour of the materialistic interpretation which are based on the text of the Tractatus. As I have mentioned earlier, entries from the Notebooks are simply hints, Wittgenstein tried there different positions and one should not put too much weight on the formulations. They are not decisive when it comes to an interpretation of the Tractatus. Therefore, in the first argument I shall try to show that the vision of the world as consisting of physical conception of the world, which, it is said, interpreted things in human and, hence, subjective terms” (Sluga 1983, p. 125). I disagree, on the other hand, with Levi’s opinion that “Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is indeed Aristotelian in spirit” (Levi 1964/1967, p. 370).

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objects that just happen to be, for example, horses, statues and books, is also present in the Tractatus. In my opinion, this aspect of early Wittgenstein’s thought did not disappear in the process of his crystallising his views. The second argument aims to prove that one should ascribe to Wittgenstein physicalism in the Carnapian sense, i.e. the view that every meaningful sentence is translatable into the language of physics (not in the meaning that every psychological or biological law has its counterpart in a physical law, but rather that every meaningful sentence expresses physical states of affairs; states of affairs that are also describable in the language of physics). Physicalism as defined by Carnap does not necessarily have to be a metaphysical standpoint declaring which objects exist. A Carnapian physicalist can simply claim that the language of physics has the multiplicity suitable to express all kinds of facts; that in this language one can predict future events in the most accurate way, without going into considerations on what there is: mass-particles, sense-data, essences or moral values. But if I was correct in defending the thesis that Wittgenstein was a proponent of semantic realism, one could indeed draw metaphysical conclusions from the thesis that the Tractatus advocates in favour of Carnapian physicalism. If the referents of the names of a meaningful proposition have to exist in order for that proposition to be meaningful and if the propositions of physics are meaningful, then objects postulated by physics must exist. I. In the previous section I interpreted a fragment of Notebooks 20-22.6.15 as considerations about the proper worldview. Does reality consist of physical objects that happen to be horses, statues or books or does it consist of objects instantiating their essences – objects which are fundamentally their essences? According to my understanding, Wittgenstein opted for the atomistic view, according to which reality consists of various complexes of mass-particles (mereological parts of these complexes). My current question is whether in the Tractatus one could find traces of this ontological conviction? Answering this question, I would like to invoke the thesis TLP 5.631: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book (TLP 5.631).

I argue that this position is exactly what we would expect from a proponent of the atomistic view of the world. In this world there are only physical particles arranged in a certain way. That is why if one describes the world from one’s own perspective (and we assume that Wittgenstein requires that one does so meaningfully), the description, when it comes to the person describing the world, will contain 100

only the mentioning of one’s body. From a materialistic perspective this concrete arrangement of physical particles which forms my body just happens to be me. Perhaps I have gained weight, so there was another arrangement of particles which formed my body yesterday, but my current body and yesterday’s body are two different objects. Naturally, intuition tells us that something has not changed, namely the fact that both objects are my bodies. But in order to express this conviction one needs the metaphysics of essences. Then one would be able to say that this object instantiates the essence of this particular human being that does not change through the flow of time (we could refer to this essence with the help of the notion of a subject. Obviously, I assume that the notion of the subject in TLP 5.631 refers to the essence or to the core of the human being. My conviction is grounded in the fact that Wittgenstein clearly juxtaposes here this notion with the notion of the body. He had to, therefore, understand in TLP 5.631 a subject as something different than a body), and then the world would consist not only of physical atoms, but also of subjects. Now, I do not say that this view is wrong. What I want to prove is simply that early Wittgenstein thought it was wrong. In his view, a proper description of the world would mention no subjects (and we can with all likelihood assume that also no essences of other objects), but just arrangements of particles – bodies. It follows from this that his worldview during the time of editing the final version of the Tractatus agrees with the atomistic worldview he discussed in June of 1915. According to it, reality consists of various complexes of physical particles. These particles are truly the substance of the world – they are bricks that form all objects of the world. If that is so, then one must accept the materialistic interpretation as that which best explains what the simple objects of the Tractatus are. II. The second argument, which is formulated by Timm Lampert, centres around the theme of the model of analysis that was employed in the Tractatus. According to Lampert, the basis of the Tractarian analysis was the physical language – the one which was familiar to him via Hertz’s The Principles of Mechanics227. The line of Lampert’s reasoning is the following: if the language of physics is indeed the basis of the Tractarian analysis of propositions, then Wittgenstein treated meaningful propositions as translatable into the language of physics, and this thesis lies at the heart of physicalism as defined by Carnap. Lampert shows that with respect to the sense-data language, Wittgenstein

227 “For [Wittgenstein], a physical language served as a basis of analysis and the distinction between sense and nonsense. (…) It is the physical language based on Heinrich Hertz’s definition of a mass-particle in the first part of his book The Principles of Mechanics” (Lampert 2003, p. 286).

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made use of psychophysical analysis of colours in the Tractatus at least two times. In TLP 4.123 he wrote: This shade of blue and that one stand, eo ipso, in the internal relation of lighter to darker. It is unthinkable that these two objects should not stand in this relation.

Here, Wittgenstein excludes that “being brighter than” is the external relation, i.e. the relation that one can state by comparing two objects. Brightness, therefore, is the internal feature of an object and, according to Lampert228, one can make sense of this rather paradoxical statement only under the assumption of the physicalistic notion of a colour, which pervaded during the time of writing the Tractatus229. If “being brighter than” were an external relation, then one would determine the truth-value, for example, of the proposition (c): “This shade of blue is darker than this one” simply by comparing two colours. It would mean, however, that the proposition (c) would function as an elementary proposition whose elements are simple signs. In other words, one would treat patches of colours as simple objects. A proponent of the phenomenalistic interpretation of the Tractatus would be very pleased with this conclusion, but Wittgenstein states something quite opposite. A feature of brightness is, according to him, an internal one. One of the practical consequences of this thesis is that one cannot fix the truth-value of the proposition (c) simply by looking at the state of affairs that is expressed by (c), but by further analysing the proposition (c). This analysis, suspects Lampert, is the psychophysical analysis of colours230. According to the views of physicists contemporary to Wittgenstein, colour was a plurality of shades-units caused by light of a certain duration of oscillation. According to Lampert, the proposition: “A bright shade of blue is brighter than a dark shade of blue” is meaningful. It is a truth-function on certain elementary propositions, and one has to reveal what these elementary propositions are. I disagree with Lampert. I am convinced that a more accurate formulation of the problem, more faithful to Tractarian principles, is the following: The expression: “A bright shade of blue is brighter than a dark shade of blue” is, according to Tractarian 228 “Wittgenstein schließt in 4.123 explizit aus, dass die Helligkeit eine externe, unanalysierbare Beziehung zwischen einfachen Gegenständen ist, und setzt hierbei die physikalische Farbanalyse voraus” (Lampert 2000, p. 185). 229 This conviction was explicitly expressed by Wittgenstein in the Notebooks: “That the colours are not properties is shown by the analysis of physics, by the internal relations in which physics displays the colours” (NB 11.9.16, p. 82). 230 “Eine Farbe besteht aus Farbtoneinheiten, die durch ein bestimmtes Licht verursacht werden und für die gilt, dass sie sich an einem Punkt im Gesichtsfeld befinden” (Lampert 2000, p. 179).

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criteria, nonsense because a negation of this expression is unthinkable. What it tries to say could only be shown by means of other propositions, for instance, one which ascribes to object A a certain number of shades-units and the second which ascribes to object B a certain number of shades-units. Whatever the proper formulation of the problem is, thesis TLP 4.123 is understandable only under the assumption of a physical analysis of colours. It seems then that in the Tractatus a physical analysis serves as the model for analysis of the language of sensations: one makes sense of propositions about sensations by translating them into propositions of physics. This conclusion is even more clear in thesis TLP 6.3751, in which Wittgenstein tackles the colour-exclusion problem: For example, the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is impossible, in fact logically impossible, since it is ruled out by the logical structure of colour. Let us think how this contradiction appears in physics: more or less as follows—a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time; that is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time; that is to say, particles that are in different places at the same time cannot be identical. (It is clear that the logical product of two elementary propositions can neither be a tautology nor a contradiction. The statement that a point in the visual field has two different colours at the same time is a contradiction.) (TLP 6.3751)

When one states: (d):  “This patch is blue”, one can conclude, and conclude with certainty, that, for example: (e):  “This patch is not yellow”. It seems that (f):  “That patch is blue and, therefore, not yellow” is necessarily true. It poses a problem for the Tractarian system because in the Tractatus the only necessary truths are logical ones. However, it seems that (f) is neither a logical truth nor a contingently true proposition. In TLP 6.3751, however, Wittgenstein states that (f) is indeed a logical truth, and he analyses colour propositions in physicalistic terms. In other words, if only under the physicalistic interpretation one can hold the essential division of true propositions into necessary logical truths and contingent empirical truths, then in order to read the Tractatus as a consistent system one has to accept its physicalistic interpretation231. 231 According to Lampert, one needs an additional condition in this line of reasoning, i.e. the condition that one proves the logical impossibility not only by demonstrating the contradiction between two statements, but also by demonstrating the incompatibility

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Wittgenstein’s line of reasoning is the following: he reformulates (f) as a proposition about two different colours existing at the same moment at the same place: (f ’): “Two colours are simultaneously present at the same place in the same visual field” He states that (f ’) is logically impossible. Now Wittgenstein takes a decisive step and proposes a physicalistic analysis of (f ’): “Let us think how this contradiction appears in physics: more or less as follows – a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time” (TLP 6.3751). Only by means of such an analysis does he manage to prove the logical impossibility of (f ’). (F’) is translated into: (f ’’):  “A particle has two velocities at the same time” Wittgenstein refers here to Helmholtz’s definition of colour, according to which colours are sensations which are caused by ether parts oscillating with a certain velocity232. The fact that (f ’’) is a translation of (f ’) indicates that Wittgenstein held the former proposition to be more fundamental. It also supports the hypothesis that Wittgenstein employed the psychophysical analysis with respect to the language of sensations, and this, in turn, suggests his physicalism. Wittgenstein continues his argument in the following way: A particle cannot have two velocities at the same time; that is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time; that is to say, particles that are in different places at the same time cannot be identical (TLP 6.3751).

This thesis contains two steps. In the first step (“a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time; that is to say, it cannot be in two places at the same time”), Wittgenstein used, as Lampert suspects, the definition of momentary velocity (v = dx/dt). (F’’) allows different values of dx for one particle (because there can also be two values of v for one particle), i.e. it does not exclude the case of one of the proposition in question with the basic definitions of mass-particles. In other words, by demonstrating that a statement cannot be formulated in the language of physics: “Wittgenstein’s proof of colour exclusion does not result in a demonstrating contradiction using rules of analysis, but as a demonstration of how the statement that two colours are at the same point in the visual field at the same time is incompatible with Hertz basic definition of particles (…) This shows that Wittgenstein’s criterion of logical possibility lies in the compatibility with the mechanical world description according to Hertz’s definition of a mass-particle” (Lampert 2003, p. 311). 232 “In the purely mechanical interpretation of the wave theory of light, which both Helmholtz and Hertz held, simple colours are caused by ether particles oscillating with a certain velocity” (ibid., p. 294).

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particle being in two places at the same time. Let us call this consequence the consequence of (f ’’) (in short (Cf ’’)). In the second step, Wittgenstein applied Hertz’s aforementioned definition of a mass-particle (c.f. footnote 211): (HD):  “Particles that are in different places at the same time cannot be identical” (Cf ’’) is contradictory to (HD). This is enough for Wittgenstein to state: The statement that a point in the visual field has two different colours at the same time is a contradiction (TLP 6.3751).

At this point of his philosophical career, Wittgenstein was satisfied with his solution of the colour-exclusion problem (his later dissatisfaction is of no interest here because my investigation refers only to a proper interpretation of the Tractatus). Independently of the fact whether the presented proof is the answer to the challenge of the colour-exclusion problem, TLP 6.3751 betrays an interesting, from my point of view, conviction. Wittgenstein manages to show the logical impossibility of (f ’) – first of all, under the condition of an analysis of sensations in purely physical terms; secondly, under the assumption of definitions that imply the physicalistic worldview. In other words, if Wittgenstein did not accept these definitions, he could not prove the logical impossibility of (f ’). Thesis TLP 6.3751 is intelligible only under the assumption that Wittgenstein accepted the standpoint according to which reality consists of physical atoms.

2.2.2.3  The argument from Wittgenstein’s testimony One testimony confirms that Wittgenstein thought of the Tractatus as physicalistic in spirit. It comes from 1932, so it has to be treated with reservations for, as we remember, from that period there come also Wittgenstein’s testimonies that suggest a phenomenalistic reading of his work. In that year Wittgenstein became familiar with Rudolf Carnap’s article Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft. In this paper, Carnap propagated ideas of physicalism. He claimed there that “all statements in science can be translated into physical language”233. He believed that all terms of natural science (for example, biology, but also psychology) are ultimately reducible to the terms of physics234. The physical language describes every state of affairs, and all states of affairs are of one kind235. In Carnap’s 233 Carnap 1931/1995, p. 28. 234 “Every statement in biology can be translated into a physical language (…) All psychological statements refer to physical events” (ibid., p. 70–71). 235 “Science is a unity, all empirical statements can be expressed in a single language, all states of affairs are of one kind and are known by the same method” (ibid., p. 32).

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view, “because the physical language is the basic language of Science the whole of Science becomes Physics”236. The physical language is the only intersubjective language, and Carnap also proposed an analysis of sentences of the protocol language (reports of a subject’s experiences) into sentences of the physical language; for instance, a report concerning a note of such and such pitch, timbre and intensity could be expressed in the physical language in terms of “material oscillations of such (specified) basis frequency with superimposed additional frequencies of such (specified) amplitudes”237. Thanks to such translations, Carnap could ultimately conclude that experiences are nothing more than physical facts. Wittgenstein read Carnap’s paper and reacted with rage. He accused Carnap of committing plagiarism. Carnap answered this accusation in a manner that is similar to what is claimed by the proponents of the anti-metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus – that Wittgenstein never spoke in favour of physicalism and that there is no trace in the Tractatus of the claim that we can identify elementary propositions with physical ones or that simple objects are physical atoms. In response to this defence, Wittgenstein wrote a letter to Moritz Schlick in which he complained: “That I had not dealt with the question of ‘physicalism’ is untrue (only not under that – horrible – name) and I did so with the brevity with which the whole of the Tractatus is written”238. Following the hint of this letter, one should not expect direct and unambiguous confirmations of physicalism in the Tractatus, and one, of course, will not find the term “physicalism” in the book, but, still, this does not mean that there are no physicalistic ideas contained there. Wittgenstein’s conviction that Carnap had simply copied his thoughts could also help us understand why, if early Wittgenstein was convinced that the world consists of physical atoms, he identified the totality of true propositions with propositions of natural science and not with propositions of physics. The explanation could be that he, just as Carnap, believed in the unity of science, so that there was no need for him to contrast physics with other branches of science. Opponents of the physicalistic reading of the Tractatus are convinced that the accusation of plagiarism refers to Wittgenstein’s views from the period of 1929–1932239, but this claim clearly does not stand the force of evidence of Wittgenstein’s letter to Schlick. The letter explicitly mentions the Tractatus in

236 237 238 239

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Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 57. cited in: Monk 1990, p. 324. Haller 1989, p. 29.

the context of plagiarism. Similarly, according to Stern, Wittgenstein’s resentment towards Carnap was caused by the fact that Carnap did not mention him as the guiding spirit of the idea of the nature of philosophy, or of the ideas that the ostensive definition “does not lead us outside language”, and that philosophical pseudo-problems are eliminated “by means of the formal mode of speech”240. In his view, the accusation could not refer to Carnap’s ontology because the Tractatus did not defend – in contrast to Carnap’s paper – the thesis of the primacy of physical language241. In my opinion, the arguments provided by Lampert as presented earlier in the chapter prove that in the Tractatus the language of physics is indeed considered to be the most fundamental one, and Wittgenstein analysed propositions reporting sensations in terms of physics contemporary to him, hence Stern’s views are wrong.

2.2.3  Advantages of the materialistic interpretation In the previous section I gave arguments in favour of a materialistic interpretation of the Tractatus. In short, I indicated: A) The fact that some excerpts of the Notebooks as well as of the Tractatus suggest that Wittgenstein saw the world as consisting of complexes of physical particles. B) The fact that Wittgenstein held psychophysical analysis to be the model analysis for the language of sensations (Lampert’s argument). C) The accusation of plagiarism against Carnap who advocated in favour of physicalism. The materialistic interpretation claims that the simple objects of the Tractatus are the most elementary particles of matter. In the opinion of the advocates of this interpretation, this thesis suits well the whole Tractarian system: 1. First, it gives a concrete form to some Tractarian ideas. Without specifying the reference of the simple signs, Wittgenstein’s early oeuvre would remain merely an intellectual exercise, an interesting and sophisticated one, but only an exercise. For example, Wittgenstein’s view on tautology (TLP 4.46-4.4661), held to be one of the greatest achievements of the Tractatus242, rests on the 240 Stern 2007, p. 322. 241 Ibid., p. 329. 242 Shanker, taking the point of view of contemporary philosophy, sees the Tractatus as a set of “curiosities, offering interesting critical problems, but hardly serious positions that any modern philosophers would want to defend or pursue” (Shanker 1986a,

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division between senseless logical truths (TLP 4.461) and contingent truths (TLP 4.464). But in order to maintain this sharp division one has to make, as the colour-exclusion problem shows, certain assumptions about reality. One needs ontology in order to understand Wittgenstein’s book. The materialistic interpretation provides it. 2. As we saw earlier, the phenomenalistic interpretation has trouble coinciding sense-data with the attributes ascribed in the Tractatus to the simples. In contrast, physical atoms fulfil the requirements put on the simple objects that could not be fulfilled by the simple units of experience. According to Hertz, mass-particles were invariable and indestructible, and that resembles the Tractarian characteristic of the simples: thesis TLP 2.0271 claims that objects are “unalterable and subsistent”. Physical atoms are unalterable and subsistent in the sense that although I am 33 years old, the physical particles of which I am composed are as old as the universe. The proponents of the materialistic interpretation also underline that such a criterion of simplicity such as indivisibility discloses the most elementary physical particles as perfect candidates for the simples (because from the definition this Holy Grail of the physicists’ investigations is indivisible).   According to the physicalistic interpretation of the Tractatus, the form of an elementary proposition looks as follows:  (*) MST,

where M goes proxy for the most elementary particle of matter (for instance in the system of Hertz’s mechanics M goes proxy for a mass-particle), S for a point in space and T for a moment in time. This corresponds to the Tractarian definition of an elementary proposition which is a concatenation of names (TLP 4.22). Moreover, if one assumes this form of an elementary proposition, one also gains an explanation for one of the most difficult dictums of the Tractatus, which says that objects cannot be thought of independently of their connections with other objects (TLP 2.0121). In the same thesis, Wittgenstein simply explains that one cannot think of an object outside of space and time (TLP 2.0121). According to the materialistic interpretation, this statement does not provide an example or an analogy that one can afterwards apply to other objects. It is a straightforward illustration of the claim that one can think about objects only in connection with other objects. p. 17), and he believes that it is exactly the Tractarian view on tautologies that could explain the enormous popularity and constant influence of the Tractatus on modern philosophy (ibid., p. 19).

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  The physicalistic interpretation also explains why an elementary proposition cannot contradict any other elementary proposition (TLP 4.211). For example, no proposition can contradict: (**) M1S1T1. If one said that the proposition (***) M1S2T1 is in contradiction to (**), then a proponent of the materialistic interpretation would answer that one, on the grounds of the language of physics, cannot even formulate (***). (***) breaks the rules of the logical syntax of this language and is simply nonsense. 3. Another advantage of the materialistic interpretation is that the candidacy of physical particles as the simples responds to the requirement that sense must be determinate. This requirement, expressed by TLP 4.023: “A proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no”, is the basis of logical atomism. In order to restrict the reality to yes or no, a proposition has to have a determinate sense. Metaphorically speaking, it has to ask reality the question which excludes answers such as: “It depends, what you mean by…”. Why do proponents of the materialistic interpretation claim that material simples satisfy the requirement of a determinate sense better than units of experience? It is best to explain this on the example of colours243. The spectrum of colours is a continuum without sharp boundaries between different shades. It is then difficult to judge if a given colour is a shade of yellow or already a shade of green. If the continuum of the spectrum of colours were indefinite, then colours would overlap and there would be situations where the decision if something is yellow or green would be purely conventional. On the other hand, if the spectrum of colours was not indefinitely continuous, and if it was possible to end the analysis at the smallest shades of colours, then it would be possible to establish differences between colours. We would be able to decide what the colour of a given thing is: is it the last shade of yellow or the first shade of green? The requirement of a determinate sense would be kept. Under the phenomenalistic interpretation such an analysis of colours is difficult to imagine. On the other hand, physics, with its notion of colour, where the notion of wavelength plays a central role (colour is a property derived from degrees of stimulation which light of different wavelengths gives to different types of cone cells in the retina), seems to provide the necessary tools. It seems, then, that if one wants to preserve the requirement of a determinate sense with respect to reports of one’s experiences, one has to accept the materialistic interpretation of the simples.

243 This example is contained in: Carruthers 1990, p. 88.

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4. In the last two chapters I was searching for the answer to the question: “Why did Wittgenstein identify the totality of true propositions with the propositions of natural science?”. The materialistic interpretation gives me the answer. It is because Wittgenstein considered the world as primarily consisting of physical objects (complexes of the most elementary particles of matter) that just happen to be objects of certain kinds. It is a world described by physics. One of the conditions of the truthfulness of a proposition is that all the names of this proposition have referents. The referents of names are objects in the world. If ultimately the only objects of the world are physical particles, then only propositions of physics can fulfil this condition of the truthfulness of a proposition. TLP 4.11 becomes intelligible.

2.2.4 Counterarguments The last advantage of the materialistic interpretation that I mentioned above is sometimes considered to be its greatest drawback. One can question: “What about the propositions of everyday language?”. It follows from the materialistic interpretation that the proposition: “The book is lying on the table” is not true even if the book is lying on the table. If only propositions of natural science are true, then it follows that propositions of everyday language are not244. The answer of a proponent of the materialistic interpretation could take on the following form: the proposition: “The book is lying on the table” is meaningful, and one shows this by means of physical analysis, which reveals that when one speaks about books and tables, in fact one is speaking about arrangements of particles standing in a certain relation to one another (“The complete physical proposition does after all deal with things, relations and so on” (NB 20.6.15, p. 67)). This means, however, that (assuming that the meaning of a proposition is a state of affairs expressed by the proposition) most of the time we are not aware what we are speaking about. It seems that we refer to objects such as trees, cars and watches when in fact we are referring to basic elements of matter. It seems that we express the states of affairs we perceive, such as that the book is on the table, when in fact we are expressing states of affairs most of us are not aware of:

244 Max Black regards the quest for the simples to be futile, and he consequently thinks that thesis TLP 4.11 is unacceptable: “The identification of science with the totality of contingent truths obliterates any distinction between science and common sense, does not square with the most sophisticated account of scientific language supplied later (e.g. at 6.341), and is therefore unacceptable” (Black 1964, p. 186).

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On Grasshof ’s account, neither “Einstein” nor “Berne” are names in the sentence “Einstein is in Berne” – these names vanish in the course of analysis. But when a sentence is used to locate a person in the city, it is not locating a spatio-temporal concatenation of molecules in respect to buildings, streets, let alone bricks or the other molecules that the bricks are made of. None of these are properly elements of the thought that is to be expressed by the sentence (Nordmann 2002, p. 376).

This consequence of the materialistic interpretation seems to be unacceptable to some of the commentators. Nordmann indicates the basic contradiction between this conclusion and theses TLP 3.2-3.201245: In a proposition thought can be expressed in such a way that elements of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thought. I call such elements “simple signs”, and such a proposition “completely analysed”.

For Nordmann, it is clear that elements of the thought about Einstein’s stay in Berne are, among others, Einstein and Bern. Let us take the proposition: (g): “Einstein rented the flat on the second floor of Kramgasse 49 from 1903 to 1905” According to thesis TLP 3.2, the elements of the proposition (g) correspond to the elements of the thought about Einstein’s stay in Berne. But if the elements of this thought are Einstein and Berne, then it follows that the elements of the proposition (g) are: “Einstein” and “the flat on the second floor of Kramgasse 49”. These elements, according to thesis TLP 3.201, are simple signs. It seems that this conclusion stays in contradiction with the materialistic interpretation. What arguments could the proponent of the materialistic interpretation give in order to defend his way of reading the Tractatus? He could, for example, refer to the text of the Tractatus, which states that in a proposition a thought can be, but not necessarily is expressed in such a way that elements of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of thought. If it can be expressed this means that there are cases in which the elements of the propositional sign do not correspond to the objects of thought. Wittgenstein does not make precise in what percentage of cases there is a correspondence between the elements of thought and the elements of propositions. This percentage could be very small, and it could refer only to the thoughts of molecular physicists. This reply sounds slightly artificial. It is hardly imaginable that Wittgenstein suddenly thought about the molecular physicists and their thoughts about their professional interests and decided to include in the body of the Tractatus a 245 Nordmann 2002, p. 376, Carruthers 1990, p. 125.

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thesis referring to them. Therefore, advocates of the materialistic interpretation need to assume a different strategy of defending their views. For example, a proponent of the materialistic interpretation could admit that it is “impossible to analyze each sentence to the level of its atomic components”246. Then he could make use of Wittgenstein’s aforementioned distinction between simple objects and objects that function as simple. Grasshof provides here an analogy from the practice of physicists who, for the sake of the comfort of a calculation (for example, a calculation of forces that influence the body, or of the kinetic energy of the body) treat material bodies as material points. In this analogy, Einstein and Berne are like extended material bodies which for the sake of convenience are treated as material points – the referents of the simple signs. Therefore, we are allowed to say that Einstein and Berne are the elements of thought about Einstein’s stay in Berne and, hence that “Einstein” and “Bern” are simple signs, but only if one is aware that “Einstein” is a shortcut for “a composition of physical molecules”; a shortcut we employ for the sake of the convenience of communication. In this way one can save the materialistic interpretation despite the challenge of theses TLP 3.2-3.201247. In Chapter 1 I defended the realistic theory of meaning. According to it, apart from breaking the rules of logical syntax, the other source of nonsense is the lack of reference of the names of a proposition. If we accept the realistic theory of meaning, then there are two major candidates for Tractarian simple objects: simple units of perception and physical atoms. I discussed both of these hypotheses. I believe that there are more convincing arguments on the side of the materialistic interpretation (these arguments are, among others, the fact that material points are compatible with the Tractarian description of the simples, the way in which Wittgenstein solved the colour-exclusion problem, his accusation of plagiarism against Carnap). That is why, according to my hypothesis, the materialistic interpretation of the simples is the best way to understand the Tractatus. The simples are of a material nature, the substance of the world consists of physical particles, only these entities could be rightfully considered as objects, and meaningful propositions can by translated into the language of physics. That point of view could be rightly named physicalism.

246 Grasshof 1997, p. 104. 247 Naturally, this line of defence does not satisfy the adversaries. It is because TLP 3.201 does not say that the elements of propositions that refer to elements of thought function as simple signs, but that they are simple signs.

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2.3  Resolute interpretation of the Tractatus Before I continue my considerations about the Tractatus, I shall refer to one more proposal of reading this book. Its basic assumption is the alleged failure of all the previous trials to understand the Tractatus. An anti-metaphysical reading sees the Tractarian object as a purely formal notion. Its main assumption says that early Wittgenstein was primarily a logician who was not interested in metaphysical problems. This corresponds well with the fact that the postulate of simple objects was in fact the consequence of the semantic views of young Wittgenstein (his demand that the sense of a proposition should be definite); it reflects Wittgenstein’s anxiety, expressed in the Notebooks, that he is unable to give an example of a simple object but, on the other hand, it is in contradiction with Wittgenstein’s desire to know the nature of being, or with semantic realism, which I believe is confessed by early Wittgenstein. According to Wittgenstein, in order for a proposition to be meaningful, its constituents have to have referents. Therefore, the semantic considerations have to be completed with the metaphysical question: “What could be a referent of a name? What exists?”. The phenomenalistic interpretation claims that there are simple units of experiences – sense-data – that exist. A very strong argument in favour of this interpretation is Wittgenstein’s identification of the world with my world, his conviction that what solipsism means is quite correct but, on the other hand, the characteristics of Tractarian simples (that they are unalterable and subsistent, that they can exist only in states of affairs) are incompatible with the characteristics of sense-data. Finally, the materialistic interpretation claims that the simples of the Tractatus are the most elementary constituents of matter. The description of physical particles corresponds to what Wittgenstein wrote about the simples, and some theses of the Tractatus assume the necessity of the translation of propositions of the language of sensations into a language of physics, but on the other hand, one of its conclusions is that elements of thought are not what we think they are. According to the materialistic interpretation, Wittgenstein was convinced that in our thoughts we refer to physical particles instead of, for instance, tomorrow’s shopping, Andy Murray’s victory in Wimbledon or Einstein’s stay in Berne. The fact that each of the above interpretations has its merits and flaws raises a suspicion that the whole dispute about the simple objects is a complete misunderstanding of the aims of the Tractatus. Recently, many of Wittgenstein’s commentators have been inclined to regard the discussions I presented in the last two chapters as, in the view of the author of the Tractatus himself, hopelessly fruitless and senseless. This interpretation, often called the New Reading, 113

or the resolute interpretation of the Tractatus, has recently gained recognition among scholars (Diamond, Conant, Crary, Ricketts, Ostrow), so in the light of the topics I am discussing here it cannot be ignored. It decidedly (as the name of the interpretation states) challenges the solutions I defend. That is why I shall refer to the most common arguments of the resolute interpretation in the following sections of the chapter. I shall present three hallmarks of this reading (section 2.3.1), i.e. its thesis that there are no theses in the Tractatus, its rejection of the conception of substantial nonsense, and its views as to what, according to Wittgenstein, was the primary reason for our failures in philosophy. In section 2.3.2 I shall respond to the claims of the New Reading. At the centre of my attention is the discussion as to what, according to Wittgenstein, is the reason for philosophical nonsense: is it the pursuit to fix the limits of sense (as the New Reading claims) or is it competing with science in the task of providing the most comprehensive worldview.

2.3.1  The principles of the resolute interpretation The most recognisable mark of the resolute interpretation is serious treatment of the result of the Tractatus, i.e. Wittgenstein’s claim: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) (TLP 6.54).

According to the proponents of the resolute interpretation, Wittgenstein wanted to communicate in this thesis that “in the end, all the pronouncements of [Wittgenstein’s] text are just gibberish”248. One could say, in other words, that there is just one thesis in the Tractatus: that the theses of the Tractatus are nonsensical. The only meaningful claim are Wittgenstein’s instructions as to how to approach the book249 or, as Conant puts it, the claim that we are exposed to temptations of ridiculous questions250. There are no theses, doctrines or even arguments in the Tractatus. The New Interpretation negates that “Wittgenstein is throughout the text attempting to provide arguments for controversial and disputable theses”251. This attitude critically assesses interpretations which say that not only did Witt248 Ostrow 2002, p. 5. 249 Morris & Dodd 2009, p. 249. 250 “The only ‘insight’ that a Tractarian elucidation imparts, in the end, is one about the reader himself: that he is prone to such illusions of thought” (Conant 2000, p. 197). 251 Ostrow 2002, p. 5.

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genstein consider the conditions for a meaningful proposition, but also that he gave a good deal of answers (for example, that the reason for the senselessness of expressions is using names in discord with their roles in logical syntax). In one place, in section 1.1.3, I claimed that although it is true that, strictly according to Tractarian rules, one cannot say that there are objects (strictly speaking it is nonsense), nevertheless the thesis “There are objects” allows us to see the world aright. The thesis is a useful tool in the process of acquiring the proper worldview. We cannot meaningfully express theses about objects (just as Frege could not meaningfully describe concepts) but, nevertheless, these expressions somehow transmit what we should think about objects252. This conception – that nonsensical expressions convey content – is the object of the fierce attack of the resolute interpretation. According to its representatives, it allows for the unacceptable distinction between mere nonsense and substantial nonsense253, whereas there is only one kind of nonsense: sentences such as Diamond’s “piggly wiggle tiggle”, which has no content at all254. The Tractatus, from this point of view, is simply a set of piggly wiggle tiggles. If one recognises an expression as nonsense, this means that one also recognises that nothing was said255. One cannot pretend, therefore, that there is an ineffable reality which cannot be expressed, but in spite of this one can have some access to it. The fight with the idea of substantial nonsense is the second hallmark (apart from a serious treating of Wittgenstein’s claim that all theses of the Tractatus are meaningless) of the resolute interpretation. According to the proponents of the New Interpretation, if we accept that there are Tractarian theses which make use of nonsense in order to convey a truth about 252 “The sentences of the Tractatus, though nonsensical, are used by Wittgenstein to bring us to see the ineffable truths which explain why this is so. Such nonsense sentences communicate truths by getting the reader to grasp the truths lying behind his words” (Morris & Dodd 2009, p. 249). 253 Conant 2000, p. 176. 254 “When you ascribe to someone the thought that p, this involves you in using a sentence giving the content of the thought, a sentence that you understand, a sentence of some or other language that you understand. You are not ascribing a belief to someone if you say that she believes that piggly wiggle tiggle, if ‘piggly wiggle tiggle’ is nonsense (although it may be that she has been hypnotized and somehow or other made to think that when she says ‘piggly wiggle tiggle’ out loud or to herself she is making sense.) If ‘piggly wiggle tiggle’ is nonsense, then ‘Mary thinks that piggly wiggle tiggle’ or ‘Mary says that piggly wiggle tiggle’ is nonsense” (Diamond 2000a, p. 151). 255 “To recognize a Satz as nonsensical [Unsinn], for the Tractatus, is not a matter of recognizing that it is attempting to say something that cannot be said, but rather a matter of recognizing that it fails to say anything at all” (Conant 2000, p. 194).

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the world, this would mean that we ascribe to Wittgenstein exactly the same mistake he fought against256, i.e. that we can take a position outside of a language. In the opinion of the proponents of the New Reading, it is the position the adherents of the standard interpretation must hold. According to the standard interpretations (both anti-metaphysical and metaphysical; phenomenalistic or materialistic), Wittgenstein in the Tractatus tried to set the limits of meaningful thought; but in the opinion of the adherents of the resolute interpretation the concept of the limit of sense suggests that there is something outside the limit since there is something a thought can express (within the limits of sense) and there is something a thought cannot express (outside the limits of sense). In the eyes of the proponents of the New Interpretation, there is nothing a thought cannot express. Either we succeed in conveying content or we do not succeed in producing a thought at all, whereas the standard interpretations make use of the idea of something a thought cannot express. According to the resolute interpretation, there is just one kind of nonsense, something one could compare with childish babbling, and in this light the pursue for setting the limits of sense is contradictory and self-refuting: ”Wittgenstein’s point here, and throughout the Tractatus, is that the idea of a limit to thought is self-undermining in the sense that there is no intelligible way in which one can be drawn. Doing so, Wittgenstein is saying here in the Preface, would require having some grasp of what lies beyond such a limit; indeed, the very suggestion of a limit implies that there is something which is being excluded, which lies outside of the range of thought and so cannot be reached” (Cerbone 2000, p. 293).

Under the New Interpretation the aim of Wittgenstein’s criticism, when he says that, for instance, “most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical” (TLP 4.003) is, therefore, the Fregean and Russellian project of fixing the limits of what is meaningful and what is nonsensical: In the transparent vacuity of this culminating statement [TLP 6.54] we are meant to see the vacuity of this Frege/Russell logic, of any attempt to specify a priori the limits of thought and language (Ostrow 2002, p. 114)

Frege-Russell’s project of the philosophy of language aims to guarantee philosophy a special place in human culture. According to this view, philosophy is the

256 “They [the representatives of the resolute interpretation] charge that standard interpretations in effect represent Wittgenstein as undertaking the very type of metaphysical project which, even according to the interpretations themselves, he is repudiating” (Crary 2000, p. 3).

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most general discipline embracing the other disciplines of science257. Its specific subject-matter is a region of necessity, in contrast to natural science whose subject-matter is the sphere of the contingent. It states truths independently of what the world actually looks like. The New Interpretation rejects this view of philosophy. It accuses this way of philosophising of accepting the groundless assumption that there is a point of view from which one sees the world as a whole258. Such an assessment of philosophy (that it unjustifiably assumes the existence of the point of view from which we can view the world as a whole) results in seeing all of its traditional discussions as empty. I discussed, for instance, the problem whether the simples are simple units of experience or material points. These questions, according to the resolute interpretation, are nonsensical. It is a dispute between the realists and the empiricists. In Diamond’s opinion, empiricism is a mirror side of realism259. Diamond argued that although we know what it means to have a realistic attitude to the world, what it means to be a realist in politics and what realism in literature consists in260, in philosophy there is a struggle when it comes to understanding what is contrasted with the realistic standpoint. A realist, for example Russell, says that he can talk about the external world; the world independent of my ideas or experiences. He claims that he can cross the limits of the subjective world of private experiences. An antagonist of a realist says, on the other hand, that this is impossible. We are imprisoned in our own worlds. Ultimately, in the opposition to realism, therefore, stands solipsism: Solipsism rejects the Russellian idea that we can get beyond the “limit of private experience” but keeps its conception of that limit: it precisely does give us one of what Russell had given us two of. The solipsist does not rigorously follow out his solipsism; if he did, it would lead him to a non-Russellian realism. A one-limit view self-destructs (Diamond 2000b, p. 282).

257 “On Frege’s view, logic, as the maximal general science, does not concern itself directly with cognition and cognizers: its topic – universality establishes a framework for all of science” (Ricketts 2010, p. 169). 258 “Take the opening sentences of the Tractatus after the preface: ‘The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’ With those sentences we imagine a point of view from which we can consider the world as a whole. That idea, not recognized as an illusion, characterizes the practice of philosophy as it has gone on” (Diamond 2000a, p. 160). 259 “Empiricism is something we get into in philosophy by trying to be realists but going about it in the wrong way, or not hard enough” (Diamond 1974–1982/1995, p. 39). 260 Ibid., p. 40–41.

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According to Diamond’s reading of the Tractatus, one cannot even formulate the idea of solipsism. This means that one cannot understand the philosophical standpoint one hoped to make clear by contrasting it with solipsism, i.e. the standpoint of realism. It turns out that the discussion between both rivalling interpretations of the Tractatus, i.e. the phenomenalistic and materialistic one, is nothing more than idle chatter261. It seems that it is impossible to find more contrasting views than realism and solipsism, but under closer scrutiny it turns out that both of these standpoints share the same conviction about the existence of a limit between the subjective and objective sphere of reality. According to Diamond, an opinion with respect to one’s ability to cross the limits of the subjective world is secondary as compared to the fact that neither of these two standpoints can make sense of the idea of a limit between what is subjective and objective. Summing up, the third feature of the resolute interpretation is a view on which the Tractaus’ criticism of philosophy was aimed at a philosophy that sets limits, i.e. between what is meaningful and nonsensical, or between what is subjective and objective.

2.3.2  The notion of philosophy in the Tractatus As we can see, the New Interpretation in a radical way (1) rejects the supposition that there are doctrines in the Tractatus, (2) rejects the conception of substantial nonsense, and (3) attacks the project of setting the limits of meaningful discourse. How could one answer the challenge of the resolute interpretation? I cannot aspire to do this better and in a more comprehensive way than Peter Hacker or Ian Proops did, who, on the basis of Wittgenstein’s writings, proved that he could not hold the position that the resolute interpretation ascribes to him262. All historical evidence (Wittgenstein’s letters, later lectures, notes, records of discussions with other philosophers), meticulously listed by the aforementioned authors263, suggests that Wittgenstein himself held the Tractatus to be a book containing substantive philosophical doctrines. I shall just concentrate on the argument that the thesis that there is just one claim in the Tractatus, i.e. that the theses of the Tractatus are nonsensical, is untenable. Such authors as Hacker, Proops, Child or Horwich point out that if the resolute interpretation sees the theses of the Tractatus as nonsensical, it has to assume that

261 “There can be no question (…) of adopting a standpoint from which we can, once for all, assess the ‘real character’ of our utterances about objects” (Ostrow 2002, p. 77). 262 Hacker 2000; Proops 2001. Other important responses to the resolute interpretation: McGuinness 2012; Sullivan 2004. 263 Proops 2001, pp. 382–395; Hacker 2000, pp. 360–382.

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we understand that they are nonsensical: a reader of the Tractatus, according to the proponents of the New Reading, is led through different tempting philosophical positions up to the point of becoming aware of the futility of philosophy and, finally, to the decision of throwing it away. The rejection of philosophy entails that one becomes aware of its nonsense. It assumes that at some point one understands that the claims of philosophy are nothing other than “piggly wiggle tiggle”264. But the same proponents of the New Reading say that there is just one kind of nonsense in which there is no content to grasp because nonsense fails to produce a thought, and yet they describe the intentions of the Tractatus as assuming that its reader will realise that its theses are nonsensical. But if one sticks to the theory of just one kind of nonsense, it seems that the reader of the Tractatus cannot become aware that its theses are nonsense. After all, if one is confronted with “piggly wiggle tiggle”, he does not have to realise that it is nonsense. Exactly because there is no content to grasp, there can be no process of reading, seeming to understand, and realising that there was nothing to understand. Clearly, the proponents of the New Reading, trying to stick to both a serious reading of TLP 6.54 as well as to the theory of one kind of nonsense, are tangled up in hopeless contradictions. According to the standard interpretations, the problem of “throwing away the ladder” is easy to solve. Wittgenstein, under this reading, tries to set the limit of sense and then, on the basis of the theory of proposition defended by the Tractatus, one rejects some linguistic expressions as not fulfilling the requirements put on propositions. This explanation is inaccessible to the resolute interpretation, which claims that there are no doctrines in the Tractatus. Moreover, it claims that the project of setting the limits of sense is alone the main source of philosophical nonsense. It makes the position of the resolute interpretation even more perplexing. If fixing the limits of sense is senseless, how could one possibly know that the theses of the Tractatus are nonsensical?265 In order to respond to such arguments, Morris and Dodd tried to improve the resolute interpretation. They called the Diamond-Conant interpretation “The NotAll-Nonsense View” because it says that there is only one claim in the Tractatus. 264 “It would seem rather that, although there are not supposed to be any fully cogent formulations of those ideas, still Wittgenstein’s formulations do somehow manage to steer us in the right direction” (Horwich 2012, p. 94). 265 “On the conventional view, the nonsensicality of the Tractatus’ own propositions follows directly from the positive theory of language that Wittgenstein is advancing. But if we insist that the Tractatus embodies no positive theory of language at all, there seems nothing to say about why Wittgenstein judges his own propositions to be nonsensical” (Child 2011, p. 71).

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The Not-All-Nonsense View assumes the existence of a frame in the Tractatus. To the frame belong, allegedly, the Preface and thesis TLP 6.54. The frame should be read as containing genuine propositions which guide a reader through the book. It is The Not- All-Nonsense View that is entangled, in the opinion of Morris and Dodd, in the aforementioned problems as to how one can know that the theses of the Tractatus are nonsensical since there is no positive theory of language in the book266. In contrast to this version of the resolute interpretation, Morris and Dodd proposed “The No-Truth-At-All View”, which says that Wittgenstein did not want to communicate any truth whatsoever. He even did not want to say that the theses of the Tractatus are nonsensical267. I am not sure if Morris and Dodd make any favours to the resolute interpretation. The conclusion of their view amounts to the claim that there is no difference between the Tractatus and a blank sheet of paper. After all, a blank sheet of paper conveys no truths either. They would obviously not agree with this criticism. According to them, the text of the Tractatus has a certain aim. This goal cannot be to convey truths (since there are none in the text) but it is “to bring us to adopt another perspective on life altogether; and this other perspective, we suggest, is the perspective of mysticism”268. Even if one accepts this explanation and agrees that The No-Truth-At-All View does not reduce the Tractatus to a blank sheet of paper, the following problem arises: “What is the difference between The No-Truth-At-All View and Conant-Diamond’s The Not-All-Nonsense View?”. Morris and Dodd could be asked how they know that Wittgenstein wanted us to adopt a mystical point of view since there are allegedly no truths in the Tractatus, just like Conant and Diamond are asked how they know that the theses of the Tractatus are nonsensical if there is no doctrine there? In the end, the proponents of the New Reading themselves cannot be faithful to the principles of their interpretation. Hacker, and rightly so, indicates that Conant and Diamond do not hold all the theses of the Tractatus as gibberish. When we read their papers we have a feeling that they are quoting theses TLP 4.126-4.1272, TLP 5.437 or TLP 5.25 with approval, as if these theses contain a true doctrine. They agree with the author of these claims and refer to these theses in order to

266 “The Not All-Nonsense View simply does not have the resources to explain why it should matter to Wittgenstein that nonsense comes to be nonsense for the particular reason he provides” (Morris & Dodd 2009, p. 256). 267 Ibid., p. 251. 268 Ibid., p. 261.

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justify their views269. This is a strange tactics for commentators who should rather say that these theses did not succeed in formulating a thought. I shall move to the second hallmark of the resolute interpretation, i.e. the claim that there is just one kind of nonsense. In my opinion, the reason for the aforementioned inconsistency with respect to the claim that there is just one thesis in the Tractatus could be reduced to the fact that in trying to understand the Tractatus one cannot avoid the distinction between substantial and mere nonsense. The proponents of the New Reading are correct when they see the danger of abusing the doctrine of substantial nonsense. It suggests that there is an ineffable reality (since substantial nonsense is about something we cannot put into words) and that it could lead to some groundless conclusions such as, for instance, that Wittgenstein believed in the existence of the transcendental self. As we will see in Chapter 4, I reject usage of the doctrine of substantial nonsense with respect to the existence of the self. I am also against associations of the doctrine of substantial nonsense with mysticism, but this does not mean that we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and negate any hint of the existence of the doctrine of substantial nonsense in the Tractatus. One can prevent the abuse of the usage of this doctrine simply by stating that, according to Wittgenstein, nonsense is substantial when we can show what it is triysing to say by means of other propositions. For example, when one says that there are objects in one’s room, we can show what this nonsense is trying to say by saying, for instance, that there are chairs in one’s room270. One shows what the expression: “Dark blue is darker than light blue” is trying to say by means of propositions in which one ascribes to the dark blue colour a certain amount of shades-units (for instance, 5), and to light blue another amount of shades-units (for instance, 3). And, using the Tractarian example, “what the axiom of infinity is intended to say would express itself in language through the existence of infinitely many names with different meanings” (TLP 5.535). As we can see, we have convincing evidence that Wittgenstein agreed that not every nonsense is gibberish. Sometimes we manage to show what nonsense tries to

269 “Diamond holds that Wittgenstein really did think that the signs ‘p’ and ‘~p’ can say the same thing (Tractatus 4.0621), that his criticisms of Frege in 4.063 are not ‘plain nonsense’ but genuine, powerful criticisms, as are his criticisms of Russell’s theory of judgement. With this one must agree, but wonder whether this is not a case of trying to have one’s cake and eat it” (Hacker 2000, p. 361). 270 “What you want to say by the apparent proposition ‘there are 2 things’ is shown by there being two names which have different meanings” (Letters, p. 126).

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say, and in this case nonsense is elucidatory271. Additionally, accepting the doctrine of substantial nonsense can free us from questions such as: “If all nonsense is like childish babbling, then how can one come to the conclusion that the theses of the Tractatus should be rejected?” After all, it is impossible to understand childish babbling”, I do not see any reason to reject this doctrine. Its acceptance allows to outline the following dialectics of the Tractatus. The Tractatus sets the limits of sense. In the previous chapters I discussed what are, in my opinion, the two requirements put forward by Wittgenstein regarding a meaningful proposition. First, it has to consist of names with referents, and secondly, all constituents of a proposition have to occur in it according to their roles in logical syntax. On the other hand, on the basis of the Tractarian theory of sense, the limiting of sense is nonsensical. We saw the reason for this: expressing the requirements put on a meaningful proposition demands using formal concepts, which in the ideal logical notation would be represented by the variables, and this means that they cannot occur in the fully analysed, meaningful propositions (because the latter are concatenations of real names). This does not mean, however, that we should assess the whole project of fixing the frame of meaningful discourse as rubbish, because theses which express the limits of sense belong to the category of substantial nonsense. At last I tackle the third claim of the resolute interpretation, i.e. that for early Wittgenstein the primary examples of philosophical nonsense were the views of Russell and Frege. I think that in claiming this the New Reading does not take into account the historical background of the Tractatus. According to the resolute interpretation, early Wittgenstein in his criticism of philosophy targets, above all, the philosophy of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. That seems, to me, highly unlikely. In the summer of 1911 Wittgenstein travelled to Jena to meet Frege. He hoped that this meeting would help him decide if he should begin work in philosophy or if he should continue his work in aeronautics. Despite the fact that Frege, according to Wittgenstein’s own remark, “wiped the floor with him”, he decided to develop his new interest272. He met Russell, and that meeting was decisive for Wittgenstein’s later career273. If Frege and Russell represented all “evil” and “delusions” of philosophy, young Wittgenstein would not be so impressed by their thought, he would not change his entire life, and he 271 “It might help to suppose on Wittgenstein’s behalf that his ‘senseless propositions’ should not be equated with ‘gibberish’, but should be taken to involve some less extreme defect – one that does not preclude their somehow being ‘elucidatory’ ” (Horwich 2012, p. 91–92). 272 Monk 1991, p. 36–37. 273 Waugh 2010, p. 71.

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would not give up his engineering studies. It is safe to say that there were rather the modern tools of logic as developed by Russell and Frege which helped to fight the philosophical nonsense of idealism that attracted young Wittgenstein. In these personas he found mentors who could help him express criticism against the traditional philosophy he knew, mainly from Schopenhauer’s books. At least this is the picture of philosophical development (from Schopenhauer’s idealism to Russell’s realism) we find in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks: This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out (NB 15.10.16, p. 85).

I agree with the representatives of the resolute interpretation about the negative attitude of the Tractatus towards philosophy. I do not agree, however, with the idea of what the aim of Tractarian criticism was. Diamond and Conant would indicate at Frege and Russell, with their goal of setting the limits of sense. They can answer to the biographical facts I have mentioned that it is comprehensible that by the time of finishing or publishing the Tractatus and having worked for many years with Russell, Wittgenstein came to the conclusion that his initial excitement about Russell’s and Frege’s writings was groundless; that, in fact, these writings are no more meaningful than the oeuvres of Kant, Hegel or Schopenhauer. I do not think, however, that this possible response withstands the textual evidence of the Tractatus. The proponents of the resolute interpretation claim that in the eyes of early Wittgenstein the scandal of philosophy consists in a project of fixing the limits of sense. But in the Tractatus we find entries that state that exactly this should be the task of philosophy: [Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought. It will signify what cannot be said, by presenting clearly what can be said (TLP 4.114-4.115).

The reason for Wittgenstein’s criticism with respect to philosophy has to be different. In my opinion, and I shall analyse this in the next two chapters in order to prove the claim, for Wittgenstein the example of nonsense in philosophy is ontotheology. By that I mean, following Putnam’s description, philosophy which searches for proofs for the existence of God, an immortal soul or free will274. In a

274 “A reason often given for the contemporary question concerning the need of or role for philosophy is that philosophy for so long (…) was heavily interested in two

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broader sense the object of Wittgenstein’s critique is a theoretical philosophy, i.e. a philosophy which formulates doctrines, theories and claims that aspire to rival, contest or complete the theories and claims of natural science. It is a philosophy which – with all its proofs, argumentations, appearances of precision and own method – is disguised as science. It is a philosophy which claims that there are phenomena whose study is its special business. An example of such a philosophy could be Cartesian dualism (which aims to prove the existence of the immortal soul and God only on the basis of speculation) or the metaphysics of will by Schopenhauer (which tries to oppose the results of mechanics, physics or biology by delivering a broader and fuller picture of the world which includes the reality of things-in-themselves). In the Tractatus, philosophy is contrasted with natural science. The danger to philosophy, in the eyes of the author of the Tractatus, consists in its constant trying to be like science. What is fatal for philosophers is their trying to compete with scientists in their task of explaining events in the world. Philosophy is not equipped for this task – it does not have a special domain of reality to investigate and, moreover, its traditional concepts, such as the concepts of self, essence, object, and so on, are empty. If the philosophical work of Russell suits the description of ontotheology, then it is also targeted by the Tractatus, but not because of the project of demarcating the meaningful and nonsensical expressions. If we assume that it is the theoretical philosophy which is the subject of Wittgenstein’s criticism, then Tractarian comments on philosophy become clear: (1) philosophy is not science; philosophy does not compete with the natural sciences – it is not “beside” them (TLP 4.111). (2) philosophy does not formulate any doctrines. The result of philosophical activities are not any claims: “Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (TLP 4.112). (3) there is no special domain of philosophy. A philosopher is not allowed to say anything more than the natural sciences do (TLP 6.53). I owe an explanation to point (2). Earlier I stated that Wittgenstein had in mind the answer to the question: “what exists?”. How could one reconcile this view with the conclusion that philosophy should not contrive any theories? The materialistic interpretation simply states that it is not the matter of philosophy to fix what objects exist. In this sense philosophy indeed does not produce its own doctrines. Nevertheless, it indicates where one should search for meaningful answers when

‘ontotheological’ ideas, namely, (1) the idea of God (…), and (2) the idea of the immateriality of the soul” (Putnam 2010, p. 39).

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one is interested in these kinds of questions. The Tractatus indicates natural science. In this way one could ascribe to the book certain metaphysical convictions – one can label them as ontological materialism – and simultaneously one can give justice to what Wittgenstein writes about the limits of philosophy. One could respond that this answer of the proponent of the materialistic interpretation is still unsatisfactory because materialism is a concrete philosophical doctrine, and Wittgenstein states in the Tractatus that philosophy contains no doctrines and claims. How does this view stand against the materialistic interpretation of the Tractatus? Does it contradict my views? I would answer negatively. I sustain both that, according to early Wittgenstein, philosophy is not a theory and that in the Tractatus he represented materialism. The solution of this paradox lies in the fact that the claim: “Objects are material points” is, strictly speaking, not a proposition but nonsense. It is substantial nonsense which allows us to see the world properly. One could say that Wittgenstein’s philosophy contains no thesis of materialism, nevertheless the Tractatus allows us to see what the world consists of. Summing up, in the last passages (section 2.3) I presented the main assumptions and the biggest problems of the resolute interpretation. This New Reading of the Tractatus stands in sharp opposition to my reading, mainly because I argue in favour of the doctrine of substantial nonsense. It is true that formulations such as: “Simple names refer to material points” are nonsensical, but because of them one gains insight into the nature of the world. On the other hand, the fact that Tractarian requirements put on meaningful propositions can be expressed only nonsensically allows Wittgenstein to consistently claim that philosophy should not contain any doctrines and theories. The proponents of the resolute interpretation are seriously challenged by the numerous pieces of textual evidence from Wittgenstein’s writings. In my opinion, Proops is correct when he writes that “until this challenge is answered – and answered convincingly – the historical credibility of the New Reading will remain in doubt”275.

Summary In the last chapter I analysed three of the possible understandings of the Tractatus (phenomenalistic, materialistic and resolute). In section 2.1 I discussed the claim according to which the simples of the Tractatus are simple units of experience. This interpretation refers to the common ontological opinions that prevailed in the intellectual environment of young Wittgenstein – especially to the views of

275 Proops 2001, p. 398.

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Russell and the fact that, at least at first sight, the Tractatus confirms the truth of solipsism. Some of the recent publications, however, point to a different source of inspiration for the metaphysical views of early Wittgenstein. According to them, one should dig deeper into the engineering education of the Austrian philosopher and his fascination with Hertzian mechanics. This fascination is displayed in the Tractatus, mainly in the way in which Wittgenstein analysed the language of sensations. His solution to the colour-exclusion problem (crucial with respect to sustaining the fundamental distinction between contingent and logical truths) betrays that he did not hold the language of sense-data to be the most basic language as, for instance, Russell did. On the contrary, in order to save the aforementioned distinction between contingent and logical truths, one has to treat colours in accordance with the physical analysis, i.e. as sensations caused by ether parts oscillating with a certain velocity. That is why in this chapter I advocated in favour of the materialistic interpretation of the Tractatus (section 2.2). It states that, according to this book, the world consists of the most elementary particles of matter. Wittgenstein could find a good candidacy for these particles in the notion of the mass-particle, taken from Hertzian mechanics. I think that one of the advantages of the materialistic interpretation is that it best answers the question I posed at the beginning of this work: “Why did Wittgenstein reduce meaningful discourse to scientific discourse?” According to the materialistic interpretation, all true elementary propositions contain names which ultimately refer to physical particles, exactly like the propositions of physics, hence meaningful language should be identified with the language of physics. The materialistic interpretation gives an answer to the questions avoided by the proponents of other interpretations: Why did Wittgenstein in fact reduce true propositions to propositions of natural science? Why did he think that a proper method in philosophy should consist in repeating what scientists say about the world (TLP 6.53)? If one looks at the world as consisting of objects that are primarily physical entities that just happen to have certain essences, then one has to conclude that all questions about the world are of a scientific nature276; that the so-called “problems of life” (to the problems of life one could include the question of moral values, aesthetic values (TLP 6.421), the immortal soul, or the existence of God (TLP 6.4312)) one cannot even express277, and this inability indicates a solution to these problems:

276 “When all possible scientific questions have been answered (…) then there would be no questions left, and this itself is the answer” (TLP 6.52). 277 “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist” (TLP 6.5).

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The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem (TLP 6.521).

The materialistic interpretation states that the ontology of the Tractatus represents strong or radical naturalism: 1) it consists only of a space-time and point particles and rejects the existence of natural laws or the object of common sense and folk psychology. In order to describe reality it is enough to determine the position of a particle at a given time278. 2) it makes science the arbiter of truth. It assigns a cognitive value to science alone. This means that Wittgenstein, despite his reluctance to the scientific problems279, was considering the problems of life from the position of a scientist, i.e. somebody who acknowledges the role of science in describing and explaining reality and does not resort to a strategy consisting in downgrading its meaning or proclaiming some kind of irrationalism. In my opinion, this position, taking into account that one cannot classify Wittgenstein as a positivist, makes his views on ethics particularly interesting. In the last section of the chapter (section 2.3) I tackled problems posed by the resolute interpretation, which accuses the anti-metaphysical, phenomenalistic and materialistic readings of the Tractatus of a fundamental misunderstanding of the book. All of these interpretations, in the eyes of the proponents of the New Reading, forget that for Wittgenstein the problem of philosophy consisted in its hopeless project to set the limits of sense. Allegedly, this project assumes that one can take a point of view “outside” a language, i.e. from which one judges which expressions are meaningful and which are not. On the resolute interpretation this assumption is not only senseless in itself but was also the subject of a fierce attack in the Tractatus. In contrast to this attempt to apprehend Wittgenstein’s views on philosophy, I claim, together with the so-called standard interpretations, that to set the limits of meaningful discourse was precisely the goal of early Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Philosophy fails when it tries to be like science, when it perceives itself as rivalling with science in the task of describing the 278 Perhaps one should also specify, as Barry Loewer suggests, a momentum of a particle and forces acting upon a particle: “The state of the universe at a time t [under the ontology of classical mechanics] is given by a specification of the positions and momenta of the particles at t and a specification of the forces on the particles” (Loewer 2008, p. 154). 279 As Carnap recalls: “All of us in the Circle had a lively interest in science and mathematics. In contrast to this, Wittgenstein seems to look upon these fields with an indifference and sometimes even contempt” (Carnap 1964/1967, p. 37).

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world. I labelled this kind of philosophy ontotheology, and I mentioned in this context dualism of mind and matter and transcendental philosophy. In the next two chapters I will show that Wittgenstein indeed combatted the dualistic and the transcendental notion of the self.

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Chapter 3.  Wittgenstein’s Theory of Judgement In the previous chapter I argued in favour of the materialistic interpretation according to which simple objects of the Tractatus are physical atoms. The claim that Wittgenstein was a proponent of physicalism (“only not under that horrible name”) could be surprising, especially when one takes into account his scepticism about science: “In order to marvel human beings – and perhaps peoples – have to wake up. Science is a way of sending them off to sleep again” (CV, p. 6). It is true that Wittgenstein’s aversion towards science grew over the years280, but already in the Tractatus he displayed a certain amount of sensitivity towards, as he put it, “the mystical” or “the problems of life”281, which we would search for in the works of the neo-positivists in vain. How could one explain the existence of these two contradictory tendencies in the thinking of young Wittgenstein? In my view, there are two morals one should draw from the fact that such a sceptic philosopher towards scientism such as Wittgenstein, nevertheless, advocated in favour of ontological materialism. First, it means that Wittgenstein acknowledged the ontological authority of natural science. By that I understand the fact that, in Wittgenstein’s view, there are the natural sciences which answer the question: “What is there?”. It is the task of physics to determine what the simple objects are. In other words, in Wittgenstein’s eyes an honest philosopher, when asked: “What is there?”, should send the asking person to a physicist. Early Wittgenstein was genuinely interested in the problems of life: in his Notebooks he asks about the moral value of suicide, the meaning of belief in God, or what a happy life consists in282. The fact that Wittgenstein accepted physicalism in

280 He, for instance, criticised his Tractarian thesis that all true propositions are propositions of natural science: “Now why am I so anxious to keep apart these ways of using ‘declarative sentences’? an attempt to see that every usage gets its due. Perhaps then a reaction against the overestimation of science. The use of the word ‘science’ for ‘everything that can be said without nonsense’ already betrays this over-estimation” (CV, p. 70). 281 “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (TLP 6.522); “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched” (TLP 6.52). 282 “To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning” (NB 8.7.16, p. 74); “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world” (NB 8.7.16, p. 75); “If

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the Tractatus means that in solving the aforementioned problems he did not want to fall back to the strategy according to which although one admits that science is making great progress in the task of describing the world, and on the basis of scientific research one can comparatively make the most precise predictions about future events, but nevertheless one claims that not every aspect of reality is accessible to scientific research; there are some aspects of human life where science is of no avail, and exactly with respect to these aspects of life one should turn to metaphysics, religion, ethics, or poetry. That would be the easy way out from the challenge of the modern development of science and, apparently, Wittgenstein did not want to use it. He accepted the modernist worldview according to which only scientists are able to tell us what the world looks like. In this respect he is in agreement with the representatives of scientism. Taking into account his interest in “the problems of life” and in the defence of so-called “human values”, it makes his solutions with respect to these issues even more interesting. The second moral one could draw from Tractarian physicalism refers to Wittgenstein’s ideas about the role of philosophy. If the ontological authority is due to natural science, this means that there is no separate region of reality which could be the domain of philosophy (such as, for instance, the domain of necessary truths, or the domain of essences). Philosophy is helpless in answering traditional metaphysical questions or in solving the problems of life. I think that it is essential for early Wittgenstein’s worldview that in the age of rapid development of scientific research, philosophy cannot pretend to be a branch of science; it will always lose the competition283. In the next two chapters of this dissertation I am going to defend this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views on philosophy. At the end of the Tractatus Wittgenstein states that a possible proof for the existence of an immortal soul “completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended” (TLP 6.4312), and that the question of God’s existence has nothing to do with what the world looks like284. There is a close analogy, in Wittgenstein’s view, between Christianity and philosophy. Just as Christianity, philosophy should not be a doctrine about the world on the basis of which suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin” (NB 10.1.17, p. 91). 283 In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein expressed this conviction by saying about Russell’s philosophy: “Russell’s method in his ‘Scientific method in philosophy’ is simply a retrogression from the method of physics” (NB 1.5.15, p. 44). 284 “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world” (TLP 6.432)

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one could explain past events and predict future ones285. And just as Christianity would revolt against its own vocation if it was just a theory, so philosophy would rebel against its basic task of defending the world of spiritual values against the claims of natural science286 if it was a theory. It would become a cold wisdom that in fact would kill what is truly important287. The morals one should draw from materialism of the Tractatus is, therefore, the conclusion that it was ontotheology that was the object of Wittgenstein’s attack on philosophy. In his opinion, such a philosophy would not only be a “bad science” but it would also wrongly serve the aim of defending the spiritual values of the human world. The most explicit of Wittgenstein’s arguments against metaphysics is that it uses empty names: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following (…): whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions (TLP 6.53).

Earlier I indicated Cartesian dualism and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will as examples of the wrong way of doing philosophy. In the next two chapters I shall argue that, indeed, in the Tractatus such a criticism takes place; and that indeed philosophy which makes use of concepts such as “the empirical self ”, “mind” or “the transcendental self ” fails to give meaning to these concepts. In Chapter 3 I shall argue that early Wittgenstein rejected the dualism of mind and matter. This rejection took place in the context of Wittgenstein’s discussion with Russell’s theory of judgement which, as we will see, defended dualistic positions. Then, in Chapter 4 I shall argue that Wittgenstein rejected the notion of the transcendental self; the notion that is connected with the philosophy of Schopenhauer (it is almost certain that it got to Wittgenstein through Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation), where it served, as I shall try to show, to safeguard moral values from the claims of a purely scientific worldview. It follows then that Wittgenstein’s critique of the notion of the transcendental self is equivalent to the critique of safeguarding values the way Schopenhauer did. The conclusion of the subsequent chapters will be: if human culture is endangered by the progress of natural science, it is not theoretical philosophy that can defend it. There has to be a different strategy for an adversary of scientism in his or her pursuit to defend non-scientific worldview. 285 “Christianity is not a doctrine; I mean, not a theory about what has happened and will happen with the human soul, but a description of an actual occurrence in human life” (CV, p. 28). 286 “Philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science” (TLP 4.113). 287 CV, p. 53–56.

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The subject-matter of this chapter are theses TLP 5.54-5.5422. In this fragment Wittgenstein aims to reconcile the strong extensionality thesis (the view according to which every meaningful sentence is a truth-function on an elementary sentence) with the existence of propositional attitudes such as “A believes that p”, in which the modal operator B occurs, which indicates non-extensional contexts in language. Simplifying, Wittgenstein’s solution, as I shall show, consists in the conviction that the problem of the alleged incoherence between the strong extensionality thesis and the propositional attitudes arises when, one, just like Russell did in his theory of judgement, assumes the existence of the Cartesian self. Once one gets rid of this metaphysical notion and shows that in a propositional attitude no meaning was given to the notion of self (or mind), the problem disappears. The solution has a naturalistic and an anti-metaphysical overtone, and there is much truth in Bergman’s claim that in TLP 5.542 Wittgenstein took “the decisive step towards materialism”288, with the reservation that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus did not take steps towards materialism – I do not agree that problems with Russell’s theory of judgement led Wittgenstein to a rejection of the dualism of mind and matter. Materialism was rather a tacit assumption right from the beginning of the first pages of the Tractatus, and the problems discussed in theses TLP 5.54-5.5422 are simply another confirmation of the rightness of the materialistic interpretation. Wittgenstein’s very strong conclusion that “there is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas” (TLP 5.631) supports such a reading. The failure of Russell’s theory of judgement alone would not entitle Wittgenstein to state such a thesis, so under my hypothesis thesis TLP 5.631 is not the conclusion of the discussion with Russell but rather its background and assumption. As I have said, theses TLP 5.54ff have an anti-dualistic overtone. Because of that many commentators – among others Peter Hacker and David Stern – think that Wittgenstein’s argument is a modern version of the Humean argument that in the stream of consciousness one cannot find an idea of the self (or if one does not like the sense-data language that among things there is no such thing as the self or mind). What, in my opinion, is distinctive in my interpretation is the claim that Wittgenstein in TLP 5.54ff tried to avoid jumping from the frying pan of Russellian mind-matter dualism into the fire of Humean positivism. I find the argument for such a suspicion in Wittgenstein’s interjection that “a composite soul would no longer be a soul” (TLP 5.5421). One of the most tempting conclusions from the thesis that there is no immaterial subject of ideas, beliefs, desires, etc. would be the claim that there are simply ideas, beliefs, desires, etc. and, 288 Bergmann 1973, p. 354.

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therefore, what the dualists call “the soul” is nothing more than a complex array of physical or psychic objects. That opens the way to such reductionist claims “as the soul is nothing more than a flow of neurons in a brain”. But in his repudiation of a complex subject Wittgenstein clearly rejected this idea. The reason for this one finds, I think, in his project of setting the limits for natural science. This attitude, in my opinion, differentiates his position from positivism and is the reason why I call the Tractatus a modernist rather than a positivistic book. I shall develop these ideas later in the chapter. Summing up, in what follows I want to defend the following claims: –– Theses TLP 5.54-5.422 are a discussion with Russell’s theory of judgement. Wittgenstein reconciles the strong extensionality thesis with propositional attitudes by rejecting the existence of what I call the empirical self (I shall later provide a description of what I mean by such a term) –– Wittgenstein’s solution confirms his naturalistic and anti-metaphysical attitude. –– The overtone of the conclusions is not only anti-dualistic but also anti-positivistic. Theses TLP 5.54-5.5422 would confirm my modernist interpretation of the Tractatus. The plan of the chapter is the following: first, I shall present Russell’s theory of judgement since it is the background of theses TLP 5.54-5.5422 (section 3.1.1). I shall also characterise the concept of the self as assumed by Russell’s theory (with respect to this concept I will use terms such as: “the empirical self ” and “mind”) (section 3.1.2). In the next sections (3.2–3.3) I shall prove that Wittgenstein’s own theory of judgement does without the empirical self, and this allows him to avoid incoherence between the strong extensional thesis and the propositional attitudes. Finally, I shall compare my interpretation with those occurring in various commentaries (section 3.4), especially in those which put an emphasis on the context of Wittgenstein’s trial to save the extensionality thesis (section 3.4.1), those which in the anti-Cartesian overtone of TLP 5.54ff see the neo-Humean argument against the self (section 3.4.2), and those which explain TLP 5.54ff by Wittgenstein’s alleged lack of interest in psychology (section 3.4.3).

3.1  The context of Wittgenstein’s theory Let me start by quoting a relevant fragment of the Tractatus: 5.54 In the general propositional form propositions occur in other propositions only as bases of truth-operations. 5.541 At first sight it looks as if it were also possible for one proposition to occur in another in a different way. Particularly with certain forms of proposition in psychology, such

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as ‘A believes that p is the case’ and ‘A has the thought p’, etc. For if these are considered superficially, it looks as if the proposition p stood in some kind of relation to an object A. (And in modern theory of knowledge (Russell, Moore, etc.) these propositions have actually been construed in this way.) 5.542 It is clear, however, that ‘A believes that p’, ‘A has the thought p’, and ‘A says p’ are of the form ‘ “p” says p’: and this does not involve a correlation of a fact with an object, but rather the correlation of facts by means of the correlation of their objects. 5.5421 This shows too that there is no such thing as the soul—the subject, etc.—as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day. Indeed a composite soul would no longer be a soul 5.5422 The correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement.).

There are two concepts in the text above which demand an explanation: the concept of the self (the subject), identified in the tradition of empiricism with the mind, and “the modern theory of knowledge”. Wittgenstein meant by the latter the part of Russell’s theory which refers to judgements. Therefore, the next two sections will be devoted to Russell’s theory of judgement and, later, to the concept of the self as assumed by this theory.

3.1.1  Russell’s theory of judgement The problem faced by Russell reads as follows: “What is the difference between a proposition and a mere collection of names?”289. His answer consisted in the conviction that in the former case there is some sort of unity, whereas the latter case lacks it. In a judgement there is something that unites its various objects, and in this way Russell introduced the thinker, a factor uniting a proposition, and its supplement, which by the act of judging completes the incomplete symbol (i.e. a proposition)290. In the following section I shall present the views Russell adopted 289 Morris 2008, p. 83; Puhl 1999, p. 25. 290 “Some context is necessary before the phrasing expressing a proposition acquires a complete meaning” (Russell 1913/1984, p. 109). Johnston thinks that Russell’s was not the unity of a thought but the unity in a thought. In other words, Russell was not interested in a subject that unites different elements of a proposition in a judgement but in the synthesis of a proposition (Johnston 2012, p. 26). I do not agree with this account precisely because Russell treated a proposition as an incomplete symbol. Johnston treats a proposition as a complex (of terms), and it seems that he allows, in contradiction to Russell, a proposition to have a sense on its own. Secondly, even if a form of a proposition is responsible for a unity within a proposition, there is still the

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in 1913, because these are the views which Wittgenstein was confronted with. It is clear that over the years Russell developed various versions of the theory of judgement and, probably around 1918, he abandoned dualism291. This general characteristic of Russell’s position needs to be developed. I shall begin with a clarification of the most important notions used in the text. Russell held the concept of a judgement and of a belief to be synonymous, and he defined them as a relation between a subject and a proposition. A judgement/belief is a certain attitude of a subject to a proposition. Russell held a judgement/belief to be a dated, particular event which could be studied empirically292. There are many propositional attitudes apart from beliefs, such as an assertion, question, volition or doubt – Russell calls them propositional thoughts, but in his considerations he was concentrated most of the time on the concept of understanding. First, he considered the relation of understanding to be the most general propositional attitude. Every aforementioned propositional attitude is a kind of understanding. For instance, both questioning what is expressed by a proposition as well as desiring what is expressed by a proposition assumes that the subject of a particular propositional attitude understands the proposition in question. Second, Russell hoped that a proper analysis of understanding a proposition would simultaneously (because of the akin logical form293) answer the question as to what a belief in a proposition consists in. Therefore, he hoped that a proper analysis of understanding a proposition would provide the right theory of judgement. The concepts of a judgement and of a belief assume the concept of a proposition. Whereas Wittgenstein in the Tractatus defined a proposition simply as a perceptible sign projecting a possible situation (TLP 3.11), for Russell this was a much more difficult task294. It seems that he hoped that his reader would intuitively grasp the idea of a proposition when he grasped what the following sentences:

291 292

293 294

problem of what is responsible for uniting the constituents of a proposition exactly with this and not the other form. Carey 2007, p. 12. “When I speak of ‘belief ’, I mean the same kind of facts as is usually called ‘judgement’. I prefer the word ‘belief ’, because it has much more definitely the suggestion of a particular dated event which may be studied empirically by psychology” (Russell 1913/1984, p. 136). “Understanding and belief are closely akin as regards logical form and raise the same logical problems” (ibid., p. 108). “It is perhaps easier to discover what is meant by ‘understanding a proposition’ than to discover what is meant by a proposition” (ibid., p. 107).

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“Beggars are riders.”, “Beggars would be riders.”, “Are beggars riders?”, “Beggars shall be riders.” have in common295. The point of departure is the claim that since understanding as a propositional attitude is the relation of a subject to a proposition, then we could treat a proposition as an object (this is the proposal of Meinong who named a proposition Objektiv). If this were true then it would turn out that understanding is (just like, for instance, perception) a dual relation of acquaintance. Russell gives two arguments against Meinong’s hypothesis. First of all, a proposition is true or false, and objects of acquaintance are what they are – they are neither true nor false. Second, Russell seeks a theory of judgement which would be indifferent to the truth or falsehood of propositions involved in the act of judging. Since he rejects the reality of false propositions, he is forced to see true propositions as also unreal296. Hence, in Russell’s opinion, propositions cannot be objects of acquaintance. He claims that propositions are incomplete symbols. Simplifying, a phrase expressing a proposition requires a context in order for the proposition to acquire meaning. According to Russell, the conclusion from the above considerations is that “when we understand or assume or believe a proposition, what is involved is not a dual relation of the subject to a single entity, such as Meinong’s Objektiv”297. Understanding cannot be a kind of acquaintance. For Russell, acquaintance (like sensations, memories and imaginations) is a dual relation (of a subject with just one relatum), whereas in understanding the proposition: “A precedes B” (where A and B are particulars), “we must have acquaintance with A and B and with the relation ‘preceding’ ”298. We also have to be acquainted with the general form of a dual complex, but this is still not enough because it does not allow us to discern between: “A precedes B” and “B precedes A”. Hence, Russell, under Wittgenstein’s influence, introduced the notion of a general form. It was Wittgenstein who indicated the importance of the difference between the two sentences above. Although the proposition: “Socrates is

295 Ibid., p. 107. We can notice that all of the mentioned sentences have different meanings, and that is the reason why Russell did not want to identify a proposition with the meaning of a given phrase. 296 “We must say that, in the sense in which propositions are involved in believing and in propositional understanding, there is no difference, as regards reality, between true and false propositions. And in this turn, since it is repugnant to admit the reality of false propositions, forces us to seek a theory which shall regard true and false propositions as alike unreal” (ibid., p. 109). 297 Ibid., p. 110. 298 Ibid., p. 111.

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mortal” makes perfect sense, this is not the case with the proposition: “Mortality is Socrates”. If understanding a proposition would involve standing in relation just to objects and the relations between them, nothing would prevent us from making nonsensical propositions like the last one299. Russell agreed with Wittgenstein’s criticism, but his response to the problems raised by his disciple was Platonic in spirit300. In order to solve the problems he introduced a general form of a state of affairs. In the case of a dual complex the general form could be indicated by “xRy”. For example, in order to understand the proposition: “The reign of King Henry VIII precedes the reign of King Edward VI”, one has to be acquainted with the general form: “Something precedes something”. Moreover, according to Russell, one has to be acquainted with the general and pure form to be in a position to understand a particular proposition. Russell, for the sake of clarity, analyses the symmetrical relation (such as “A resembles B”, “A and B are similar”) in which the positions of A and B in a sentence are not essential (“A and B are similar” and “B and A are similar” express exactly the same proposition). In order to understand the proposition: “A and B are similar”, one has to be acquainted with objects A and B, with the relation of similarity and with the general form of symmetrical dual complexes301. It is plain to see that this understanding, under such a conceptualisation, cannot be a dual but is a comprehensive relation. This means that a subject in understanding a proposition is acquainted with multiple elements. It is also plain that the understanding does not consist in separate acquaintances with each of these elements (even if coexisting in one momentary experience) but that it brings all these elements “into relation with each other, so that all become parts of one complex”302. In other words, although according to Russell the general form is responsible for synthesis within a proposition (in our example the synthesis of objects A and B and the relation of

299 Wittgenstein noticed that without the concept of a form under Russell’s theory (which treats the particulars, universals, relations as terms of a proposition) one can substitute, for instance, “bigger than” with “penholders” (both of these expressions appear in a proposition in the same mode of a term). One of the consequences of Russell’s theory would be then the claim that since: “The table is bigger than the book” expresses a possible situation, so “The table penholders the book” (NL, p. 103). To prevent this consequence, Russell introduced the notion of a form, which would block the possibility of a substitution of a universal by a particular and vice versa. 300 According to Pears, Russell’s thoery is a “remarkable Platonic theory” (Pears 1977, p. 181). 301 Russell 1913/1984, p. 112. 302 Ibid., p. 112.

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similarity), there is a further problem of a unity of judgement that involves, apart from the terms of the proposition, also a subject and an act of judgement. I will put emphasis on this fragment of Russell’s text because it clearly differentiates his position from Wittgenstein’s. When Russell answers the question as to what the difference is between a proposition and a mere collection of objects, he comes back to his earlier remark that it is the fact that propositions are true or false. Being true or false is a hallmark of the sphere of the mental; hence propositions are features of mental events. But the current description of a proposition (the objects and relations falling under a certain general form) does not satisfy the restriction that propositions are true or false. It is my hypothesis that in order to solve this problem Russell had to refer to the mind. As we remember, Russell takes propositions to be incomplete symbols. What completes the meaning of a proposition is a mental act (such as judging or understanding); hence it is the connection to the mind which makes propositions the sort of things which are true and false303. Peter Hanks claims that “the real point of Wittgenstein’s objection [to Russell] is that what is judged must be capable of being true or false, and a disunified collection of objects, properties, and relations (…) lacks that capacity”304. I do not agree with this interpretation. As I have tried to show, Russell was fully aware of the requirement mentioned by Hanks, and he addressed the issue. The reason for Wittgenstein’s dissatisfaction was the way the issue was addressed, not the fact that Russell’s theory did not ascribe the feature of being true or false to propositions. Russell’s solution betrays his dualism of mind and matter, where the region of the mental is discerned from the region of the material (atoms, molecules, electrons, etc.) and the psychological (emotions, sensations, etc.) by the possibility of ascribing to the mental entities features of truth and falsehood. Russell’s answer to the question as to what differentiates a collection of elements (objects: A and B, the relation of similarity S, and the general form xRy) from the proposition that A is similar to B reads as follows: the latter is a mental entity (in other words, it is true or false). This answer introduces a subject as a necessary element of the theory of judgement (it would be perhaps more accurate to speak about the introduction of 303 Of course, Russell writes that in order for a proposition to be a complete symbol, an actual subject which has mental relations to the elements of the proposition is not necessary: “It is not necessary to our definition that there should actually be a subject which has one familiar mental relations to the objects” (ibid., p. 115), but at the same time he admits that since there is no proof of the existence of propositions not thought by anybody, “we cannot know of the existence of propositions other than those that have been actually thought of ” (ibid., p. 116). 304 Hanks 2012, p. 39.

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the mind). The benefit of my interpretation of Russell’s theory is that it explains why one of the conclusions of Wittgenstein’s argument against Russell is the rejection of the existence of a subject. Since in describing a proposition one has to refer to the mind, then in the final formulation of what a judgement consists in the symbol that represents the subject has to occur. Accordingly, we read in the Theory of Knowledge that an understanding of the proposition: “A is similar to B” has the following logical structure: U {S, A, B, similarity, R (x,y)} Where U goes proxy for a mental act of understanding a proposition, S goes proxy for the subject that understands a proposition, A and B go proxy for the objects, and R(x,y) for the general form of the dual complex of similarity. Let us call a proposition that A and B are similar proposition p. According to Russell, a belief (tantamount to a judgement) has a similar logical form to an understanding. The proposition of everyday language: “S believes that p” can be formalised in the following way: B {S, A, B, similarity, R (x,y)} We can notice at once that in Russell’s formalisation of beliefs occurs the symbol S that goes proxy for a subject. Therefore, taking a closer look at Russell’s notion of subject is crucial to understanding Wittgenstein’s discussion with Russell.

3.1.2 The notion of the empirical self In the following section I shall discuss the idea of the self as standing behind the presented theory of judgement. Russell belongs to the tradition of empiricism represented by such philosophers as Hume and Mill. This thesis does not contradict my previous remarks about the dualistic solutions one finds in Russell’s Theory of Knowledge. The superficial contradiction is a result of the fact that the body-mind problem is usually presented in terms of the Cartesian doctrine (the relation between different kinds of substances), but one has to remember that it has its counterpart in empiricism, called by D.M. Armstrong “bundle dualism”305. In the tradition of empiricism the category of self was identified with the category of the mind, and the latter was identified with a series of impressions

305 “In the second place, we have what may be called ‘Bundle’ Dualism, the term ‘bundle’ echoing Hume’s notorious description of the mind as a ‘bundle of perception’. This form of Dualism characteristically arises out of reflection on the difficulties of Cartesian Dualism” (Armstrong 1968, p. 7).

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(or appearances)306. The body-mind problem referred to impressions under such a conceptualisation. According to Putnam, arguments in favour of dualism or in favour of non-materialism were solely arguments against the identification of sense-data with something material307. Therefore, I shall understand under the concept of the empirical self the concept in which the self (tantamount to the mind) is the container (reservoir, bundle) of impressions (appearances). I will trace this concept of the mind by two prominent representatives of empiricism: David Hume and Bertrand Russell. I will also indicate the most important difference between these two standpoints and I shall show how this comparison should make a reader of the Tractatus suspicious of the common thesis that Wittgenstein applied in this book a kind of neo-Humean argument against the self. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume wrote, among others: What we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity (Hume 1739/2001, p. 137).

One finds in this quotation two hallmarks of the concept of the empirical self: identification of the self with the mind and the latter with a collection of perceptions. Similarly, in Logical Atomism, Russell represented the view that the contents of one’s mind at one time consist of all of his or her sensations, images, memories and thoughts308. For both of them the content of the mind is something different than material objects. Hume argued that we ascribe quite different features to material objects and to impressions. For example, we ascribe to material objects a distinct and continued existence, “since all impressions are internal and perishing existences”309. That entails, in his opinion, an immaterial character of impressions. Russell took immediate data of senses (certain patches of colour, sounds, tastes, smells, etc.) to be prima facie very different from the objects of the physical world: molecules, atoms or electrons (which have no colour, no taste, make no noise, etc.)310. To be exact, Russell takes the above-mentioned sensibilia to be psychological311, and propositional attitudes such as beliefs to be mental

306 307 308 309 310 311

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Putnam 1986/1994, p. 5. Ibid., p. 8. Russell 1924, p. 341. Hume 1739/2001, p. 129. Russell 1914a, p. 5. Ibid., p. 8.

entities312 (this means that since beliefs are true or false, sensibilia are what they are – they are neither true nor false). We come to the decisive difference between both philosophers, which will allow us to indicate the second feature of the Russellian concept of the mind. Hume was convinced that all knowledge about the world comes from impressions, and that one should not ascribe to reality more than is contained in only available evidence about reality (the example of ascribing more would be saying that reality contains material objects which are distinct and continued existences)313. As a result, in his system the existence of the physical became doubtful, and though it was still true that impressions and ideas are not material things, the mere idea of comparison of what is mental with what is physical became meaningless. On the other hand, Russell, on the basis of a real difference between beliefs and affections, advocated for the realness of both relata of the relation: the mental and the physical. The difference, roughly speaking, consists in the fact that the former has content and meaning. According to Russell, if one does not recognise the difference between the mental on the one hand and the psychological or the physical on the other, then one is tempted to reduce beliefs and judgements to some bodily behaviours such as emotions314. Russell was afraid that this is a direct path leading to logical behaviourism. One could suspect that what Russell had in mind was the following reasoning: psychological statements are statements about physical processes in the body (presumably in the central nervous system). But because the current state of physiology does not allow us to reduce beliefs to concrete physical-chemical processes in the human body, then the first phase of this reduction should be the translation of psychological statements into statements about observable behaviours. For instance, instead of statements about excitement, one could formulate statements about raised pressure and pulse, a rapid heartbeat, a blush on a face, etc. But if there is no difference between statements about beliefs on the one hand and statements about excitement on the other, then one could also translate statements about beliefs into statements about pressure and pulse, a rapid heartbeat, and so on. This position would deserve the name of “logical behaviourism”. Russell indicated in this context that this is a mistake

312 Russell 1918, p. 221. 313 Hume 1739/2001, p. 128. 314 It is exactly the consequence of Hume’s point of view: “a belief may be most accurately defined as a lively idea related to or associated with a present impression” (ibid., p. 67).

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committed by “some of the American realists, the school whom one calls neutral monists”315. According to Russell, a proper answer to the question as to what the difference is between an excitement and a belief would indicate the fact that a belief is an act of the mind. But if one describes the mind as Hume does, i.e. solely as a container of appearances, one will still not grasp the difference between beliefs and excitements. Under such a conception of the mind there is no essential difference between beliefs and emotions – both are appearances. One, therefore, cannot content himself with the Humean characteristic of the mind; the mind is not only a screen that passively receives images. Russell writes little about this additional function of the mind but, indeed we find in his Theory of Knowledge a short section where he talks about “uniting” or “synthesizing the terms of proposition into one complex”. The general form is responsible for the process of this synthesis, but there is an additional process of synthesis in which a subject unites a proposition in an act of judgement. Although the mind is not mentioned directly as the prime mover of this process of unification, it is clear that there is no other candidacy (for example, Russell draws a graph of a belief as a five-term complex. In the graph the lines binding the terms meet in the subject). We can sum up the description of Russell’s notion of the empirical self in the following way: 1) The category of the empirical self is tantamount to the category of the mind. 2) The empirical self is a container of sensations such as beliefs (judgements), desires, understandings, etc. 3) The empirical self unites the terms of a proposition and in this way it forms judgements. That is the concept of the self which was criticised by Wittgenstein. From the description I have proposed above it follows that: (A) there are indeed differences between Russell’s and Hume’s conception of the mind (B) Russell did not think of the mind as an immaterial substance, hence: If Wittgenstein’s critique is directed solely against the Cartesian notion of the self, then it is not directed against Russell’s notion of the self. This cannot be true because in TLP 5.54-5.5422 Wittgenstein directly referred to Russell’s theory of knowledge. This leads me to the conclusion that Wittgenstein’s argument is generally anti-dualistic, but if that is the case then one should also include

315 Russell 1918, p. 218.

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here Humean bundle-dualism. Wittgenstein’s argument is not, as many commentators claim, a new form of the Humean critique of Descartes.

3.2  Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s views on judgement In the previous section I analysed the background of the theses of the Tractatus which are interesting to me. In the following section I shall point at four reasons of Wittgenstein’s disagreement with Russell’s theory of judgement. Wittgenstein’s own view on judgement will emerge from this critique. We know that Wittgenstein was unsparing in his criticism of the theory of judgement which Russell had presented to him. In 1913 Russell was working on a new book on epistemology, with the working title Theory of Knowledge, and he was hoping that it would be his major contribution to this area of philosophy. After writing six chapters he presented the results of his efforts to Wittgenstein, but he came in for harsh criticism. As a result of that criticism Russell withdrew publication of the book, although, as he admitted, he had not understood all of Wittgenstein’s remarks. He just felt that his disciple had to be right316. The manuscript remained unknown until 1967 and waited for an edition until 1984. Probably until his death, because of Wittgenstein’s criticism, Russell did not like the text and wanted to forget about it317. We do not know the exact course of the discussions between these two philosophers318, but in the light of Wittgenstein’s position this is what one could have expected his criticism to be: a)  The first objection is clearly expressed in the Tractatus: The correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement.) (TLP 5.5422).

316 Carey 2007, p. 1–2. 317 In 1967 Russell sold a bundle of manuscripts (including the one containing Theory of Knowledge) to the Russell Archives at McMaster University in order to collect money for the International War Crimes Tribunal, but even then he remained silent about it: archivists intrigued by the discovery of an unknown text from 1913 wrote a letter to Russell about it, but he never answered it (Carey 2007, p. 2). 318 The ordinary source of information about the discussions between Russell and Wittgenstein – Russell’s letters to Ottoline Morrell – remain silent about the matter. A hypothetic course of the talks is given in: Johnston 2012, pp. 29–31.

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There are different views as to why Wittgenstein thought that Russell’s theory does not prevent one from thinking nonsense319. According to Johnston, this was because it did not account for a thought’s synthesis320. Russell himself was convinced that with the notion of the general form he was addressing Wittgenstein’s accusation that he had expressed already in Notes on Logic: Every right theory of judgement must make it impossible for me to judge that this table penholders the book. Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement (NL, p. 103)

The accusation from Notes on Logic refers to the fact that in the period before Theory of Knowledge Russell did not discern between particulars and universals as far as their role in a proposition was concerned. He held both of them as appearing in a proposition in the same mode of a term. According to Russell, one could substitute in a meaningful proposition a term appearing in a mode m with any other term appearing in mode m and still obtain a meaningful proposition. But if, for example, one substituted the term “love” with the term “Iago”, one would obtain from the meaningful proposition: “Desdemona loves Cassio” plain nonsense such as: “Desdemona Iagos Cassio”. That is the edge of Wittgenstein’s criticism, and Russell corrected his views by introducing the notion of a form321. On the other hand, this correction did not change Wittgenstein’s assessment: he still thought that Russell’s theory allows one to think nonsense. Why? In my opinion this is because Russell’s account of a judgement assumes an active role of the subject. If a belief consists in a relation between a thinker and various objects of a proposition, and the role of the thinker is to synthesise these objects so that he is acquainted with all constituents of the thought, then he can unite in his mind objects and properties however he wants (for example, objects number 3 and a sandwich and the relation of eating

319 In this context a nonsensical expression is an expression in which its constituents are going against its entity types. For instance, in the expression: “The table penholders the book”, “penholders” is going against its entity type and plays the role of a universal. 320 “Wittgenstein’s claim that Russell’s multiple relation theory is consistent with the existence of nonsense judgement was intended as a demonstration that that theory, even in its 1913 version, does not account for thought’s synthesis” (Johnston 2012, p. 31). 321 Understanding the proposition “A is similar to B” assumes understanding the form: “something is similar to something”. Only one who sees that in the place of relata occur only particulars and in the place of the relation only the universal can judge that A is similar to B. In this sense, judging nonsense in which elements of a proposition are going against their types (for example a particular playing the role of a universal) is blocked.

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with the general form: “something eats something”. The result of such a unification: “Number 3 eats a sandwich” does not make any sense)322. b) The Russellian theory of judgement entails an inconvenient consequence for Wittgenstein’s theory of a meaningful proposition, which says that every mean­ ingful proposition is a truth-function of an elementary proposition (with the extreme case of an elementary proposition which is the truth-function of itself)323. If both Russell’s analysis of beliefs as well as Wittgenstein’s principle of extensionality are true, then beliefs cannot be meaningful because judgements of the form: “A believes that p” are not the truth-functions of p (let us suppose for a moment that p is an elementary proposition). The truth-value of “A believes that p” is independent of the truth-value of an elementary proposition p. This is also why Wittgenstein wanted to propose his own theory which would retain the extensionality principle. c) Russell mentions that among the objects of acquaintance there is “a form of complex”. For example, in the case of a similarity between particulars A and B, one is acquainted not only with particulars A and B and the relation that connects both the particulars, but also with the form of this dual complex. The pure form of a complex is described, according to Russell, in the expression: “something is similar to something”324. Exactly this view caused Wittgenstein’s disagreement. According to him, there are no logical objects (TLP 5.4); one can do without introducing abstract (in contrast to concrete) entities in order to explain propositions. Moreover, Wittgenstein could not agree with Russell’s conviction that one describes the form of a state of affair. In a state of affairs its elements stand in some relations to one another (TLP 2.14) – thus a state of affairs has a structure (TLP 2.15). The possibility of having a structure is called in the Tractatus a form – the logical form or the pictorial form (TLP 2.151). Thesis TLP 4.121 expresses what is essential in Wittgenstein’s views on form:

322 Of course, this would mean that in comparison to Notes on Logic, Wittgenstein changed the meaning of the concept of nonsense. Under an earlier conception, “Number 3 eats a sandwich” is a meaningful proposition. Each of its constituents is in line with its entity type. Nevertheless, this expression, popularly understood, is nonsense. Wittgenstein speaks then (in TLP 5.5422) about nonsense in this popular meaning of this concept. 323 “All propositions are results of truth-operations on elementary propositions” (TLP 5.3). 324 Russell 1913/1984, p. 133.

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Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it.

Gilbert Ryle explained in a very simple and convincing way why the form itself cannot be depicted: let us take a sheet of graph paper in a hospital. The dots of the graph represent the temperatures of a patient. Ryle asks a reader to imagine the following situation: “suppose we now asked the nurse to depict on a second sheet of graph paper, not the course of the patient’s temperature, but the rules for representing his temperature by dots on graph paper, she would be baffled. Nor can the rules and conventions of map-making themselves be mapped”325. Because, according to Wittgenstein, what can be shown (and that is, among others, the logical form of a proposition) cannot be said (TLP 4.1212), Russell’s efforts to describe it, were, in his eyes, futile. In one of the entries of his Notebooks Wittgenstein wrote: The reality that corresponds to the sense of the proposition can surely be nothing but it component parts, since we are surely ignorant of everything else (NB 20.11.14, p. 31).

According to Wittgenstein, when one describes a fact, the elements of propositions refer only to the component parts of the respective fact, i.e. to simple objects. What one can do at best in describing forms of facts is to describe the constituents of the fact: what they are and in what relations to one another they are standing. There is nothing more to describe326. For Wittgenstein, describing pure forms as something existing apart from particulars sounds peculiar. In his opinion, it unnecessarily introduces the second realm: the Platonic-Fregean realm of thought327. Russell was aware of the fact that his Platonic ontology could drive away his readers from accepting his theory, and he tried to explain the fact that we normally pay attention only to particulars by referring to the popular version of the theory of natural selection. He claimed that there are particulars which have a vital role for our sustainability as a species. Particular things can be good to eat or they can kill us; hence we are sensitive only to the existence of particulars and not universals. According to Russell, only eccentrics, relieved from the struggle for existence, also pay attention to universals. This does not mean, 325 Ryle 1951/1967, p. 121. 326 In Wittgenstein’s opinion, expressed in one of the letters to Russell, it was the main point of Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement that his mentor “had not really got hold of ” (Letters 19.8.19, p. 71). 327 According to Pears, Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of a form “is Aristotelian in spirit. The forms that Russell had placed in a Platonic world were treated by Wittgenstein as essential features of objects” (Pears 1977, p. 188).

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however, that ordinary people are not acquainted with pure forms328. In the light of Wittgenstein’s views, we could say that this explanation could serve him at best as an example of a superficial psychology one cannot mix with philosophy. d) Although the aforementioned differences are great, there is also, in my opinion, a more basic discrepancy which reaches to the roots of both systems, and that is the concept of meaning. The theory of judgement must appreciate the fact that, using Hanks’ formulation, “what is judged [a proposition] must be capable of being true or false”329. In section 3.1.1 we saw that Russell’s theory fulfils this requirement by putting a proposition in a relation to the mind. A proposition in itself is not an actual entity, it is an incomplete symbol. One cannot prove the existence of propositions other than propositions which are (or were) actually thought by somebody330. In contrast to these views, Wittgenstein states that for a proposition to be true or false it is sufficient to be a picture of a state of affairs331. For something to be a picture or a model of reality is to fulfil three conditions: 1) The complexity condition. It has to share the complexity of the depicted state of affairs, and this means that every element of a state of affairs has to be represented by an element of a picture (TLP 2.13-2.131). 2) The structure condition. Condition 1) alone is not enough. Apart from every object of the state of affairs being represented by an element of a picture, a picture has to have the same structure as the respective state of affairs. By

328 329 330 331

Russell 1913/1984, p. 132–133. Hanks 2012, p. 39. Russell 1913/1984, p. 116. David Shier would disagree with my opinion. According to him, “mere pictures are not yet propositions” (Shier 1997, p. 69). His main argument says that the same picture can serve to express two contradictory propositions, and that “the picture by itself, qua picture, neither affirms the pictured state of affair, nor denies it” (ibid., p. 71). Shier claims that in order to make a picture from a proposition, one needs a mental act, for example, an act of thinking the sense of a proposition (ibid., p. 73). In his view, a mental act is indispensable if we account for propositions, and in this respect, according to him, there are no significant differences between Russell and Wittgenstein. I think that Shier is forgetting that the ambiguity of a picture refers only to what the picture shows: it is true that one proposition could be used to show two contradictory facts (to show what the state of affairs obtains and to show what the state of affairs does not obtain). But Wittgenstein underlined that what the proposition says is quite determinate – it says how things would stand if the proposition were true (C.f. TLP 4.022).

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the structure of a state of affairs Wittgenstein understood the connection of its elements (TLP 2.15). 3) The logical form condition. A picture has to have a pictorial form. In other words, there have to be some rules of projection combining different objects into the relation “a model – a state of affairs”. I shall explain the third condition a little more. In the Tractatus we read, among others: a “Pictorial relationship consists of the correlations of the picture’s elements with things” (TLP 2.1514). Wittgenstein says that such different objects as written notes and a gramophone record could stand in this relation (TLP 4.014), but to make this happen one needs rules according to which it is “possible to derive the symphony from the groove on the gramophone record” (TLP 4.0141). As I have mentioned, the possibility that “things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture” (TLP 2.151) was called by Wittgenstein the pictorial form, hence it is the pictorial form which makes a state of affairs a picture of another state of affairs. As we can see, not only propositions fulfil these three conditions and, therefore, not only propositions are pictures and, therefore, not only propositions realise information (to use Chalmer’s notion332). If a gramophone record is a picture of written notes, it realises the information contained in those notes; it transmits the sense of the written notes. A proposition is a kind of picture (TLP 4.021), and even here the concept of a proposition is used in a broader sense, i.e. one that is not limited to linguistic signs. Wittgenstein could easily imagine propositions composed of books, chairs and tables (TLP 3.1431). But what about Russell’s question? What is the difference, then, between a proposition and a mere collection of names? As we remember, Russell, in order to explain the mental character of propositions, introduced a relation to a subject – the factor that was missing in the case of a mere collection of names. Of course, Wittgenstein, as Russell’s disciple, was aware of the problem: A proposition is not a blend of words. – (Just as a theme in music is not a blend of notes). A proposition is articulate. Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot (TLP 3.141-3.142)

The solution to the problem was, however, different. It could seem that a random collection of three objects on my desk is not in itself a picture of anything. But if I put next to them three other objects and say that the object on the right of the original collection of objects (C1) goes proxy for the object on the right of the new collection of objects (C2), the object in the middle of C1 goes proxy for the object 332 Chalmers 1996, pp. 276–310.

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in the middle of C2, and the object on the left of C1 goes proxy for the object on the left of C2, then nothing has changed in C1 – but together with the rules of projection it is now more than just a mere collection of objects – it is a picture of C2. How is it possible that there were no changes in C1 but now it is a picture? When answering this question one should ask why one could introduce such rules of presentation as “the object on the right goes proxy for…” in the first place? There had to be something in C1 that allowed us to make it a picture of C2 – it was the fact that in C1 objects stood in some relations to one another – and this is what Wittgenstein called a logical form. The three aforementioned conditions are sufficient for any collection of objects to be a picture. An additional condition – the condition of the identity of logical forms – is a sufficient and necessary condition for a picture to be a picture of a concrete state of affairs. If a fact is to be a picture, it must have something in common with what it depicts. There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all. What a picture must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it—correctly or incorrectly—in the way it does, is its pictorial form. (TLP 2.16-2.17)

The answer to the Russellian problem is, therefore, the following: what differentiates a mere collection of names from a proposition is the fact that the latter has a logical form. Simply by the fact of having a logical form is a proposition a unity. I want to emphasise the fact that Wittgenstein’s solution does without the concept of the mind. A proposition is true or false because it is a picture. It is a picture on the basis of having a logical form.

3.3 The Tractatus 5.54-5.5422 After explaining both Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s theories of proposition, we can better understand the argument contained in TLP 5.541-5.5422. In the following section I shall analyse, thesis by thesis, the fragment in question. The text contains important notions which in the Tractatus have a slightly different meaning than in Russell’s writings, so I will start with short conceptual explanations. The task of this excerpt of the Tractatus is, just as for Russell, to analyse judgement and to show that this analysis does not put the extensionality thesis at risk. My task in this section will be to reconstruct Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement.

3.3.1  Conceptual clarifications Russell held the concept of a judgement to be synonymous with the concept of a belief. Wittgenstein, additionally, thought that the concept of a thought is 149

another synonym for the concept of a judgement. Frank Ramsey, who as a student visited Wittgenstein (at that time working as a school teacher in the villages of Austria) complained in one of his letters to his mother that Wittgenstein would forget the meaning of what he had said five minutes before, that some of the Tractarian claims are deliberately ambiguous and have two meanings, and, moreover, that their author believes in both of them333. The concept of a thought is a good example of the aforementioned ambiguity. In the Tractatus one can single out two meanings of this concept334: A) A thought as the content of a proposition: in TLP 4 Wittgenstein characterises thought as “a proposition with a sense”. In the same context he complains that “language disguises thought” (TLP 4.002). The concept of a thought does not occur in this meaning in TLP 5.54-5.5422. B) A thought as an act of thinking. For instance, Wittgenstein claimed that a “thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically” (TLP 3.03). The English translation does not give exactly what Wittgenstein meant because of the reification of the verb “denken” in the translation. In the original the author states: “Wir können nichts Unlogisches denken, weil wir sonst unlogisch denken müssten”. From now on by the term “thought” I will understand an act of thinking; a dated, temporal event. The main proof for the claim that Wittgenstein in TLP 5.54ff considered a thought a dated, temporal event can be found in a letter in which Wittgenstein, when asked by Russell what the constituents of a thought are and what their relation is to the pictured state of affairs, responded as follows: I don’t know what the constituents of a thought are but I know that it must have such constituents which correspond to the words of Language. Again the kind of relation of the constituents of thought and of the pictured fact is irrelevant. It would be a matter of psychology to find it out (Letters 19.8.19, p. 72)

In contemporary literature one often juxtaposes beliefs with thoughts by saying that whereas the former are dispositions, and therefore states, the latter are mental acts, and therefore events335. But for Wittgenstein there is no difference

333 Waugh 2010, p. 199. 334 As Wittgenstein later wrote: “ ‘Thought’ sometimes means a particular mental process which may accompany the utterance of the sentence and sometimes the sentence itself in the system of language” (PG, p. 51). 335 Crane 2001, p. 103.

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between a belief that p, a judgement that p, or having a thought that p. In all of these cases he is talking about temporal and dated events. Wittgenstein rejected the Russelian notion of a proposition336. As we remember, in the Theory of Knowledge Russell held that propositions are dependent on mental acts; for Wittgenstein, in contrast, propositions are pictures337 (in the previous section I showed that being a picture of reality was a sufficient condition to be a bearer of truth and falsity). Wittgenstein discerned two meanings of the notion of a proposition: a propositional sign (a token of an utterance or an inscription) and a symbol. A symbol is what all propositional signs expressing the same sense have in common338. For instance, “The cat is on a mat” and “Kot jest na macie” are two different propositional signs (in English and in Polish), but they express the same symbol. In the fragment analysed in this chapter of the Tractatus Wittgenstein used the notion of a proposition in the meaning of a symbol.

3.3.2  The form of “A believes that p” according to Wittgenstein After these conceptual clarifications we are in a position to analyse Wittgenstein’s response to Russell’s theory of judgement. In TLP 5.541 we read: At first sight it looks as if it were also possible for one proposition to occur in another in a different way. Particularly with certain forms of proposition in psychology, such as ‘A believes that p is the case’ and ‘A has the thought p’, etc. For if these are considered superficially, it looks as if the proposition p stood in some kind of relation to an object A. (And in modern theory of knowledge (Russell, Moore, etc.) these propositions have actually been construed in this way.)

Wittgenstein introduces here Russell’s way of dealing with beliefs. According to Wittgenstein’s interpretation of Russell’s theory, a belief consists in a relation between a subject A and a proposition p. This is not exactly what Russell says because in his theory the relation in question is not a dual one; it is a relation between a subject and objects (particulars and universals), but this omission

336 “Frege said ‘propositions are names’; Russell said ‘propositions correspond to complexes’. Both are false, and especially false is the statement ‘propositions are names of complexes’ ” (NL, p. 97). 337 “A proposition is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it” (TLP 4.01). 338 “I call any part of a proposition that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol). (A proposition is itself an expression.) Everything essential to their sense that propositions can have in common with one another is an expression. An expression is the mark of a form and a content” (TLP 3.31).

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suggests which aspect of Russell’s theory Wittgenstein is concentrated on. He is obviously interested in two things: (1) that a judgement consists of a relation. One term of the relation is a subject. According to Russell, (J): “A believes that p” is of the form (F1)  B (A, a, b, R, γ)339 (2) and that this interpretation of Russell’s theory could put the Tractarian principle of extensionality in danger. However, it turns out that the danger mentioned in (2) vanishes simply because (J) is not of the form (F1). So, in the next thesis (TLP 5.5421) we read: It is clear, however, that ‘A believes that p’, ‘A has the thought p’, and ‘A says p’ are of the form ‘ “p” says p’: and this does not involve a correlation of a fact with an object, but rather the correlation of facts by means of the correlation of their objects.

In other words, a proper interpretation of (J), construed with the support of the proper theory of judgement, should reflect what truly takes place in (J). As I pointed out earlier, what Wittgenstein and Russell both agree on is that a proposition is true or false. This fact was explained differently by both philosophers. Russell’s formulation (F1) contains the reference to a subject, which in his theory is responsible for uniting the elements of a proposition in a judgement. In the previous section I presented Wittgenstein’s theory of a proposition and I underlined that he goes without the concept of a subject. From the fragments of the Tractatus quoted above we can give the following examples of propositions: –– a gramophone record (picture) and the written notes (depicted state of affair – TLP 4.014) –– furniture in a room (could be a picture just like a written sentence – TLP 3.1431) One can then explain why a proposition has content in terms of models, and this means in terms of sharing the same complexity, structure and form with the depicted state of affairs. The examples given here show that one does not need any subject to “complete” the propositions – they are independent entities. Therefore, Wittgenstein’s interpretation of (J) looks as follows: (F2):  “ ‘p’ says p”. According to Wittgenstein, a judgement consists not of a relation between a subject and a proposition but of a relation between two facts. The task for the interpreter is 339 “B” stands for a belief, “A” stands for a subject, “a” and “b” for particulars, “R” for a relation holding between particulars and “γ” for a general form of a complex “aRb”.

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to unravel which facts exactly Wittgenstein had in mind. Assuming the physicalistic spirit of the Tractatus, according to my hypothesis, roughly speaking, Wittgenstein held a judgement to report not a relation between a subject and a proposition but a relation between an event in the brain and a state of affairs340. There is one thing to ask: “What does a judgement consist in?”, and another to ask: “What proposition does a reporting judgement (such as a proposition (J)) inform about?”. Wittgenstein’s answer, expressed in (F2), reveals two states of affairs: quoted and unquoted p standing to each other in the relation of saying. The use of the notion of saying alludes to thesis TLP 4.022, in which Wittgenstein explains the relation of depicting states of affairs and claims that “a proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand”. A proposition says that a state of affairs obtains. In other words, Wittgenstein, by revealing the true form of (J): “A believes that p” by (F2): “ ‘p’ says p” claims that: (1) “p” stands to p in the same relation as a picture stands to a depicted state of affairs, and that (2) a proposition reporting a judgement states the existence of a state of affairs. What state of affairs? Some authors (Hanks, Jacquette, Puhl) talk in this context about the language of thought or mental sentences341. Although some views that Wittgenstein held with respect to language, such as semantic atomism or the compositionality thesis, suggest that he could accept the language of thought theory, such a proposal seems to impose a contemporary philosophical vocabulary and solutions on the Tractatus. Given that the argumentation of the defenders of the materialistic reading of the book is true and, hence, that Wittgenstein saw the world as consisting of physical atoms, it seems more plausible to me that, according to Wittgenstein, a proposition reporting judgement (J) informs about the existence of an event in the brain. I prefer to speak about “an event in the brain” more than about “mental sentences” also because the first expression 340 As far as I understand Peter Hanks’ interpretation (Hanks 2012), my proposal is similar to his. Dayton’s interpretation also goes in the same direction: “The Tractatus tends in the direction of materialism (…) The projective relation by means of which a proposition pictures a fact essentially involves the human organism in its internal causal complexity” (Dayton 1976, p. 282). Also, Elisabeth Anscombe, instead of speaking of A’s beliefs or judgements, prefers to say: “There occurs in A or is produced by A something which is (capable of being) a picture of p” (Anscombe 1965, p. 88). 341 “If judgement sentences say anything, they say only that certain physical facts exists, the mental sentences that are depicted by the quoted sentences in their subject positions. Any other information provided by judgement sentences, including information about the senses of these mental sentences, is merely shown” (Hanks 2012, p. 59).

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is more general (after all, mental sentences, if there are any, are also events in the brain), and it better suits Wittgenstein’s scepticism towards philosophy trying to decide purely empirical matters. When A judges that p (note that we are talking about judgements as dated, temporal events), something happens in the brain of A. In (F2) an event in the brain is represented by an unquoted p. What is left in the Tractarian analysis of a judgement is a quoted proposition “p”. In my opinion, it is a proposition as a symbol (in the meaning I gave at the beginning of the section). Of course, one has to bear in mind how broadly Wittgenstein understood the notion of a proposition. It could be a token of an inscription or of an utterance; it could even be a specific arrangement of objects. These propositions express (show) what the content of a judgement is and say that a certain event in the brain obtains. Let us take the following example: a mother tidies up the room of her teenage son. She does so because she believes that he has a mess in his room. This belief does not need to be linguistically expressed. In this case a term of the judgement is the actual way the son’s room looks. The mother’s belief consists in a relation between an event in her brain (it has a sufficient complexity to depict a state of affairs) and the arrangement of objects in her son’s room. If we take then a report of this belief (J1):  “The mother believes that there is a mess in her son’s room”, then, according to my reading, Wittgenstein would interpret this utterance as in fact informing about the existence of a certain event in the brain that is capable of depicting a state of affairs. The depicted state of affairs, in our case the mess in the room, shows what the content of the mother’s thoughts is.

3.3.3  Consequences of Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement If my interpretation is correct, then, according to Wittgenstein, a judgement consists in a relation of picturing between a state of affairs and an event in the brain. What does one gain from this interpretation? First, it is compatible with the materialism of the Tractatus. It is not committed to intentional states or processes endowed with casual powers. It admits that beliefs are causes, for instance, that an explanation for my taking an umbrella for a trip is my judgement that it will rain, but beliefs themselves are explained in a naturalistic way. Therefore, this interpretation, assuming that only matter is endowed with casual powers, is in accordance with the physicalism of the Tractatus and it harmonises well with the general conviction of the commentators that the overtone of TLP 5.54ff is anti-dualistic. Secondly, the proposed interpretation explains a close connection between Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s theory of judgement and the repudiation of 154

the existence of the self by the end of the argument. Since Wittgenstein goes without the notion of the self in the explanation of a belief, then the concept of the self is unnecessary, and what is the unnecessary sign, according to Wittgenstein’s reading of Occam’s razor, means nothing342. That is why in the following thesis (TLP 5.5421) Wittgenstein considers Russell’s solution as absurd: This shows too that there is no such thing as the soul—the subject, etc.—as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day. Indeed a composite soul would no longer be a soul.

The absurdity consists in conferring no meaning on the sign: “A” in (F1): “B (A, a, b, R, γ)”. Of course, the notion of the soul refers here to what I described in the previous sections as the empirical self. Otherwise, the conclusion would be entirely unconvincing. The plain possibility of naturalisation of the intensional contexts does not mean that the self does not exist. If Wittgenstein was inclined towards such a strong thesis, this could mean two things: either he thought that the theory of judgement is the only way for arguing in favour of the existence of the self (this hypothesis I reject because, as we will see in the next chapter, Wittgenstein saw, at least at some point of writing the Notebooks, the possibility of arguing in favour of the existence of the self on the basis of the existence of moral judgements), or the thesis “there is no such thing as the soul” is not a result of Wittgenstein’s dissatisfaction with Russell’s views on judgement but rather a confirmation of Wittgenstein’s assumptions. It seems, then, uncontroversial to say that TLP 5.5421 concludes that the notion of the empirical self is empty and that the conclusion is a confirmation of the hypothesis that the self does not exist. Thirdly, my interpretation shows that Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement eliminates a possible danger for the extensionality principle. Intensionality of beliefs consists in the fact that it is possible that, although proposition p expresses the same state of affairs as proposition q, subject A believes that p, but he does not believe that q. For instance, Oedipus believes that he is married to Jocasta, but he does not believe that he is married to his own mother, despite the fact that the propositional signs: (p) “Oedipus is married to Jocasta” and (q) “Oedipus is married to his own mother” express the same proposition. We have a paradoxical situation in which Oedipus believes and does not believe in the same proposition at the same time. Frege solved the paradox by introducing the notion of the way of representation. Because of a different way of representing “Jocasta” and “The mother of Oedipus” 342 “Occam’s maxim is, of course, not an arbitrary rule, nor one that is justified by its success in practice: its point is that unnecessary units in a sign-language mean nothing” (TLP 5.47321).

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to Oedipus, one can say that (p) and (q) are in fact two different beliefs. The consequence of this solution is connecting intensional contexts with a subject’s particular point of view. The connection is the following: intensional contexts express the fact that a subject is directed at something and that things are presented to him or her in a certain way. Wittgenstein’s hope that the elimination of a subject from a theory of judgement would save the extensionality principle is probably the consequence of an approach which claims that intensional contexts are the result of the fact that subjects have particular points of view on the world. At the same time, he solves the paradox of affirming and rejecting the same proposition at the same time simply by saying that (p’) “Oedipus believes that he is married to Jocasta” and (q’) “Oedipus believes that he is married to his own mother” inform about two different events in Oedipus’ brain and, hence, one cannot speak about a paradox but about two different cases. Propositions p’ and q’, since they report the existence of states of affairs, could be regarded as elementary propositions. The extensionality principle is not threatened.

3.3.4 The repudiation of the existence of the complex soul (TLP 5.5421) At the end of the analysis of Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement I would like to pay attention to an often overlooked but at the same time very startling remark. In the second part of TLP 5.5421 Wittgenstein claims: “Indeed a composite soul would no longer be a soul” (TLP 5.5421). Why did he add this remark? What is its sense? The complex self would not be a subject of philosophy anymore but of “superficial psychology” or neuroscience, and Wittgenstein clearly wanted to avoid a conclusion such as: “The self is nothing more than an array of events in the brain”, which would mean that there is no difference between his and Russell’s theory of judgement343. But, of course, there has to be more in Wittgenstein’s approach than the worry of distinguishing himself from his mentor. In my opinion, the real reason for Wittgenstein’s position is his intention to set the limits for natural science. In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned that the remark that a soul cannot be complex is a sign of Wittgenstein’s modernism in contrast to the

343 Russell says that a judgement consists in a relation between a subject and a proposition, Wittgenstein, on the other hand, claims that it consists in a relation between an event in the brain and a state of affairs (and propositions are also states of affairs). When one identifies a subject with events in the brain, then Wittgenstein’s theory is different in comparison to Russell’s.

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standpoint of positivism. I shall now develop this hypothesis. Suppose that a philosopher acknowledging Wittgenstein’s arguments against Russell’s theory of judgement concludes that a soul is nothing more than an array of states of a brain. He could continue his considerations with the claim that with the death of a brain the soul also dies. Since human brains die, human souls die also. Our philosopher could be tempted to say that since one of the most important elements of religious beliefs is the tenet that a human soul is immortal, then science repudiates religious beliefs. Such a conclusion would show that the philosopher in question believes in a positivist conception of science as able to replace nonsensical theological views. In contrast to positivism, Wittgenstein’s conclusion that a complex soul would no longer be a soul shows that scientific research says nothing about a soul (neither that it is mortal nor that it is immortal). Saying that science repudiates religious beliefs or the claim of the immortality of a soul is, in the eyes of Wittgenstein, unjustified. On the other hand, he was definitely not an apologist of religion and its notions. He held the notion of the immortal soul to be meaningless, in the sense that it does not help to solve any problems: not only philosophical or scientific but also existential ones: Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? (TLP 6.4312).

But if Wittgenstein says that propositions containing the notion of a soul are nonsensical, then what is the difference between his standpoint and the positivistic one? In my opinion, the difference is significant: someone who sets the limits of natural science in the way that Wittgenstein did cannot dream a positivistic dream of a future in which traditional philosophical and religious questions will be replaced by scientific ones. That difference was noticed by such an attentive, positivistic and contemporary to Wittgenstein reader of the Tractatus as Otto Neurath, who analysed the Tractarian metaphor of the ladder one has to throw away in order to see the world aright (TLP 6.54). According to him, if one uses the metaphor of a ladder, one should understand it as a picture of the constant process of rejecting metaphysical theses in favour of scientific ones: “Every individual, in order to arrive at scientific knowledge, has temporary need of meaningless word-sequences for ‘elucidation’ ” (my emphasis)344. But instead of a positivistic

344 Neurath 1959, p. 284.

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image of science replacing metaphysics in the passage of time, Wittgenstein’s image (modernist, as I call it) see metaphysics as a constant tendency of the human mind345; a tendency that leads only to nonsense but, on the other hand, a tendency which science cannot remove. Note that the proposal that one should understand the notion of a soul as standing for a complex of physical objects assumes that there is an aspect of reality that the notion of a soul tries to capture, and that this aspect of reality is better (more accurately, allows more precise predictions, etc.) expressed by scientific notions. The positivistic picture assumes that philosophers try to explain certain phenomena, such as, for instance, transtemporal identity, with the help of the notion of self, and that this phenomenon could be better explained by scientists studying the brain. For Wittgenstein, this conviction would be an example of a distortion of philosophical notions which are not supposed to describe or explain anything. For him, the notion of the immortal soul expresses “one’s feeling that one has duties from which one cannot be released, even by death”346. From the scientific point of view this formulation has no meaning at all: how can one have duties even after one’s death? But this is exactly what Wittgenstein tried to say: ethical and religious notions are not just empty notions – they are necessarily empty and, therefore, hopelessly nonsensical notions. This, however, means that not only are the expressions of somebody who believes in life after death nonsensical but, in this respect, also the expressions of a scientist. We stand before the choice: either we believe in some kind of progress from religious beliefs, through ontotheology up to the point of modern science, but then one cannot see metaphysical expressions as nonsensical but simply as false, or we sustain the view in which religion or ethics is nonsensical and we accept the consequence that there is then nothing to be replaced, falsified or repudiated by science. Either the notion of a soul refers to an object in the world, and it is possible to describe this object more precisely by means of scientific tools, or this notion is necessarily empty; but then scientific investigations have nothing to say with respect to the soul. If the above interpretation is correct, then not only does thesis TLP 6.52 (“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions 345 “The running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless (…). But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind” (LE, p. 12). 346 Malcolm 1984, p. 59. Interestingly, Russell also used the notion of the soul in this non-philosophical meaning. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński quotes his conversation with Russell about Joseph Conrad, during which Russell described Conrad as a man who saw the horror of our soulless world earlier and better than anyone else (Herling-Grudziński 2011, p. 258).

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have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched”) limit the authority of natural science and expresses the modernism of young Wittgenstein. It turns out that modernist remarks are spread throughout the book, including Wittgenstein’s discussion with Russell’s theory of judgement. In the last section (3.3), I analysed Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement. According to it, one does not have to postulate the necessary relation to the mind in order to explain the fact that propositions are true or false. What is truly needed is a proper theory of meaning according to which in order to have a content a proposition has to be a picture and, more precisely, it has to have a logical form. Because the notion of the empirical self is superfluous in the explanation, this means that one did not confer any meaning on “A” (allegedly referring to the self) in the Russellian formula: “B (A, a, b, R, γ)” and, hence, the conclusion that the self – understood as in the empirical tradition – does not exist. According to my interpretation of the Tractatus, a belief consists in a relation between an event in the brain and a state of affairs. Such a solution allowed Wittgenstein to be in accordance with the physicalistic conviction that only matter has casual powers, and with the common sense claim that beliefs explain, at least partly, human behaviour. At the same time, my interpretation can explain the fact that Wittgenstein linked the theory of judgement with the problem of the extensionality of language. According to my reading, he must have held intensional contexts to be essentially and mutually combined with a subject’s perspective on the world. By eliminating the category of a subject he wanted to get rid of intensional contexts as well (section 3.3.3). In section 3.3.4 I sought the answer to the question as to why Wittgenstein put so much emphasis on the condition of the simplicity of the self. According to my hypothesis, the reason for this is Wittgenstein’s intention to limit the authority of natural science. As a concluding remark of the previous considerations I would like to pay attention to the fact that in TLP 5.54ff there co-exist two projects: one is of the naturalisation of beliefs and the second of limiting the range of application of science. One aims to show the emptiness of philosophical categories, the second aims to show that they nevertheless cannot be replaced by the concepts of natural science. Together they characterise the early 20th-century informal movement of modernism. That is why I hold fragment TLP 5.54-5.5422 to be one of the best arguments in favour of the modernist interpretation of the Tractatus.

3.4  Other interpretations of TLP 5.54-5.5422 As an appendix to Chapter 3 I want to compare my interpretation of TLP 5.545.5422 with the others occurring in the literature. I have classified them into three groups. The first group of commentators is interested in the question whether 159

Wittgenstein truly dealt with the problem of the intensionality of propositional attitudes as such (section 3.4.1). The second group considers the problem if Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s theory of judgement resembles Hume’s critique of Cartesian dualism of substances (section 3.4.2). Finally, the third group of commentators ask if TLP 5.54ff is not a sign of Wittgenstein’s neglect of psychology (section 3.4.3)?

3.4.1  Anscombe: TLP 5.54-5.5422 and the extensionality principle Elisabeth Anscombe set the tone for the discussion if in TLP 5.54ff Wittgenstein reconciled his requirement that all meaningful propositions have to be either elementary propositions or truth-functions on elementary propositions with the existence of intensional contexts in language. The expression: “A believes that p” could not be, in Wittgenstein’s eyes, a form of a meaningful proposition because it is not a truth-function on an elementary proposition. Wittgenstein solved this paradoxical conclusion by saying that “A believes that p” is in fact of the form: “ ‘p’ says p”. If Wittgenstein’s analysis of “A believes that p” is the proper answer to the challenge, then, as Anscombe points out, “ ‘p’ says p” has to be a truth-function on an elementary proposition347. For the sake of the argument she concedes that it is a proper solution. This means then that “ ‘p’ says p” is a meaningful proposition. In consequence, the discussion among scholars concentrated on the question if “ ‘p’ says p” is truly a form of a meaningful proposition? Anscombe thought that it is, although at first sight it seems that: “ ‘p’ says p” is always true, hence not contingently true, hence meaningless. She goes back to thesis TLP 3.1432, according to which the sign “aRb” says that a stands in relation R to b. We can transform then “ ‘p’ says p” into “ ‘aRb’ says aRb” and then ask what exactly in the propositional sign “aRb” says that aRb? Is it the fact that in “aRb” “a” is written in italics and “b” in a Roman letter? This could be true, but we know (by means of knowledge of linguistic conventions) that this is not the case. It is the fact that in “aRb” “a” stands to the left and “b” to the right of “R” that says that aRb. These two proposals (one false and one correct), in Anscombe’s eyes, show that the form of a proposition: “ ‘p’ says p” can be understood in different ways. The truth or falsity of: “ ‘p’ says p” depends on our choice of understanding. “The fact that in ‘aRb’ “a” is written in italics and “b” in a Roman letter says that aRb”

347 “If Wittgenstein has not been careless, it must fit his general account of propositions – that is, it must have true-false poles” (Anscombe 1965, p. 88).

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is a false proposition348. “The fact that in ‘aRb’ “a” stands to the left and “b” to the right of “R” says that aRb” is a true proposition. That entails that “ ‘p’ says p” “is a genuine proposition with true-false poles”349. On the other hand, such philosophers as Dayton or Cohen show dissatisfaction with Wittgenstein’s analysis. According to them, “ ‘p’ says p” is a pseudo-proposition. Michael Cohen says that “A believes that p” purports to say what it is that A believes. Wittgenstein had to reject such propositions because, in the Tractarian system, one cannot say what it is that A believes, but only show it350. One shows what it is that A believes by indicating A’s utterances. That is why Wittgenstein proposed the form: “ ‘p’ says p”. Unfortunately, according to Cohen, this is also not the form of a significant proposition. As Eric Dayton pointed out, “ ‘p’ says p” “is not in Wittgenstein’s technical sense of the word, a proposition; that “p” says p should rather be shown, and therefore it cannot be said”351. “ ‘p’ says p” is an example of Tractarian nonsense because it “cannot be a fact; it is used to convey (strictly speaking, an inexpressible) picturing of one fact by another”352. But if: “ ‘p’ says p” is not a form of a significant proposition, then it is not the proper answer to the challenge of the extensionality principle either. What is my response to the above discussion? Is: “ ‘p’ says p” a form of a proposition? When answering this question I want to stress the fact that I do not agree with the common assumption of Cohen’s and Dayton’s interpretations that both Russell and Wittgenstein were focussed on the problem as to how to express the fact that propositions have meaning. Of course, taking into account Wittgenstein’s views on meaning one cannot say what the meaning of a proposition is. If Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s problem was how to express the fact that propositions have meanings, then both solutions fail. When analysing the above-mentioned interpretations, one has to remember that until 1967 the existence of the text with which Wittgenstein argued, i.e. the manuscript of Russell’s Theory of Knowledge, remained unknown, and until 1984 it was inaccessible. This had an impact on the deficiencies of the above commentaries – Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was originally published in 1959, Dayton’s and Cohen’s responses 348 “Although it contains a true description of the propositional sign as here occurring, it is a false statement; for it is not, as it happens, this fact, but the fact that ‘a’ stands to the left and ‘b’ to the right of ‘R’ that says that aRb” (ibid., p. 89). 349 Ibid., p. 89. 350 “ ‘A believes that p’ purports to say what is it that A believes. But this cannot be said” (Cohen 1974, p. 444). 351 Dayton 1976, p. 277. 352 Ibid., p. 280.

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come from the 1970s. In this chapter I tried to show that it was the Theory of Knowledge which served as a background against which Wittgenstein formulated his own thoughts. The problem that both philosophers were dealing with was the question: “What does judgement consist in?”. Secondly, a comparison of fragment TLP 5.54-5.5422 with the respective fragments of the Theory of Knowledge shows that “ ‘p’ says p” is not Wittgenstein’s answer to the alleged difficulties of the form: “A believes that p”, but to Russell’s formula: “B (A, a, b, R, γ)”. Therefore, his reason for rejecting the propositional form: “A believes p” was not the impossibility of saying the meaning of p but, as I think, incoherence of the concept of the empirical self. In: “ ‘p’ says p” Wittgenstein encapsulated his own theory of judgement which says that a judgement consists of a relation between an event in the brain and a state of affairs. This theory manages to deal with the problem of the alleged contradiction of the form: “A believes that p” with the extensionality principle, simply by stating that there is no such thing as the self (the solution assumes, obviously, that intensional contexts are internally related to the point of view of the subject). Hence, in contradiction to Anscombe, Dayton or Cohen, I think that the problem of the meaningfulness of “ ‘p’ says p” has very little to do with the question whether Wittgenstein managed to defend the extensionality principle in his early oeuvre.

3.4.2 Hacker: Hume’s influence on Wittgenstein’s theory The second group of commentators consists of philosophers who claimed that Wittgenstein in TLP 5.54ff opposed the Cartesian conception of the self. For example, Rosalind Carey, whose book is entirely devoted to Wittgenstein’s objections to Russell’s theory of judgement, claims that Russell defended Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, and hence Wittgenstein’s remarks have anti-Cartesian significance353. Hans Sluga is convinced not only that Russell had argued in Theory of Knowledge for a Cartesian conception of the self, but that “it was precisely this theory which Wittgenstein attacked in sections 5.54ff of the Tractatus”354 (my emphasis). I do not agree, however, with philosophers who understand Russell’s dualism as substance-dualism and, hence, they see in the anti-Cartesian overtone of the Tractatus 5.54-5.5422 a “re-make” of Hume’s classic argument that among things one cannot find the self. For instance, David Stern thinks that Wittgenstein’s theory is mostly negative and that its biggest achievement is a repudiation that the self is to be found “within immediate experience be means of introspection, a ‘thinking, 353 Carey 2007, p. 4. 354 Sluga 1996, p. 324.

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representing self ’ ”355. Jesse Prinz agrees with him and claims: “[Wittgenstein] can be read as saying there is no self to be found in introspective experience – no phenomenal I. When we think or perceive, we experience the contents of our thoughts and perceptions, but not a subject of them”356. Dale Jacquette writes about “Wittgenstein’s neo-Humean thesis about the no-ownership of psychological experiences as a conclusion from his method for eliminating propositional attitudes contexts”357. Very often these claims occur together with another claim, namely that Wittgenstein was also a proponent of a composite self. The most representative examples are the works of Peter Hacker, who writes, among others, that “Wittgenstein was willing to adopt more or less Humean analysis of the empirical self ”358. Hacker argues that the relation of representing a fact consists in a correlation of two facts rather than a fact and an object. Because facts are composite, only composite things can “say” something. TLP 5.541 entails, according to Hacker, the claim that The person A is not an object but a complex array of physical objects. ‘A believes p’ is analyzable into a series of elementary propositions such that existence of the physical constituents which corresponds to the constituents of the fact p is specified. These constituents are related in some contingent way to whatever other facts constitute the person A. (Hacker 1971, p. 165)

Hacker concludes from the premise: “representations are composite”

that “the person is composite (of physical objects)”

but for that to be correct one has to identify the flow of representations with the self. In other words, from the fact that a representation is composite he concludes that the self – as the container of representations – is also composite. I would like to point to two problems of this interpretation. First, we should take seriously Wittgenstein’s thesis that there is no such thing as a soul and that a composite soul would no longer be a soul (TLP 5.5421). As I wrote earlier, according to Wittgenstein it is better to say that there is no self at all than to claim that the self is composed of material objects (even if we could successfully reduce the flow of representations to something material). Of course I do not think that 355 356 357 358

Stern 1995, p. 73. Prinz 2011, p. 147. Jacquette 1992/1993, p. 199. Hacker 1971, p. 165.

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Hacker simply omitted TLP 5.5421. I suspect rather that his line of thought was the following: in TLP 5.5421 Wittgenstein understood “soul” as the Cartesian self – the immaterial subject of experience, its owner. It would indeed be absurd to conceive such an object as composite. According to Hacker, Wittgenstein rejected in TLP 5.5421 only the Cartesian self – the subject of representations – but not the Humean concept of the self. That is the second point of my disagreement with Hacker. In my view, TLP 5.54-5.5422 is not a polemics with the Cartesian notion of the self (understood as an immaterial substance), but with the notion of the empirical self – the opinion about the self represented, among others, by Russell, whose name is explicitly mentioned in the Tractatus. Moreover, if we accepted the Cartesian concept of the self – which includes that the self is the owner of experiences of a mental nature – then no arguments used by Wittgenstein in the analysed fragment of the Tractatus would be directed against such a concept. An adherent of Descartes could easily accept all that Wittgenstein says about the logical form as a necessary condition of a picture; he can agree that one does not have to accept the existence of a mind synthesising raw sense-data material, and he can still hold his dualistic views. Simplifying, if Wittgenstein’s argument says only that among empirical reality there is no such thing as the self, then substance dualists can reply that the self exists outside the empirical reality. Indeed, many of the proponents of the thesis of Hume’s influence on TLP 5.54ff, including Peter Hacker, are simultaneously adherents of the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus. Anthony Kenny and Hans Sluga are perfect examples, too; both admit that Wittgenstein rejected the empirical self, but they also think that it did not interfere with his belief in the existence of the metaphysical self, existing apart from the material world. Kenny learns from Wittgenstein that the empiricist hypothesis of the empirical self does not explain why propositions are true or false359 (the thesis I argued in favour of), but it does not prevent him from believing that Wittgenstein ascribed the function of conferring a meaning on “the pure will of the extra-mundane solipsistic metaphysical self ”360. Similarly, Sluga emphasises Wittgenstein’s conclusion of the argument that “the notion of the soul or subject is altogether incoherent and, consequently, there cannot be any such thing”361 (it is also the thesis I argued in favour of), but nevertheless that leaves him open to the question if perhaps there is a soul, but outside the world; not as a part of it362. 359 “The Tractatus itself did not think, as the British empiricists did, that impressions and ideas could themselves confer meaning” (Kenny 1981, p. 147). 360 Ibid., p. 147. 361 Sluga 1983, p. 129–130. 362 Ibid., p. 130.

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In other words, some philosophers suppose that even if Wittgenstein thought that the notion of the self as conceived in the empirical tradition is empty, this does not mean that he rejected the notion of the self as empty in itself. It is possible, according to them, that Wittgenstein simply preferred the transcendental understanding of this concept. I think that this hypothesis is wrong. Naturally, I agree that in TLP 5.54ff the main aim of Wittgenstein’s argument was the concept of the empirical self, and that does not exclude another understanding of the concept of the self, but I think that the other theses of the Tractatus show that also the transcendental notion of the self was under Wittgenstein’s attack. There is no room for the task of proving this claim in this chapter, but I shall go back to it in Chapter 4.

3.4.3  Jacquette: the distinguishability problem The last group of interpretations raises the question whether Wittgenstein’s critique of Russell’s theory of judgement precludes a distinction between different psychological states such as beliefs or doubts. One of the assumptions of Dale Jacquette’s interpretation is the claim that Wittgenstein’s goal was to eliminate propositional attitudes from a logical notation. According to Jacquette, “ ‘p’ says p” is a “metalinguistic pseudoproposition purporting to describe the officially unspeakable one-one correspondence relations between elementary propositions and atomic facts guaranteed by the picture theory semantics”363. It seems that, according to Jacquette’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, a judgement consists in a relation between an elementary proposition and a state of affairs. It also seems that Jacquette holds a judgement to be the most general propositional attitude, and beliefs or doubts to be different kinds of a judgement364. Beliefs and doubts have the same form (“p” says p) but different psychological contents, and that is why, in Jacquette’s eyes, Wittgenstein’s theory does not allow to discern between beliefs, doubts, desires, etc. Jacquette does not want to ascribe to Wittgenstein an omission, therefore, he suspects that Wittgenstein intentionally left psychological contents outside the scope of his interests. He speculates that Wittgenstein thought that discerning different kinds of judgements was “an empirical task for the science of psychology, not a matter for philosophical

363 Jacquette 1992/1993, p. 195. 364 “Consider the sentences: ‘A believes that p’, ‘A doubts that p’. It is counterintuitive to suppose that the analysis of these sentences could result in the very same reduction in any correct theory of judgement” (ibid., pp. 195–6). Later, he writes about “the contents of judgements that distinguish believing from doubting” (Ibid., p. 196).

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semantics”365. It seems that, according to Jacquette, one can analyse A’s belief that p as being composed of a psychological fact, which in Wittgenstein’s example is a belief, and of a proposition with a content (in Wittgenstein’s example it is a proposition “p” with a content p); hence the analysis of “A believes that p” into: “Belief + [“p” says p]”. In fact, claims Jacquette, Wittgenstein was aware that a judgement consists in two elements: a form – the subject-matter for semantics, and a psychological state – the subject-matter for psychology366. Jacquette claims that Wittgenstein probably thought that the problem of psychological states is an empirical one and, therefore, of no interest to a philosopher. At the same time, claims Jacquette, this conviction is the reason why Wittgenstein’s attempt to “eliminate propositional attitude contexts from language at its deepest level of analysis is faulty”367. It can work in simple cases such as “A believes that p”. Wittgenstein tackles this propositional attitude by isolating a psychological state from a propositional content: “Belief + [“ ‘p’ says p]”. But what about more complex cases such as: “A believes that B doubts that q”? By analogy with the former case, the form of this propositional attitude looks as follows: “Belief + [“ ‘q’ says q]”, but because “q” stands for “B doubts that p”, we obtain in fact: “[“[‘p’ says p] + Doubt” says [‘p’ says p] + Doubt] + Belief ”. It would turn out that Wittgenstein did not get rid of the psychological (empirical) states from the analysis of propositional attitudes at all368. In response to Jacquette’s commentary, I would like to point to the fact that Wittgenstein’s rejection of the propositional form “A believes that p” was not entailed by his dismissal of psychology but was the consequence of his conviction that it falsely interprets what beliefs consist in. Moreover, he thought that propositional forms such as “A believes that p” are misleading in the sense that they suggest the empirical self as being a term of relation with a state of affairs. My objection to this interpretation is that it discerns between beliefs and judgements, which is quite common in contemporary literature369 but unjustified with respect to Wittgenstein. He held the notions of a judgement and of a belief to be 365 Ibid., p. 196. 366 Puhl thinks similarly, and he indicates at Wittgenstein’s intention of discriminating psychology and philosophy as the motif for TLP 5.542. According to Puhl, Wittgenstein’s propositions of the form: “A believes that p” are the subject-matter for psychology; propositions of the form: “ ‘p’ says p” are the subject-matter for philosophy (Puhl 1999, pp. 26–28). 367 Jacquette 1992/1993, p. 195. 368 Ibid., p. 210. 369 Crane 2001, pp. 102–3.

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synonymous. In the Tractatus they pertain to dated and temporal events. Much of Jacquette’s interpretation is based on this false discernment between judgments, on the one hand, and beliefs, doubts and desires, on the other. It gives the impression that Wittgenstein was interested only in abstract forms of propositions and their semantics. I do not think that Wittgenstein aimed in TLP 5.54ff at a correct logical notation. His aim was rather to contrive a theory of judgement, and if we accept that by “judgement” he understood a dated and temporal event, then it turns out that he was interested in the question: “What does this psychological and mental act of judgement consist in?”. There is no reason to supplement “ ‘p’ says p” by a psychological state; it simply leads to unsolvable problems. This means, obviously, that I have a different view on what: “ ‘p’ says p” is. According to Jacquette, this expression purports to describe a relation between an elementary proposition and a fact, but in fact it is a pseudoproposition, whereas I do not think that “ ‘p’ says p” tries to describe anything. The proposition “aRb” does not try to describe the form of the fact aRb. It says that aRb obtains and it shows its form. Similarly, “ ‘p’ says p” says – under my interpretation – that an event in the brain obtains. According to Jacquette, “ ‘p’ says p” gives only the form of a judgement but not its content, whereas my interpretation allows to state that “ ‘p’ says p” shows what the content of a judgement is.

Summary In this chapter I analysed Wittgenstein’s rejection of the concept of the self prevailing in empiricism. We can sum up the dilemma of empiricism as follows: either we admit that beliefs belong to the region of the mental and we explain in this way their truth or falsity but on the other hand we reject physicalism (because it would turn out that some objects in the world are not ontologically reducible to matter), or we defend materialism, reject the mental character of the propositional attitudes and claim that there is nothing distinct between propositions and perceptions or emotions. We saw that Russell was the proponent of the first solution and Hume of the second. In the chapter I analysed the details of Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s theory of judgement (sections 3.1 and 3.2). According to Wittgenstein, judgement consists of a relation between an event in the brain and a state of affairs (section 3.3.2). In my opinion, he killed in this way two birds with one stone: I. The basic result of the Tractarian solution is that Wittgenstein succeeded in avoiding the dilemma: he neither had to give up his materialism nor the truthvalues of beliefs. He solved the challenge of the physicalistic position, namely, that rationality has a normative character that is non-reducible to matter by 167

means of his picture theory of meaning and the concept of the logical form that was crucial for this theory. Pictures (or representations) are true or false not because of the synthesising activity of the mind but just because of sharing the same form with the depicted state of affairs. In order to explain that some entities (such as beliefs) are true or false, one does not have to introduce the mind. Hence, Wittgenstein’s conclusion that a soul (understood as the empirical self) does not exist. This claim is slightly ambiguous: it could suggest that after some investigations one did not find an object corresponding to the characteristics given in the concept. I do not think that this is what Wittgenstein had in mind in his rejection of the empirical self; I believe that he wanted to say that one did not confer any meaning on this concept (section 3.3.3). II. Secondly, Wittgenstein showed how one can reconcile the thesis that all meaningful propositions are truth-functions on elementary propositions with the meaningfulness of propositions expressing propositional attitudes. According to Russell’s view, the former propositions are the results of operations on propositions. The problem is that the modal operator B is not a truth-functional operator. On the other hand, according to Wittgenstein’s solution, propositions expressing propositional attitudes report the existence of an event in a brain, so it is imaginable that they are elementary propositions. The tension between the extensionality principle and the meaningfulness of propositions expressing judgements does not arise (section 3.3.3). In section 3.3.4 I also tried to show that the discussion with Russell’s theory of judgement allows us to outline the strategy in which philosophy fulfils its task of defending the world of human values against the impoverishing influence of science. Speaking metaphorically, Wittgenstein thinks that there is one efficient weapon left in the arsenal of philosophy, and that is setting the limits of meaningful discourse: It must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought (TLP 4.114).

In my opinion, the short remark: “A composite soul would no longer be a soul” (TLP 5.5421) is an application of the above claim. What differentiates Wittgenstein from the standpoint of positivism is his opinion regarding the limitations of science. This is why I think that, on the one hand, the fragment of the Tractatus, 5.54-5.5422, is a good example of the existence of the book’s modernist tendency. It shows that accepting modernism as an intellectual background of the book helps in understanding its sometimes intricate and surprising formulations. I think that these conclusions shall even be strengthened in the next 168

chapter, which is devoted to the great rival of materialism, i.e. transcendental philosophy. Finally, I shall try to present the “big picture” standing behind the results of this chapter. I hope that, despite the fact that in the next remarks I shall go beyond the exact results of my analysis of fragment TLP 5.54ff, I shall still say something that is in accordance with the Tractarian spirit. In this chapter my considerations are centred around the theme of dualism. Descartes, who was a great representative of this philosophical tradition, had in Meditations on First Philosophy two goals: to prove the existence of the immaterial soul and to prove the existence of God. Descartes hoped that by achieving this goal he would provide strong fundaments for religious beliefs against those who refused to see in the soul something different than matter370. I am not going to analyse Descartes’ oeuvre; what is interesting to me is that, according to him, it was precisely the task of philosophy to guarantee the fundamentals for faith and moral values. Faith itself confronted with sceptics is unable to do so: For although it is sufficient for us Christians to believe by faith that the human soul does not perish with the body and that God exists, yet it seems certain that unbelievers cannot be convinced of the truth of religion, and scarcely even of any moral values, unless these first two truths are proved to them by natural reason. (…) And although it is completely true that we should believe in the existence of God because it is taught in the holy scriptures, and by the same token that we should believe the holy scriptures because we have them from God (…) there is no point in asserting this to unbelievers, because they would call it arguing in a circle [Descartes 1641/2008, p. 3].

In this context, the Tractatus with its fierce conviction that metaphysical propositions are nonsensical, that traditional philosophical concepts (such as the concept of the soul) are empty, and that the world is completely described by natural science is a witness to times when it is becoming clear that philosophy cannot fulfil the task that Descartes put upon it. Ontotheology is helpless when it comes

370 “And as regards the soul, even though many authors have judged that it is very difficult to discover its nature, and some have even dared to say that human reasoning convinces us that it perishes along with the body, and that we believe the contrary by faith alone, nonetheless because the Council of the Lateran held in the reign of Leo X condemns these people, and explicitly enjoins Christian philosophers to refute their arguments, and to make every effort to prove the truth, I did not hesitate to tackle this issue as well. Besides, I know that most of the impious refuse to believe that God exists and that the human mind is distinct from the body, for no other reason than that they say that these two points have never been proved by anybody up to now” (Descartes 1641/2008, p. 4).

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to defending the existence of the values of the human world in an age of the progress of science. I hope to prove this claim even more convincingly in the next chapter when I analyse the influence of Schopenhauer’s transcendentalism on Wittgenstein’s early oeuvre.

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Chapter 4.  The Transcendental Self Metaphysics fails in the task of finding a place for the soul, good or beauty in the modern, scientific worldview, which is, according to my hypothesis, the claim of the Tractatus. In the last paragraph we saw a critique of dualistic metaphysics that sees the soul as a thing among other things. Wittgenstein in this respect belongs to a large group of philosophers rejecting the Cartesian notion of the self. Some of those philosophers undertook another philosophical effort to justify the existence of a non-reducible to matter self, and in this way to safeguard ethics and the world of human values. In the history of philosophy this effort is called transcendental idealism, and it will be the subject-matter of the following chapter. In what follows I shall begin with the terminology, i.e. I shall summarise what I mean under the term “the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus”, and under the concept of the transcendental self. Then I shall mention an impressive group of scholars – proponents of the transcendental interpretation and their arguments in favour of this interpretation. Extremely simplifying, the transcendental interpretation claims that early Wittgenstein adopted from Schopenhauer transcendental idealism. Hence, throughout the chapter I shall compare the philosophies of these two philosophers (sections 4.1.1 and 4.1.2). If the transcendental interpretation were true, then it would turn out that Wittgenstein actually used metaphysics of the self in order to safeguard the world of values and meaning. This is contradictory to my reading of his early book, so I shall try to prove that arguments in favour of this interpretation taken from the text of the Tractatus are not sufficient to justify such a reading. These three fragments of the text are its ethical considerations (section 4.2), the so-called solipsistic theses (section 4.3), and remarks on death (section 4.4). In the conclusion of the chapter I intend to argue that, according to the Tractatus, transcendentalism, similarly to dualism, fails to give meaning to the concept of the self and, hence, fails to safeguard the values of the human world in the age of scientism (section 4.5). This conclusion is in line with the main hypothesis of this inquiry: that Wittgenstein belongs to a wide intellectual movement of modernism and that he acknowledged that science replaces philosophy in the task of describing reality, and although he sought an answer to the question of the place of human values in a world governed by the laws of mechanics, he was sceptical about the possibilities of philosophy in delivering answers. He rather saw the solution in a radical turn to an inner, subjective life.

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4.1  The transcendental philosophy of Schopenhauer The transcendental interpretation is an interpretation which attributes to Wittgenstein the thesis that the transcendental self exists, or the thesis that although the claim about the existence of the transcendental self is nonsensical, it is somehow an illuminating nonsense. I shall take the use of the term “the transcendental self ” to mean an entity which fulfils conditions (1) and (2) or an entity which fulfils conditions (1) and (3): 1. An entity which is not a part of the empirical world but still there is a sense according to which we can talk and think about it371 2. An entity to which the world is coordinated (this means that one cannot build a wholly objective and materialistic worldview without assuming the existence of a cognising subject), which is tantamount to saying that it has its world; an owner of a point of view of the world as a whole372. 3. An entity which conditions the existence of the world. The world is dependent in its existence on the transcendental self. The term “the transcendental self ” is tantamount to the various other notions used by commentators: “the solipsistic self ”, “the metaphysical self ”, and “the willing subject”. By “transcendental” I shall mean every philosophy which claims that the transcendental self exists. Terms synonymous with “transcendentalism” in the following chapter are: “transcendental idealism”, “transcendental solipsism” and “idealism”.

4.1.1  Schopenhauer and the notion of the transcendental self In the following section I shall develop the aforementioned ideas about the transcendental self on the example of the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

371 For example, Bas van Frassen writes about the ego: “I exist, but I am not a thing among things. I am neither a physical object, nor a mental substance or abstract entity, nor a compound thereof. I am not animal, mineral, or vegetable. Nor am I a thing constituted by or composed of things of that sort taken together. I am not some piece of furniture of the universe” (van Frassen 2005, p. 87). 372 “No truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 3).

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Ad 1) Schopenhauer claimed that the self is not a part of the empirical world: The world as representation (…) has two essential, necessary, and inseparable halves. The one half is the object, whose forms are space and time, and through these plurality. But the other half, the subject, does not lie in space and time (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 5). What is not in space or in time cannot be object; therefore the being or existence of things-in-themselves can no longer be objective, but only of quite a different kind, namely a metaphysical being or existence (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 7).

At first the idea of an object which is not a part of the empirical world but nevertheless exists as well as synonymous ideas of “non-factual existence”, “something which exists, but not as a thing” and “something which exists outside the world” could be confusing. When forced to explain what the concept of existence outside the world means, I would use the Kantian category of things-in-themselves. According to transcendental thinkers, all that we know and perceive are just appearances. The empirical world consists of appearances, so things-in-themselves – the way objects are even if there is no cognising subject – transcend it. One should not even use the word “object” when one refers to them. The category of an object is misleading because the only objects we know are by definition appearances. On the other hand, transcendentalists claim that they are sure of the existence of things-in-themselves because only their existence explains the way the world of appearances looks to us. In the idealistic tradition the self is one of the things-in-themselves. Transcendentalists claim that the self is not a part of the empirical world because its existence is different than the existence of empirical things, and in the more radical versions of transcendental idealism, such as solipsism, its existence is even “greater” than the existence of empirical things because it is a source of the existence of empirical things. On the other hand, when asked: “How do you know that the self exists?”, the transcendentalists would answer that it is the only way to explain certain phenomena. For example, we will see in the subsequent passages that the justification for the postulate of the existence of the willing subject comes from the need to explain the fact that we experience moral values. The concept of the willing subject explains it because it captures the aspect of the self as a bearer of moral values. Moral values enter the empirical world through the willing subject. Ad 2) Schopenhauer endorsed the thesis that the material world is coordinated with the subject in the sense that one cannot build a wholly objective and materialistic worldview without assuming the existence of a cognising subject: “No object without subject” is the principle that renders all materialism for ever impossible. Suns and planets with no eye to see them and no understanding to know them can

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of course be spoken in words, but for the representation these words are a sideroxylon, an iron-wood (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 29–30).

The next characteristics of the self in the idealistic tradition are that the world is coordinated with the self. According to Glock, “Kant had refuted the Cartesian doctrine of a soul-substance, but introduced two other notions: the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ a formal feature of judgements, namely that they can be prefixed by ‘I think’; and a noumenal self, the locus of free will and the moral law”373. I explained the notion of a noumenal self in the previous point. What does “transcendental unity of apperception” mean? For our purposes it is not necessary to go into the details of Kantian philosophy because this notion was transformed by Schopenhauer into the formula “the world is my representation”374, and in this form it was filtered to Wittgenstein. The most important consequence of Schopenhauer’s catchword is that if the world is a representation, then there must be someone who perceives it – a subject375. The world, under this conception, is coordinated to the subject. By the concept “coordination” I understand the fact that the mere indication at the existence of the world signals the existence of the subject who perceives this world. The transcendentalists would agree with the anti-Cartesian thesis of      TLP 5.5421 that the self is not a part of the empirical reality, so in order to express the relation between the self and the world one needs a different concept than “being a part of ”. It is the concept of ownership or of subordination. The relation of ownership is not like the relation between Roman Abramovich (the owner) and the Chelsea London football club (the property). Both Roman Abramovich and his football club are parts of the empirical world, and both Roman Abramovich and Chelsea London would exist independently, without any relation holding between them. In order to express the relation of ownership between the self and the world, I shall make an analogy to the relation of substance and accidents in Aristotle’s metaphysics. Substance, according to this tradition of metaphysical thinking, is something which can exist on its own; accidents are something that exists only instantiated by the substance376. Let us make a horse an example of a substance (horses do not need any other things in order to exist, so they are a good example) and its properties, e.g. shape, size, properties of

373 Glock 1996, p. 348. 374 Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 3. 375 “The whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation” (ibid., p. 3). 376 Martin 1980/1999, p. 37.

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character and so on as examples of accidents. What is important in this analogy is that although the properties of the horse are parts of the perceivable world (I can see the size and the shape of a particular horse), the horse in itself – the bearer of the properties – is not. Aristotelian substances are not perceivable. If we replace “perceivable” by “empirical”, “substance” by “the self ”, and “properties” by “the empirical world”, then we will get the intuition of transcendental idealism. Although the empirical world is perceivable and, hence, is a subjectmatter for scientific research, its bearer – the self – is not. What could also be made of this analogy is the relation of coordination between a substance and its properties: both are conceivable only together. We cannot conceive accidents hanging in the air without the support of a substratum (one cannot conceive the accident “tall” in itself without the connection with things that have this feature), but, on the other hand, we cannot conceive pure substrata either – things without any accidents at all. The same goes, according to the transcendentalists, for the relation between the self and the world. Thinking about the self independently of the subordinated world would be tantamount to repeating the mistake of the dualists, but on the other hand the idea of an external world existing independently of the self would mean to commit a mistake of materialism. According to the transcendentalists, we cannot conceive matter in any other way than in relation to the subject. Having an idea of the matter is always conditioned by the existence of the subject that has that idea377. Hence the conclusion that: “Every object always and eternally presupposes a subject”378. Ad 3) Schopenhauer very clearly formulated the thesis of the dependence of material things in their existence on the subject and the intellect: We must absolutely deny to the dogmatist the reality of the external world, when he declares this to be its independence of the subject. The whole world of objects is and

377 “Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, regarded by materialism as a solid basis for its explanations, all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 28). 378 Ibid., p. 95. In this respect to these theses Schopenhauer is a debtor of Berkeley, whom he held in a high esteem: “The whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation (…). This truth is by no means new (…). But Berkeley was the first to enunciate it positively, and he has thus rendered an immortal service to philosophy, although the remainder of his doctrines cannot endure” (Ibid., p. 3).

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remains representation, and is for this reason wholly and for ever conditioned by the subject; in other words, it has transcendental ideality (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 15) Matter and the course of nature become mere phenomenon, conditioned by the intellect; for the phenomenon has its existence only in the representation of the intellect (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 13).

The epistemological thesis that the world is given to a subject only through experiences, so the only world the subject knows is the world of the subject’s experiences, starts to have peculiar consequences when expressed in ontology by the identity: “the world = my world”, which one can also find in the Tractatus379. Jointly, these theses do not only state that the self has its world, but they also comprise the core of transcendental solipsism, i.e. the conviction that the world (the totality of things, reality, the empirical) is dependent in its existence on the self, and that the self is a condition of the existence of the world. There is one thing that is troubling and confusing in an otherwise helpful analogy, i.e. the analogy between the transcendental self and the Aristotelian substance. It should be clear that the analogy works only insofar as it involves the explanation as to what the relation between the transcendental self and the empirical world consists in, but not in explaining the nature of the transcendental self. As little as we can say about the transcendental self, one thing is certain: because it exists outside the realm of empirical objects, and because it does not subsist on its own, the category of a substance does not apply to it. We are left only with metaphors with respect to the transcendental self; for example, Schopenhauer compares the self with an eye380; similarly, Wittgenstein uses an analogy of the eye and its visual field381. This picture serves to present the self as an extensionless point rather than a particular object (which is always in space and time): “The I of solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and what remains is the reality co-ordinate with it” (NB 2.9.16, p. 82). The other metaphor is the metaphor of a perspective or of a point of view sub specie aeternitatis. There is nothing idealistic or transcendental in speaking about different points of views and perspectives in philosophy when it discusses, for example, intentionality382. What is exceptional in a point of view sub specie aeternitatis 379 TLP 5.621–5.63. 380 “The world as representation certainly begins only with the opening of the first eye, and without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and hence before this it did not exist” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 31). 381 TLP 5.6331; NB 12.8.16, p. 80. 382 For example, Crane claims that: “What the daffodil lacks and the ‘minded’ creature has is a point of view on things or a perspective. The minded creature is one for which

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is that it is a point of view on the world as a whole and, hence, placed outside the world: “The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside” (NB 7.10.16, p. 83). Combined with the assumption that whenever there is a point of view there is someone who has this point of view, the claim that a point of view is outside the world leads to the conclusion that there is someone outside the world – the transcendental self. One can also find in the commentaries of the Tractatus the notion of an ethical point of view. Why can this term bring to mind transcendental associations? To answer this question one should go back to Schopenhauer’s claim that an act of will and an action are two sides of the same coin383. For Schopenhauer, the unity of the act of the will and the action meant that we are given to ourselves in two different ways: as acting we perceive ourselves as objects among other objects, and bond with them by the laws of nature. On the other hand, as willing, desiring, etc., we are given to ourselves directly and immediately as the will in itself, i.e. the subjects of the will384. Although only the first point of view is translatable into the language of natural science, both of them are equally important. The second point of view is even more valuable because it refers to “the original forces”385, i.e. the vital forces which explain the rules and laws of mechanics, physics and chemistry, such as “the forces of impenetrability, gravitation, rigidity, fluidity, cohesion, elasticity, heat, light, elective affinity, magnetism and electricity”386. Without an explanation in terms of the original forces (for Schopenhauer it is obviously the will), they remain mere phantoms and qualitates occultae387. We have two points of view from which we have access to reality and to ourselves; from each point of view we learn something different. In ethics we talk about ourselves as willing and desiring. It is then ethics which discovers reality

383

384

385 386 387

things are a certain way: the way they are from the creature’s perspective” (Crane 2001, p. 4). This claim, naturally, does not entail any kind of idealism. “The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 100). “To the subject of knowing, who appears as an individual only through his identity with the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways. It is given in an intelligent perception as representation, as objects among other objects, liable to the laws of these objects. But it is also given in quite a different way, namely as what is known immediately to everyone, and is denoted by the word will” (ibid., p. 100). Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 122.

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that is inaccessible to natural science, i.e. the kingdom of will. The owner of the ethical point of view – the willing subject – is, therefore, often said to be the transcendental self.

4.1.2  Schopenhauer and the safeguarding of values In the last paragraph I described the notion of the transcendental self. This self is not a part of an empirical world, it is rather a point of view which takes the world as a whole (and is, hence, placed outside the world). From this point of view we gain deeper insight into the nature of the world. According to its proponents, one of the main reasons to accept the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus is the claim that it reflects Wittgenstein’s desire to safeguard the values of the human world from the standpoint of scientism. Although I agree that the Tractarian point of departure involves the question of the place of moral values, aesthetics and the soul in the world of scientific facts, I do not agree that the transcendental interpretation rightly reflects Wittgenstein’s answer to this question. But firstly I want to present, on the example of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, what defending the world of human values against the claims of science could look like in the case of transcendental idealism. What is the connection between the doctrines of idealism and the modernist pursuit of finding a new way of expression for human values apt to the requirements of the modern age? Schopenhauer held science as limited by the principle of sufficient reason. He adopted Kantian thinking regarding this principle. Therefore, in his eyes, it is not a law of nature; it rather encapsulates our way of organising empirical data. In consequence, according to Schopenhauer, what is governed by the principle of sufficient reason are not things-in-themselves but appearances, i.e. not noumena but objects as we perceive them. In this sense objects depend in their existence on the cognising subject. In other words, Schopenhauer saw the deficiency of science in the fact that it refers only to appearances. It describes the relations holding between them, the laws that govern them, or the connections that take place between them388, but it never reaches the core of reality or, in other words, the sphere of noumena. Perhaps we can find in the Tractatus a vague echo of this point in the thesis where Wittgenstein criticised the “modern conception of the world” for idolising the laws of nature

388 “All these, the common name of which is science, therefore follow the principle of sufficient reason in its different forms, and their theme remains the phenomenon, its laws, connexion, and their relations resulting from these” (ibid., p. 184).

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and the illusion that they explain natural phenomena389, or in A Lecture on Ethics, where Wittgenstein imagined what a scientific explanation in the case of a miracle could look like. All that science could do in such a case would be to state a sequence of events: in t1 a state of affair A, then in t2 a state of affair B, and in t3 a state of affair C. Because all a scientist could say would be 1) “A is the cause of B, and B is the cause of C”, and 2) “We have never encountered such a sequence of events before”390, it is thus, for Wittgenstein, an example of the limitation of science by the principle of sufficient reason. Many shades and aspects of reality slip through the scientific conceptual net. Science loses the uniqueness and meaning of some events. According to Schopenhauer, the situation of somebody who would, nevertheless, want to describe aspects of reality that are non-attainable to science is not helpless. It is enough for him to abandon a futile, in this respect, language of science and to employ a different kind of discourse. One possibility is art because it grasps what is essential in objects and their eternal ideas391. Another way to “lift the veil of deception” is, according to Schopenhauer, a mystical experience392. For the sake of the argument I shall concentrate only on the third source of knowledge about the reality of things-in-themselves, and that is metaphysics. To be precise, Schopenhauer thought that every philosophy, even one denying the discernment between appearances and things-in-themselves, or one fully trusting the cognising capacities of science, has its own metaphysics, in the sense of a theory of what exists. The precursors of modern physicalism, such as Lamarck, Hollbach and Cabanis, as mentioned by Schopenhauer, who take all phenomena to be physical are also metaphysicians, with the exception that their metaphysics is

389 “The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the socalled laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena (…) People today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable (…) The modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained” (TLP 6.371). 390 LE, p. 10. 391 “What kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to exist outside and independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena (…)? It is art, the work of genius. It repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the world” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 184). 392 “Mysticism is every guidance to the immediate awareness of that which is not reached either by perception or conception or generally by any knowledge (…) The mystic starts from his inner, positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only being, and so on” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 611).

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identified with physics393. Schopenhauer had some bitter words to say about such metaphysics (“it would look almost like Holberg’s theatrical pot-house politician who was made burgomaster”394), and the most important reason for his outrage is that such metaphysics would eliminate ethics. This, in consequence, would have a damaging effect on morality395. This threat led Schopenhauer to formulate his own credo: We can therefore set this up as the necessary credo of all righteous and good men: “I believe in a system of metaphysics” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 175).

As I mentioned earlier, according to Schopenhauer a scientific explanation is limited because it pertains only to appearances, and that is why a “physical explanation (…) requires one that is metaphysical, which would furnish the key to all its assumptions”396. Metaphysics in this second meaning is not a theory of what exists but a theory passing beyond the phenomenal appearance. The possibility of passing beyond is grounded in the fact that we experience ourselves not only as appearances, i.e. as bodies, but also as things-in-themselves, i.e. the will. The self has a special status in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics because it possesses insight into the core of reality, which stands behind all appearances: Man carries the ultimate fundamental secrets within himself, and this fact is accessible to him in the most immediate way. Here only, therefore, can he hope to find the key to the riddle of the world, and obtain a clue to the inner nature of all things (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 179).

Summing up, Schopenhauer regards scientific explanations, though they explain the whole realm of appearances, as insufficient with respect to the moral aspect of human life. Secondly, he thinks that for this reason we need metaphysics, which could pass beyond what is empirically perceived. Thirdly, he hopes that we – the selves – have access to what is beyond appearances – to the will397.

393 “Such an absolute system of physics as described above, which would leave no room for any metaphysics (…) would be physics seated on a throne of metaphysics” (ibid., p. 175). 394 Ibid., p. 175. 395 “Certainly such a system would necessarily be destructive for ethics” (ibid., p. 175). 396 Ibid., p. 173. 397 It is the metaphysics of the will that enables meaningful discourse on ethics and justification of moral tenets. The same goal is unachievable to science, simply because the condition of morality – the will – is a thing-in-itself and, hence, out of the scope of scientific interest.

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What, in my opinion, is the most tempting reason to accept the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus is the recognition that there occurs the same dissatisfaction as presented by Schopenhauer: We feel that even all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remains completely untouched (TLP 6.52),

and perhaps the same cure for the disease, i.e. metaphysics of the self. One can simply point at the well-known admiration that Wittgenstein had towards Schopenhauer’s philosophy to conclude that Wittgenstein accepted the transcendental solution to the problem of the imperfection of science. The question I want to ask in this chapter is whether Wittgenstein used the same way of “safeguarding” the special position of human beings in the world or the existence of moral values? Is the occurrence in the Tractatus of such notions as the notion of the metaphysical self, or the notion of a point of view sub specie aeternitatis, explained by the fact that Wittgenstein wanted to cross the limits of science and wanted to suggest that we somehow have access to the metaphysical realm? In this section I have concentrated on the possible main reason to accept the transcendental interpretation – Wittgenstein’s desire to safeguard values. The advantage of the transcendental interpretation consists in the fact that it can both reflect this desire as well as show the way out for those who are unsatisfied with the results of natural science. In the subsequent sections I shall analyse particular versions of the transcendental interpretations. I will group them into three categories. First, I will analyse the interpretations based on the ethical theses of the Tractatus (4.2). Then I shall mention these referring to solipsism of the Tractatus (4.3) and, finally, I shall refer to one interpretation underlining Wittgenstein’s remarks about death (4.4). Every presentation will be concluded with my response to the arguments. Finally, I shall present some general remarks about the failure of the transcendental interpretation (4.5), and in the next chapter (5) I will present my own point of view on how to interpret claims which raise suspicion regarding Tractarian transcendentalism.

4.2  The willing subject First, I shall refer to a group of authors who claim that Wittgenstein’s ethical views betray that he, during the period of writing the Tractatus, was a transcendental idealist. They find confirmation of such a hypothesis in the parts of the book dealing with ethics. The central notion of this interpretation is the concept of the willing subject. As the proponents of the interpretation prove, this concept fulfils all requirements put on the transcendental self: its referent is not 181

a part of the empirical world, but at the same time it guarantees the existence of moral values, and in this sense it conditions the world as we know it. They would also add that we have evidence in Wittgenstein’s writings that he believed in the existence of the willing subject. Therefore – conclude the adherents of the transcendental interpretation – we have no other option than to accept transcendentalism in the work of early Wittgenstein. I shall begin the section with a short review of authors who represent such a way of thinking about the Tractatus. Then I shall refer to the argument saying that since the concept of the willing subject occurs in Wittgenstein’s texts, and the concept is defined in such a way that it fulfils all the requirements put on the concept of the transcendental self, then one has to accept a transcendental reading of the Tractatus. My response consists in, to simplify things, pointing out that the concept of the willing subject occurs only in the Notebooks, so at best one could talk about transcendentalism in the Notebooks. I shall also argue that a comparison made between the respective theses of the Tractatus and entries from the Notebooks suggests that Wittgenstein ultimately withdrew from transcendentalism with respect to ethics.

4.2.1 Examples of transcendental interpretations referring to Wittgenstein’s ethics According to Hidé Ishiguro, Wittgenstein borrowed from Schopenhauer a model according to which we have at our disposal two different points of view of the world, i.e. the scientific-objective-materialistic one and, the second, the personalethical one. She speaks about the discovery of the ethical perspective by Wittgenstein in the empirical and material world, with which I agree. This is a typical way to describe a modernist point of view. On the other hand, I do not agree with her conviction that the cost of this double-model is the acceptance of the existence of the subject – the will, i.e. an individual that “chooses to view the whole to which the object or event belong and to which he adopts an attitude”398. Her reasoning is the following: since the willing subject has a perspective on the world as a whole, then the self must withdraw from it. Hence, the willing subject resides outside the world. We recognise in Ishiguro’s paper the following form of reasoning: there are moral values. The existence of moral values is incomprehensible on the basis of the scientific-objective-materialistic point of view. Then there must be another point of view and an owner of this point of view that is not a part of the empirical reality. Hence the willing subject is the transcendental self 398 Ishiguro 1981, p. 459.

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and one must accept the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus. A similar position is taken by John Kelly. He also very correctly describes the point of departure for Wittgenstein’s considerations on ethics: “Wittgenstein is concerned to understand how there can be meaning and worth in the seemingly nihilistic world of modern science where the order of nature has been divorced from any conception of value”399. In my opinion, he falsely concludes that Wittgenstein, in order to prevent us from scientific nihilism, uses metaphysics, and his answer to the challenges of the modern era is to contrive a theory of the metaphysical self: “Wittgenstein’s position is that the existence of ethical meaning and value is also the result of the constituting activity of the metaphysical subject”400. Martin Stokhof also notes the central opposition in the Tractatus between two points of view: in his case there is one which apprehends the world as a complex of facts and objects and one which apprehends the world as a whole. Stokhof claims that “on the level of subject this distinction reappears as that between the world from the point of view of the individual, psychological subject, which is in the world as a subject among other subjects, and the world viewed by the metaphysical subject, which is not in the world, but constitutes its limits”401. From the first point of view there is no necessary connection between my will and the events in the world: “this is one sense in which one may uphold that will and world are independent”402. If the world is independent of will, we are forced to accept determinism, and that has a damaging effect on ethics because it makes sense to ascribe to an action the value of good or evil only under the condition that a subject had an influence on the action in question. This causes tension between the points of view as mentioned above. To solve the impasse and to safeguard moral values, as we could expect, Stokhof ’s interpretation introduces a metaphysical notion: “in the case of Wittgenstein it is the will as the bearer of ethical values that escapes the logical contingency of the world of language and thought”403. The will is apparently identified by Stokhof with the metaphysical self. It is not the will in an empirical sense (the will as experienced in desires) but “the will which presents the ethical aspect of action”404. 399 Kelly 1995, p. 571. 400 Ibid., p. 573; Rosenberg shares this standpoint: “The existence of the metaphysical self (…) is required by Wittgenstein’s doctrines of the will and of good and evil” (Rosenberg 1968, p. 170). 401 Stokhof 2002, p. 233. 402 Ibid., p. 208; TLP 6.374. 403 Stokhof 2002, p. 208. 404 Ibid., p. 209.

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Stokhof ’s position could be summed up as follows: ethical values are intrinsic aspects of our actions, they are an intrinsic dimension of reality (and as aspects or dimensions they cannot be depicted, and hence ethics is senseless according to Tractarian criteria of meaning). Moreover, the notion of an aspect of a thing or of an aspectual shape requires the existence of a certain point of view. There is nothing transcendental up to this moment: one can naturally talk about some aspects of reality that we notice only when we have a certain attitude to the world, without any ontological implications in mind. But in the case of Stokhof ’s interpretation it is a point of view sub specie aeternitatis, which requires that an owner (we refer to this owner by using the notion of the metaphysical subject) of this point of view is positioned outside the world and, hence, his interpretation could be rightfully named as transcendental405. What should be clear after this short review is insistence on the fact that Wittgenstein’s transcendentalism is an upshot of his observation that science impoverishes the human world of values and that he hoped to find a solution to this problem in the metaphysics of the self. Now I shall examine what arguments the proponents of such an interpretation use in order to support their hypothesis.

4.2.2 Counterarguments In order to support the transcendental interpretation, its proponents often indicate certain entries from the Notebooks. I will argue that there is a clear influence of Schopenhauer on Wittgenstein’s thinking in the Notebooks – one can investigate a form of transcendentalism there. But at the same time one observes a definite change in Wittgenstein’s ethical views in the Tractatus. Even if there is a resemblance between the ethics of the Tractatus and Schopenhauer’s ethics, it is not enough to state that the former oeuvre represents the position of transcendental idealism.

4.2.2.1 Transcendentalism of the Notebooks and the shift in Wittgenstein’s thinking about ethics We saw earlier that for Schopenhauer the empirical reality is morally indifferent and the way to safeguard the position of moral values in our worldview is to introduce the notion of the subject as a bearer of moral values. One could successfully argue that this kind of reasoning is present in the Notebooks, in which

405 For now I leave aside the question if the inference from viewing the world as a whole to the existence of an owner of this point of view who exists outside the world is right.

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Wittgenstein claimed that the act of a will and the action are not two separate states406 – a thought which, as I have mentioned, led Schopenhauer to contrive a theory about two different points of view of ourselves and the world. Secondly, in the Notebooks Wittgenstein identified the concept of the subject with the concept of the willing subject407, and the description of the concept of the willing subject is such that it fulfils all the conditions put on the transcendental self. Ad a) The willing subject as the bearer of ethics is not a part of the empirical: Good and evil only enter through the subject. And the subject is not part of the world, but a boundary of the world (NB 2.8.16, p. 80).

Moreover, in the Notebooks there is a conviction that, although apart from the world, the self, the I, or the will – all of these concepts seem to be for Wittgenstein synonymous with the concept of the willing subject – somehow exists: The thinking subject is surely mere illusion. But the willing subject exists (NB 5.8.16, p. 80). There are two godheads: the world and my independent I (NB 8.7.16, p. 74).

and acts: My will penetrates the world (NB 11.6.16, p. 73).

Ad b) The willing subject is also the subject of a particular experience, namely the moral one. It is the bearer of moral values: What really is the situation of the human will? I will call “will” first and foremost the bearer of good and evil. Let us imagine a man who could use none of his limbs and hence could, in the ordinary sense, not exercise his will. He could, however, think and want and communicate his thought to someone else. Could therefore do good or evil through the other man. Then it is clear that ethics would have validity for him, too, and that he in the ethical sense is the bearer of the will (NB 30.7.16, p. 76–77).

Ad c) Finally, Wittgenstein straightforwardly writes that the willing subject, and in consequence ethics, is the precondition of the existence of the world. The subject is also called in this context “the centre of the world”: The subject is not the part of the world but a presupposition of its existence (NB 2..8.16, p. 79).

406 “The act of the will is not the cause of the action but the action itself ” (NB 4.11.16, p. 87). 407 “The subject is the willing subject” (NB 4.11.16, p. 87); “The thinking subject is surely mere illusion. But the willing subject exists” (NB 5.8.16, p. 80).

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If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I, and which is the bearer of ethics (NB 5.8.16, p. 80). Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be condition of the world, like logic (NB 24.7.16, p. 77).

Are the above quotations enough to secure the validity of the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus? Is the willing subject the Holy Grail of the transcendental interpretation? When answering this question it should not escape our attention that they are to be found only in the Notebooks, in which Wittgenstein admitted that he was not certain about his ideas (“As for what my will is, I don’t know yet” (NB 8.7.16, p. 74).) and that the Notebooks’ formulations are vague: directly after a passage about the willing subject as the limit of the world and directly before the passage about the subject as the precondition of the world’s existence, Wittgenstein notes: “I am conscious of the complete unclarity of all these sentences” (NB 2.8.16, p. 79). To state the obvious, the basis for the interpretation of the Tractatus is the text of the Tractatus and not of the Notebooks. In comparison to the Notebooks it is easy to notice important changes in the text of the Tractatus with respect to ethics. What is the most significant sign of the shift in Wittgenstein’s thinking about ethics is that from all the quotations from the Notebooks that confirm he was thinking about the willing subject as the transcendental self, literally NONE occurs in the Tractatus. He disposed of ALL of them. There is no mention of the concept of the willing subject, no mention of any kind of bearer of ethics. On the contrary, now we read that “it is impossible to speak about the will in so far as it is the subject of ethical attributes” (TLP 6.423). There is no mention that it is the will which is good or evil, no mention that an act of will and an action are one. A person reading only the Tractatus would have no idea that Wittgenstein was interested in the problem: “how do good and evil enter into the world?”; not to mention that he claimed that the willing subject is the condition of the existence of the world. In this respect one finds in the Tractatus no evidence supporting the transcendental interpretation. Perhaps a comparison of some theses from the Notebooks and their counterparts from the Tractatus would be the most convincing; for example, the thesis, which I have already quoted, reads in the Notebooks as follows (I shall give the original German text in order to show the parallelism between the respective texts from the Notebooks and the Tractatus): Good and evil only enter through the subject. And the subject is not the part of the world, but a boundary of the world. In the original: Gut und Böse tritt erst durch das Subjekt ein. Und das Subjekt gehört nicht zur Welt, sondern ist eine Grenze der Welt. (NB 2.8.16, p. 79).

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But in the Tractarian counterpart one reads only that: The subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world. In the original: Das Subjekt gehört nicht zur Welt, sondern es ist eine Grenze der Welt. (TLP 5.632)

In another example we could compare the following entry from the Notebooks with TLP 5.631: The thinking subject is surely mere illusion. But the willing subject exists. In the original: Das vorstellende Subjekt ist wohl leeren Wahn. Das wollende Subjekt aber gibt es. (NB 5.8.16, p. 80)

Very interestingly, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein gave up the second part: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. In the original: Das denkende, vorstellende, Subjekt gibt es nichts. (TLP 5.631)

Instead of speculations about an entity which somehow exists and acts although it does not belong to the world, in the Tractatus we simply get information that the subject is a limit of the world, which disposed of the background of considerations about how good and evil enter the world, could just be read as a claim that one cannot speak meaningfully about the subject of the will. What happened then? What does the shift between the Notebooks and the final formulations in the Tractatus consist in? In my opinion, in the Notebooks the influence of Schopenhauer is clear: not only did Wittgenstein agree that according to the scientific worldview reality contains no moral values, but he also agreed that safeguarding ethics reaches fruition by going beyond the reality of facts and postulating an entity which would, on the one hand, secure the existence of good and evil and, on the other hand, would not belong to the world of empirical facts. Just as Schopenhauer, he identified this entity with the self, namely the willing subject. My supposition is that by the time of composing the final formulations of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein realised that this kind of “safeguarding” ethics is just a void gesture, a form of wishful thinking. If, according to the Tractarian theory of meaning, the only meaningful propositions belong to natural science, then ethics is nonsensical, and we should treat this result seriously. To support this hypothesis I would indicate that, in contrast to Russell’s accusation, according to which Wittgenstein in the Tractatus managed to say a good deal about ethics although he recommended silence about it408, one can trace a real effort to keep silent with respect to ethics. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein thought about suicide as an elementary sin

408 Russell 1922, p. XXIII.

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because if “suicide is allowed then everything is allowed” (NB 10.1.17, p. 91). In the Tractatus he keeps silent about this topic. In the Notebooks there are vast entries where Wittgenstein considers what it means to be happy409. The Tractatus contains no such indications, apart from the statement that the world of a happy person is different than the world of an unhappy person (but still no remarks as to what being happy consists in)410. It seems that he took seriously his own counsel to be silent about things one cannot meaningfully express. The gist of the above considerations reads as follows: the Notebooks take from Schopenhauer a transcendental point of view. There is a willing subject and good and evil enter into the world through the willing subject, and that perspective (the point of view of the willing subject) allows to carry out concrete ethical considerations. In Wittgenstein’s final formulations, in the official presentation of his views, i.e. in the Tractatus, we observe in this respect a change. He withdraws from using the controversial term of the willing subject and from contriving a theory as to how good and evil enter the world, and he avoids talking about specific ethical issues. Instead, in the foreground of the Tractatus is the thesis of the nonsense of ethics and the conviction that an opinion according to which in ethics we acquire access to a higher reality is deceptive: It is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental (TLP 6.42-6.421).

The last proposition should not mislead us. It does not mean that Wittgenstein ultimately kept thinking about ethics in transcendental terms. The significance of the last sentence is not, as Anscombe claims, that ethical propositions “show something that pervades everything sayable and is itself unsayable”411. In the light of the shift between the Notebooks and the Tractatus, I think it is much more probable to regard “transcendental” as tantamount to “attacking the limits of sense”. In my view, according to Wittgenstein, ethics is an example of a human’s desire to cross the limits of sense. An attempt which fails. Hence, despite the fact that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein describes ethics as transcendental, one should reject the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus as far as ethics is concerned. This means that although its proponents rightly recognise in the Tractatus the modernist suspicion that the progress of science leaves no room 409 “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what ‘being happy’ means” (NB 8.7.16, p. 75). 410 TLP 6.43. 411 Anscombe 1965, p. 166.

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for moral values, they are wrong in thinking that Wittgenstein’s response was to adopt transcendental idealism. Naturally, proponents of the transcendental interpretation could respond to my critique that, nevertheless, despite the changes in the formulations about ethics, there is still much evidence in the text of the Tractatus which confirms a transcendental reading of the book. I am at odds with this kind of defence. In sections 4.3 and 4.4 we will come to see that a meticulous analysis of the fragments given as typical examples of Tractarian transcendentalism shows that we cannot rightfully ascribe to early Wittgenstein the label of a transcendentalist.

4.2.2.2  The naturalisation of ethics In this section I am going to argue that if there is any influence of Schopenhauer’s ethics on the Tractatus, it finds its expression not in the alleged transcendentalism of this book but in the process I call the “naturalisation of ethics”. Some of the ethical notions seem to suggest dualism of mind and matter, or the existence of a supernatural reality. For example, the concept of free will seems to invoke dualistic associations with the self which is a cause and in full control of the action of the body. The concept of justice assumes, since we do not observe moral justice in this world, the realness of another world; the beyond in which human beings are punished or rewarded for their actions. Otto Neurath wrote that “in its origin, ethics is the discipline which seeks to determine the totality of divine injunctions”412. As a naturalisation of ethics I will mean a philosophical undertaking which aims to present such an understanding of ethical notions which would not require any dualistic or supernatural connotations. I will argue that this undertaking is present in Wittgenstein’s ethics and is a constant element of Schopenhauer’s influence throughout the early phase of Wittgenstein’s philosophical career. The naturalisation of ethics inherited by Wittgenstein from Schopenhauer is displayed, among others, in: 1. The conviction of the illusionary character of free will which does not have any influence on the world of empirical facts. Schopenhauer wrote that: The dispute as to the freedom of the individual action (…) really turns onto the question whether the will resides in time or not. If, as Kant’s teaching as well as the whole of my system makes necessary, the will as thing-in-itself is outside time and outside every form of the principle of sufficient reason, then not only must the individual act in the same way in the same situation (…), but, as Kant says, if only the empirical character and the

412 Neurath 1959, p. 305.

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motives were completely given, a man’s future actions could be calculated like an eclipse of the sun or moon (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 292),

and Wittgenstein, respectively: The world is independent of my will (TLP 6.373). I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless (NB 11.6.16, p. 73).

The difference between these two philosophers is that for Schopenhauer the claim of a unity between the will and an action led to a “discovery” of the core of reality, one that is inaccessible to natural science. But it is clear that for young Wittgenstein it meant only that an act of will (elusive to natural science) is not a cause of actions: “The act of the will is not the cause of the action but is the action itself. One cannot will without acting” (NB 4.11.16, p. 87)413. We do not change facts through the exercise of will: If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts – not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole (TLP 6.43)

The intention is clear: there are no two different causes of one event, i.e. mental (synonymous with free will) and material (a precedent fact), but just one, i.e. material. We should read TLP 6.43 as an anti-Cartesian remark against the thesis that immaterial entities can directly influence events in the empirical world. 2. Reluctance towards the concept of the justice of retribution. The fact that we are held accountable for our actions is a necessary condition for morality; we take responsibility for what we do. The fact that we sometimes get away with what we do wrong or that we sometimes are not appreciated for what we do right could be seen as dangerous to our feeling of justice. In order to preserve our respect of justice sometimes one postulates that, independently of the current course of events, we are always held accountable. We will eventually be

413 Wittgenstein clearly connects the notion of free will with the notion of a cause of events in the world. In this sense there is no free will (as independent of actions; as their driving force). This claim also refers to actions which are often regarded as purely mental, such as beliefs. As we saw in Chapter 3, Wittgenstein was of the opinion that beliefs consist of the relations between events in the brain and states of affairs. These events are not, therefore, in his view, purely mental. They are also happenings in the world. In these cases one is also powerless, one also cannot say that an action is preceded by an act of free will. Also, to these cases Wittgenstein’s dictum is applied: the act of the will and the action are one.

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rewarded or punished for what we do – but after this life, in another, supernatural world. This kind of combining the notions of reward and punishment with the elementary feeling of justice was unacceptable for both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. In their view, the concept of justice is not endangered by cases in which the course of events does not correspond to our feeling of justice because both philosophers saw a reward and a punishment as inherently connected to a deed. Schopenhauer claimed that “the concept of the retaliation implies time, therefore eternal justice cannot be a retributive justice (…) Here the punishment must be so linked with the offence that the two are one”414, and this remark was later repeated in the Tractatus in thesis TLP 6.422: Ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms (…) There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself.

Just as the concepts of reward and punishment are demythologised and, so to speak, turned back from the realm of eternity to the earthly reality, so the concept of eternity itself is naturalised and deprived of a supernatural meaning. Eternity, according to Schopenhauer, is not something that awaits us after our death but rather resides in the present: “The will to live manifests itself in an endless present (…) This is temporal immortality”415. One finds a similar remark with respect to an eternal life in the Tractatus (TLP 6.4311): “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present”. A reader of the Tractatus can sometimes have a feeling that although Wittgenstein recommends silence about ethics, he speaks much in this respect. What I attempted to show is that this is not in contradiction with Tractarian intentions. As one of the most important results of his book Wittgenstein held the discernment between meaningful and senseless discourses. When somebody wants to say something metaphysical, one should answer, claims Wittgenstein, by showing the adversary that he did not confer any meaning on the signs he used. That is how we should interpret the remarks about eternity, punishment, reward and free will. If somebody uses these concepts in a traditional way (suggesting some kind of dualism), he attaches no meaning to these ideas. A meaningful discourse containing these concepts refers only to human deeds (instead of a reward and a punishment in the spirit world), the present (instead of eternity) and to movements of the body (instead of free will). 414 Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 350–351. 415 Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 479.

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Secondly, the naturalisation of ethics proves that commitment to the thesis of the great influence of Schopenhauer on Wittgenstein’s thinking does not compel one to accept the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus. I can admit that the Tractatus, with respect to ethics, is inspired by the views of Schopenhauer, however, in my opinion this inspiration is restricted only to the naturalisation of the ethical notions.

4.3  Solipsistic theses of the Tractatus In the previous paragraph I analysed interpretations which emphasise Wittgenstein’s ethics as allegedly speaking in favour of the transcendental interpretation. In the following section I shall refer to theses TLP 5.6-5.641, which are sometimes called (as I shall prove incorrectly) the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus. In TLP 5.62 Wittgenstein surprises the reader of his book (which up to this moment is a very consistent, logical and analytical text about facts, propositions and the theory of meaning) with his sudden approval of solipsism – one of the most scandalous philosophical positions: This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world (TLP 5.62).

Another astonishing claim states the identification of the world with life: The world and life are one. I am my world. (The microcosm.) (TLP 5.621-5.63).

Moreover, although the reader of the Tractatus read earlier that there is no such thing as a soul (TLP 5.5421), now he finds that there is a sense in which we can talk about the self in philosophy and that the self is the limit of the world: The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.(…) Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it (TLP 5.632; 5.641).

“What the solipsist means is quite correct” – says Wittgenstein (TLP 5.62). The following review of interpretations covers a range of positions which try to figure out what, according to Wittgenstein, is rightly meant by solipsists. What is common to these commentaries is the fact that their authors deduce the transcendental idealism of the Tractatus not from a modernist disagreement with the scientific worldview but they see this position as a consequence of, in one 192

case, Wittgenstein’s views on the simples (Frascolla) and in the second case of Wittgenstein’s view on language (Hacker). In the next two subsections I will present the views of two typical representatives of the transcendental interpretation: Pasquale Frascolla (section 4.3.1) and Peter Hacker (section 4.3.2). After a discussion of their views I shall present my critical response. The result of the critique aims to show that these proposals of reading the Tractatus have some intrinsic difficulties. They struggle to convince the reader that transcendentalism truly follows from the assumptions of Wittgenstein’s ontology or the theory of language. A possible response to that critique could be to point at the respective fragments of Wittgenstein’s writings and to say that even if there are no logical inferences between some of Wittgenstein’s views, he nevertheless saw the connection, and that is why he ultimately admitted the correctness of solipsism. In response I shall analyse fragment TLP 5.64-5.641 (section 4.3.3). I hope to show that what at first sight looks like an approval of transcendental solipsism is in fact a critique of this standpoint. Therefore the proponents of the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus have no support for their hypotheses.

4.3.1  The transcendental self as the owner of the phenomenal world For Pasquale Frascolla, the so-called solipsistic theses of the Tractatus are confirmation of a phenomenalistic interpretation of this book (an interpretation which claims that Tractarian simples are simple units of perception)416. According to him, conceding that the simples are sense-data is the only way to make sense of Wittgenstein’s claims about the subject who is at the same time the owner of both language and the world: “The thesis that language is my language and that the world is my world (…) must be a consequence of some of the pivotal principles of the picture theory. And its source can in fact be easily found in the phenomenalistic ontology which, according to my conjecture, underlies language”417. Frascolla claims that Wittgenstein when writing the Tractatus had in mind some basic principles. One of these is the phenomenalistic thesis that the world consists of

416 “The fact that Wittgenstein himself introduces the theme of solipsism as if it were an obvious corollary of his theory proves that his ontology was phenomenalistic from the beginning, and that the sections at the outset of the Tractatus are to be construed as putting forward, even if to a certain extent implicitly, a phenomenalistic ontology” (Frascolla 2007, p. 206). We also find a similar interpretation to Frascolla’s in: Kannisto 1986. 417 Frascolla 2007, p. 205.

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qualia. Qualia, on the one hand, make up the world and, on the other, constitute my experiences, and, therefore, they constitute my life. Phenomenalism regards life as identical to the totality of phenomena with which the subject is acquainted. The world is defined by phenomenalists in exactly the same way. Therefore, somebody who is aware that the Tractatus silently presupposes the truthfulness of phenomenalism should not be surprised by Wittgenstein’s identification of the world with my world and the world with life. Solipsism of the Tractatus should be taken then at face value: what is correct in the thinking of a solipsist is the fact that we are trapped in the world of our phenomenal experiences and the only objects whose existence one can be certain of are qualia. Wittgenstein admits that one cannot meaningfully express the claims of solipsism but this is only because, as Frascolla claims, that he generally bans expressions that try to grasp what the world is taken as a whole418. The first pillar of Frascolla’s commentary is the conviction that the simples of the Tractatus are units of perception. The second pillar of his interpretation is the transcendental reasoning he detects in Wittgenstein’s work. The first step in this reasoning consists in stating the existence of a particular point of view – an attitude which takes the world as a whole. According to solipsism, the world as a whole is a totality of experiences. In the next step Frascolla draws the moral that there must be a bearer of this world: “The phenomenal world is inconceivable without an owner”419. Wittgenstein, as Frascolla rightly notices, denies the existence of the subject within the phenomenal world but, according to this commentator, this “does not mean to deny that the phenomenal world, taken as a whole, has an owner, nor does it mean to adopt the view that the phenomenal world, taken as a whole, is a subject-less world”420. He identifies the owner of the world with the transcendental self421. Frascolla finds confirmation of his

418 “Since nothing in general can be meaningfully said about those limits, the solipsistic principle, that the world is my world, cannot be formulated in a genuine proposition” (ibid., p. 206). 419 Ibid., p. 208. 420 Ibid., p. 208. Also Heikki Kannisto, who is a proponent of the phenomenalistic interpretation of the simples, draws the moral that the consequence of this position is the acceptance of the transcendental self: “On the one hand, both subjects [Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s] function as that to which the world is ultimately given. On the other hand, they themselves lie outside the forms of representation, in the way even the empirical subject cannot be said to do so” (Kannisto 1986, p. 151). 421 “It is the transcendental nature of the self which is owner of the world” (Frascolla 2007, p. 208).

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conclusion in thesis TLP 5.633, where Wittgenstein compares the self and its world to an eye and its visual field. Just like an eye is not a part of the visual field but conditions the existence of it, in the same way the transcendental self is not a part of the empirical world but conditions its existence and forms its limits. Hence Wittgenstein was right to say both that the self is the limit of the world and that the world is my world. I will argue in the next section (4.3.3) against these conclusions from the analogy of an eye and its visual field, but first I shall refer to the substance of Frascolla’s interpretation. As I said before, it has two pillars. I am at odds with both of them. First, Frascolla’s understanding of the solipsistic theses assumes the identification of Tractarian simple objects with sense-data. From this identification it follows that the rightness of solipsism should be read at face value. In section 2.1.3 I discussed the problems of the phenomenal interpretation. There is no room here for repeating arguments against the candidacy of qualia as the simples. Let me just say that the solipsistic theses are supposed to be the main argument in favour of this candidacy. Frascolla seems to draw his certainty about the Tractarian simples from somewhere else. However, whereas the phenomenalistic interpretation was doubtful even with the support of the solipsistic theses, then without this support it is convincing to an even lesser extent. The first pillar of Frascolla’s interpretation seems to collapse. In the second important claim Frascolla argues that the phenomenal experience of the world as a whole has to have an owner. My problem with that argument is that I do not understand the conclusion that a subject of the phenomenal world has to be a transcendental self existing outside the world. I assume that, according to Frascolla, every experience has its subject. This seems cogent. But from the claim that every particular experience has a subject it does not follow that the totality of experiences has one and the same owner, nor that it transcends the empirical world. It seems that someone who accepts this kind of reasoning has already asserted the truth of transcendentalism. Transcendental reasoning cannot function as an argument supporting the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus. Concluding, Frascolla’s conviction that the Tractatus supports the existence of the transcendental self is unjustified. It is based on two doubtful theses: for instance, one cannot say that the phenomenalism of the Tractatus supports the hypothesis that Wittgenstein was an adherent of solipsism since there are solipsistic theses which usually support the phenomenalistic interpretation. The only way to save the transcendental reading is to say that the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus speak for themselves. Their transcendental morals are so clear that they do not need further support from other Tractarian theses. But again, I am at odds 195

with this claim. I shall examine TLP 5.6-5.641 in section 4.3.3 with the intention of showing that these theses even when read at face value do not support the transcendental reading. In other words, I shall show that even if the Tractatus consisted only of these theses, it would still be a transcendental oeuvre.

4.3.2  The transcendental self as the linguistic soul Perhaps problems with the phenomenalistic interpretation are the reason for which some of the commentators who sympathise with the transcendental interpretation (Peter Hacker, Hans-Johann Glock, Eric Stenius) do not go as far as Frascolla and they do not take Wittgenstein’s stance to be phenomenalistic. Nevertheless, they also think that Wittgenstein’s approval of solipsism means that he accepted in his early work a form of transcendentalism. According to Frascolla, a language, which is the topic of early Wittgenstein’s philosophy, is the language of sense-data. This thesis is rejected by Hacker; however, he wants to maintain the feature of privacy when referring to a language as described in the Tractatus. Instead of the language of sense-data, Hacker prefers to speak about the egocentric language which, following Putnam’s accurate description, “is a language in which I can speak of things as existing only when they are observed by me”422. Hacker detects in the egocentric language of the Tractatus a remote ancestor of the theory of the language of thought (LOT). Indeed, we saw in Chapter 3 that, according to Wittgenstein, thoughts are facts, that the constituents of thoughts are correlated with words, and that the relation of isomorphism holds not only between linguistic signs and reality but also between thought and reality. Simplifying, thoughts can also represent states of affairs. This conclusion is in accordance with LOT theory, which claims that mental states have a representational character. There are other elements of the Tractarian theory of language, not mentioned by Hacker, which make his hypothesis that we find LOT in the Tractatus more probable. For example, Fodor argues that the representational theory of the mind requires pure referentialism423, which is the claim that names have no senses just reference. I have argued (in Chapter 1) that that is exactly the Tractarian position. We could also argue in favour of the hypothesis that early Wittgenstein believed in the compositionality thesis, i.e. the conviction that the content of a thought is entirely determined by its structure and the contents of its constituents. Moreover, in the previous chapter we saw that Wittgenstein naturalised intentional psychology, which is impossible, according to Fodor, when we do not accept one of the 422 Putnam 2008, p. 10. 423 Fodor 2008, p. 16.

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principles of LOT theory, i.e. the priority of thought over language. Referentialism, the compositionality thesis, naturalisation of propositional attitudes – all of these features of the Tractarian system make Hacker’s view plausible. The first pillar of Hacker’s transcendental interpretation is established: the Tractarian view on language resembles what we nowadays call the language of thought. In the second step of his reasoning, Hacker claims that for Wittgenstein the obvious consequence of such a theory of language was acceptance of the transcendental solipsism. Why such conclusions? As I mentioned before, according to referentialism the meaning of a name is its referent. Hacker is interested in the questions: “How does this correlation between signs and objects in the world take place? What binds the elements of a sentence or thought with elements of reality?”, and he claims that according to Wittgenstein it is through “some mental act of meaning or intending a certain word to signify an object one has in mind. It is an act of will which correlates word to signify an object one has in mind”424. It is through the machinery of the mind that language gains its flesh and blood. We reach out to the world through a mental act of an ostensive definition. For Hacker it seems legitimate to ask: “Who is the agent of the correlation between words and objects?, Who performs these mental ostensive definitions?”. Following the hint of theses TLP 5.6ff, he thinks that it is the metaphysical self which “injects meaning or significance into signs, whether in thought or in language425. One might call this conception “The Doctrine of the Linguistic Soul”, for it is the soul that is the fountainhead of language and representation426; the linguistic 424 Hacker 1972/1986, p. 73. A similar position is taken by Anthony Kenny: “The Tractatus itself did not think, that impressions and ideas could themselves confer meaning unaided. In the Tractatus meaning is conferred by pure will, the pure will of the extramundane solipsistic metaphysical self ” (Kenny 1981, p. 147). The same conclusion is expressed by Eric Stenius: “[For Wittgenstein] the form of experience is ‘subjective’ in the transcendental sense, the metaphysical subject being the ‘subject’ which uses and understands language” (Stenius 1960/1996, pp. 220–221). 425 Hacker interprets the notion of the willing subject from the Notebooks also as a counterpart of the notion of the transcendental self. Consequently, Hacker identifies the willing subject with the linguistic soul. The transcendental self under his interpretation confers meaning on linguistic expression and confers values on objects. 426 Hacker 1972/1986, p. 75. Hans-Johann Glock could agree with the doctrine of the linguistic soul. He assumes that every representation is linguistic in the Tractatus, and that entails a special kind of transcendentalism, namely linguistic solipsism. Wittgenstein identified the world with “my world” and, moreover, the limits of my world with the limits of my language, the only language one understands. Glock understands these theses in connection with theses TLP 3.11-3.12, which state that

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soul which confers meaning on linguistic expression by means of mental ostensive definitions. Hence, the user of a language uses his own private language. Only he can understand the meanings of its expressions and this, for Hacker, perfectly harmonises with thesis TLP 5.62: The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

Solipsism in this respect is right: the private language entails that the world is my world. We are trapped in our own languages and understandings. In contrast to Frascolla’s interpretation, I do not neglect the first pillar of this transcendental interpretation (that one can find in the Tractatus a remote ancestor of LOT), but similarly to my doubts with respect to Frascolla I shall argue that there is no logical connection between the belief in LOT and the belief in the existence of the linguistic soul. The crucial question is if one truly needs to introduce the notion of the linguistic soul in order to make the LOT theory consistent. If there is another explanation for the correlation between signs and objects at our disposal, then one is not bound to accept transcendental conclusions from the fact that Wittgenstein probably approved LOT. If we find it, then we will falsify the reasoning that Hacker adheres to. I will just notice that one can find an explanation for the correlation between words and objects which does not assume the existence of a non-empirical being in the texts of the classic proponent of LOT, i.e. Jerry Fodor. Fodor argues in favour of a form of nativism – the form which tries to reconcile the typical claim of nativism that we possess an innate inventory of concepts with the common sense belief that mind-world interactions can change our repertoire of concepts427. The fact that concepts are innate means that we have them because of our neurology. Our neurology is the result of the phenotype, and the phenotype is the result of the genotype. Hence, we have the concepts that we have because of our genotype. All of the concepts we possess are built in our organisms, but we need something

signs become symbols only when we – the users of language – think and use them. Linguistic symbols become meaningful only through my intentions or other mental acts. There must be a subject who confers his intentions and meanings on symbols. This is Glock’s explanation for the concept of the metaphysical self which we find in the Tractatus: “The relation between the I and reality is replaced [in the Tractatus] by the relation between the sentence and reality. And that relation depends on the metaphysical subject, a linguistic soul which breathes life into mere signs” (Glock 1996, p. 350). 427 Fodor 2008, p. 131.

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to trigger the concepts we already possess. For example, let us imagine a situation when one sees a dog for the first time. This event triggers in a person the innate concept of a DOG428. From this moment on, one uses the concept of a DOG to refer to dogs. As we can see, Fodor does not need to employ the transcendental concepts (such as the concept of the linguistic soul) in order to explain that by using words we mean something. Instead, his theory speaks about genotypes and ordinary interactions with the world. It is not my task to decide whose explanation – Hacker’s or Fodor’s – is better. In order to falsify Hacker’s reasoning it is enough to show that there are other alternatives to the Doctrine of the Linguistic Soul. By indicating a different possible explanation for LOT one shows that Wittgenstein, being a proponent of LOT, was not forced to accept transcendental solipsism. One can adhere to the conception of LOT and one can negate that the linguistic soul has an impact on the meaning of the concepts we possess. Concluding, even if Wittgenstein believed in LOT, that fact alone could not make him a transcendental solipsist. Hacker’s defence, therefore, should be analogical to Frascolla’s: perhaps the belief in the transcendental self is the conclusion from the theory of language as accepted by Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, he made this mistake, and evidence of this one can find in the so-called solipsistic theses of the Tractatus. Hacker indicates at remarkable similarities between the formulations, pictures and metaphors that Wittgenstein used in TLP 5.6ff and those one can find in the idealistic system of Schopenhauer: “Wittgenstein’s metaphors are identical with Schopenhauer’s. There can be little doubt that the last of the three extant notebooks was written while Wittgenstein was re-reading Schopenhauer”429. These similarities should ultimately convince the reader of the Tractatus that he has in his hands an idealistic oeuvre. Perhaps the arguments in favour of transcendentalism are weak, says Hacker, but, nevertheless, Wittgenstein, being under the impression of Schopenhauer, seems to hold them as valid. In the last two sections I investigated the interpretations which ascribe to Wittgenstein the thought that transcendental solipsism is the consequence of his other 428 “We have the concepts we do because we have the neurology we do; we have the neurology we do because we have the phenotype we do; and we have the phenotype we do because we have the genotype we do (…) For concepts to be genotypically specified is one thing; but for the genotypically specified information to be phenotypically expressed—for it actually to be accessible to a creature’s mental nativism processes—is perhaps quite another. Maybe experience is what bridges the gap between a genetic endowment and its phenotypic expression” (ibid., p. 146–147). 429 Hacker 1972/1986, p. 88.

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Tractarian theses (such as the alleged identification of the simples with sense-data, or the acceptance of LOT theory). I am not interested if Frascolla or Hacker think that Wittgenstein was right in his conclusions, but just in their conviction that he did indeed infer his solipsism from his other standpoints. I argued in the last sections (section 4.3.1) against the claim that Wittgenstein could conclude that the view of a solipsist is correct from his ontological phenomenalism. I also rejected the hypothesis that he asserted the rightness of solipsism as a consequence of the LOT theory (section 4.3.2). In other words, if Wittgenstein was a solipsist, this has to follow solely from the solipsistic theses (TLP 5.6-5.641). In the next section I shall investigate the validity of this claim by analysing these theses.

4.3.3  Arguments in favour of Tractarian transcendental solipsism The conclusion of the last two sections is that, for instance, LOT theory alone would not suffice to state Wittgenstein’s transcendentalism. But a proponent of the solipsistic interpretation could answer that there are direct proofs in the so-called solipsistic theses of the Tractatus that its author was truly a proponent of transcendental solipsism. What is crucial for this argument is the claim that Wittgenstein inherited ontological views from Schopenhauer: “In claiming the relativity of the world or, better, of logical space, for a subject, and in providing his semantic version of solipsism, Wittgenstein develops themes which one can find in Schopenhauer”430. I shall argue in this section that, naturally, the so-called solipsistic theses “are better understood in the light of Schopenhauer than any other philosopher”431, but, on the other hand, this does not mean that the Tractatus adopted transcendental solipsism. On the contrary, a comparison with Schopenhaeur’s system will reveal that in fact Wittgenstein rejected solipsism. The structure of the section is the following: first, I shall point at two of the most important pieces of evidence from the text that allegedly confirm the transcendentalism of the Tractatus. These are the identification of the world with my world (section 4.3.3.1) and the metaphor of the eye and the visual field (4.3.3.2). Next (section 4.3.3.3), I shall indicate two theses from fragment TLP 5.6-5.641

430 Frascolla 2007, p. 207. Another example of this claim: “These apparently Schopenhauerian influences suggest that Wittgenstein’s remarks about the illusoriness of the thinking self are, like Schopenhauer’s unoriginal criticism of Descartes, directed against the conception of a Cartesian res cogitans (…). Schopenhauer’s distinction between the illusory Cartesian self and the transcendental self was taken over by Wittgenstein” (Rosenberg 1968, p. 170). 431 Anscombe 1965, p. 12.

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that suggest a rather polemical overtone of the whole passage to solipsism. The point is to prove that there are neither substantive (sections 4.3.1 & 4.3.2) nor derived from the text of the Tractatus arguments (current section) in favour of the transcendental interpretation.

4.3.3.1  “The world is my world. I am my world” (TLP 5.62-5.63). “The identification of the individual consciousness with the microcosmos, and the microcosmos with the macrocosmos, is a central Schopenhauerian thesis”, claims Hacker when commenting on the above quotation from the Tractatus432. Frascolla claims, on the other hand, that the above assertions “unquestionably” confirm his reading of early Wittgenstein433. First, I would answer these claims that, to be exact, the Schopenhauerian thesis identifies the world with my representation and not with my world434. It is clear that Hacker and Frascolla identify the term: “my world” with what is experienced by the subject, but in this way they assume what should be proved. I think we have important reasons to disagree with such an identification. In thesubsequent passages I shall argue in favour of a different understanding of the expression “my world”. What is important is that the thesis: “I am my world” (TLP 5.63) is preceded in the Tractatus by the claim: “The world and life are one” (TLP 5.621). In the Notebooks we can find an entry in which Wittgenstein explains that he does not have to take the notion of life to mean a psychological life435, and having that in mind for early Wittgenstein psychology meant what we would rather call today phenomenology; thus it becomes clear that TLP 5.62 does not identify the world with my experiences, as Hacker and Frascolla suggest. It is not an ontological thesis stating that the world consists of my representations nor an epistemological claim that we are acquainted only with sense-data. If we take into account that Wittgenstein explained the concept of “life” as the “consciousness of the uniqueness of my life”436, we should revise, all the more, the first associations one could have after reading TLP 5.62. Being aware that one’s life is unique suggests that Wittgenstein, when he talks about the world as my world, is more interested in rather existential questions than in epistemology. The next argument supports my point. We read in TLP 5.632 that the metaphysical subject is the limit of the world, but first we get to know the consequences

432 433 434 435 436

Hacker 1972/1986, p. 93. Frascolla 2007, p. 206. Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 1. “Psychological life is of course not ‘Life’ ” (NB 24.7.16, p. 77). NB 1.8.16, p. 79; NB 2.8.16, p. 79.

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of this claim in TLP 6.43. And these are not (as they should be if the claims of TLP 5.6ff reveal Wittgenstein’s ontology or epistemology) a sceptic’s theses that one can never be certain of the existence of other subjects (just the opposite: according to the Tractatus (TLP 6.51), scepticism is obviously nonsensical), but that “the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” (TLP 6.43). This trivial thought is nonetheless astonishing to the reader of the Tractatus, hence the world is supposed to consist of facts. They are the same for all. From a certain perspective one could say that both happy and unhappy people live in the world, where X won the lottery, travelled around the world and helped the poor, and in a world where Y was diagnosed with cancer, his house burnt down in a fire and so on – it is the same world. What is different is the fact that X won the lottery has dramatically different importance for X than it does for Y. It has a different meaning not because it refers to a different state of affairs, nor because X has different access to this fact than Y (to win the lottery is a public event), but simply because it has an existentially different meaning: the same event could help X live a life of ease, whereas it does not change Y’s situation at all. In this way the limits of the world of X have changed. As I have tried to prove, when Wittgenstein talks about the limits of the world or of my world he does not mean to advocate in favour of an epistemological or an ontological position. He rather uses these concepts in the existential meaning. I could also support my view by referring to the philosophy of Schopenhauer. There are fragments in The World as Will and Representation in which Schopenhauer identifies the world with my world. For example, he claims that the microcosmos is the macrocosmos. What I want to stress is the fact that he does this in the context of remarks on the egoism of individuals who want everything for themselves. Characteristically of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, individuals are ready to sacrifice everything else in order to maintain themselves. They treat themselves as the centres of the world, and only in this sense does Schopenhauer identify the world with my world437. Every individual can take the place of the centre of the world and, hence, there is nothing solipsistic entailed in the above considerations. Schopenhauer uses the notions of the world and my world to point out the quite obvious observation that, relatively to the point of view, we estimate ourselves as extremely important (if we take into consideration a more subjective attitude to reality when we think about ourselves in relation to our 437 “Every knowing individual is therefore in truth, and finds himself as, the whole willto-live, or as the in-itself of the world itself, and also as the complementary condition of the world as representation, consequently as a microcosm to be valued equally with the macrocosm” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966a, p. 332).

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interests, pleasures, fears, goals, family and friends) or as quite ordinary (if we look at ourselves as one of the countless representatives of one of many species on one of countless planets in the universe)438. Concluding, in Schopenhauer’s philosophy the claim: “The world is my world” betrays rather his pessimism than solipsism, and even if Wittgenstein borrowed this claim from him it should rather imply an existential reading of the Tractatus than a transcendental one. There is another argument saying that one should not read TLP 5.62 as a paraphrase of Schopenhauer’s dictum that the world is my representation. It follows from the analysis of the motivations that stood behind the Schopenhauerian thesis. Wittgenstein rejected these motivations, so he had no reason to accept the conclusion. For Schopenhauer to talk about the world as identified with “my representations” meant that the empirical world is not a thing-in-itself: “All knowing is essentially a making of representations; but my making of representations, just because it is mine, can never be identical with the being-in-itself of the thing outside me”439. It is, in his opinion, necessary to discern between appearances and things-in-themselves, because otherwise we are doomed to the purely physical, chemical and mechanical explanations he despised440. The misery of materialism is shown, according to Schopenhauer, in the absurd upshot of the investigations of the natural sciences. Among the ridiculous theories of science contemporary to him he mentioned physical atomism441, corpuscular

438 “By looking inwards, every individual recognizes in his inner being, which is his will, the thing-in-itself, and hence that which alone is everywhere real. Accordingly, he conceives himself as the kernel and centre of the world, and considers himself infinitely important. On the other hand, if he looks outwards, he is then in the province of the representation, of the mere phenomenon, where he sees himself as an individual among an infinite number of other individuals, and consequently as something extremely insignificant, in fact quite infinitesimal” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 600). 439 Ibid., p. 194. 440 “Let us not be deceived by dogmatic utterances and brazen assurances that these matters are decided, settled, and generally admitted. On the contrary, the entire mechanical and atomistic view of nature is approaching bankruptcy, and its advocates have to learn that something more is concealed behind nature than thrust and counter-thrust” (ibid., p. 311). 441 “In truth the atoms are a fixed idea of French savants, who therefore talked about them just as if they had seen them” (ibid., p. 302). “I am no more obliged to think of the mass of a body as consisting of atoms and of the spaces between them, in other words, of absolute density and absolute vacuum, but I comprehend without difficulty

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theory of light442, and the theory of biogenesis (which is directed against the theory of spontaneous generation)443. Hence there are two motivations for the Schopenhauerian identification of the world with my representation: –– it allows to differentiate appearances from things-in-themselves –– it protects us from “the continuance of the absurdities of the atomistic und purely mechanical physics”444 because one can always see scientific explanations as restricted only to the sphere of appearances. It opens the possibility for metaphysical explanations of the world. Wittgenstein rejected the above theses, and, therefore, there is no reason to ascribe to him the conclusion that the world is my representation; quite the opposite, the Tractatus begins with a polemics with this claim. On the first page of the Tractatus we read that the world is the totality of facts (TLP 1.1)445, and on the last page the claim that physical theories based on atomism and mechanics (regarded by Schopenhauer as absurd) are the only meaningful propositions one can express (TLP 6.53). Concluding, the thesis that the world is my world cannot be seen as confirmation of Wittgenstein’s transcendental solipsism. It would be even strange and inconsistent for him to disguise in this claim principles of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, because in Schopenhauer’s system this thesis was thought to be protection against the claims of mechanics. If there is, however, a grain of truth in the thesis of Schopenhauer’s influence on the analysed theses of the Tractatus, then we should see TLP 5.62 as an existential claim rather than an epistemological (for example: “I am acquainted only with sense-data”) or an ontological (for example: “Basic bricks of reality are phenomenal units of my experience”) one. The next paragraph of the Tractatus that is invoked by proponents of a transcendental reading is thesis TLP 5.633, in which Wittgenstein compared the

442 443 444 445

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those two phenomena as constant continua, one of which uniformly fills time, and the other space” (ibid., p. 303). “The constructions of light from molecules and atoms which have come from the French are a revolting absurdity” (ibid., p. 302). “Despite the most recent objections to it, I regard generatio aequivoca as extremely probable at very low stages, and above all in the case of entozoa and epizoa [parasites]” (ibid., p. 310). Ibid., p. 303. “The first proposition of the Tractatus is an echo of Schopenhauer’s, but at the same time a seeming denial of it. The world is not my idea but all that is the case” (McGuinness 2002, p. 133–134).

relation of the metaphysical self to its world to the relation of an eye to its visual field. In the next passage I shall examine what the conclusion of this analogy should be. I am not going to present my own views in the next passage because I believe that David Pears sufficiently proved that TLP 5.633 is in fact a rejection of solipsism. I shall focus, then, on presenting his argument.

4.3.3.2  The eye and the visual field (TLP 5.633) Wittgenstein asks an imaginary interlocutor: “Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?” (TLP 5.633). There is a dispute over the meaning of the answer. Peter Hacker, a proponent of the transcendental reading of the Tractatus, sees in this thesis confirmation of his interpretation. In the analogy of the eye and the visual field, he notices the transcendental thesis of a subordination of the world to the subject. The fact that one does not see the eye in the visual field confirms, according to Hacker’s understanding of the text, that the transcendental self is not a part of the empirical world. It also goes well with Hacker’s suspicion that early Wittgenstein professed transcendental solipsism. It is because the eye is the condition of the existence of the visual field just as, according to the solipsists, the subject is the condition of the existence of the empirical world446. The other group of commentators (Pears, Stern, Puhl) has quite an opposite view on the discussed thesis which, according to them, is in fact a polemics with solipsism. Under their proposal, the analogy is an example of the nonsense of consequent solipsism. In Pears’ eyes, the proponents of the transcendental interpretation forget what morals Wittgenstein himself drew from the comparison of the metaphysical subject with the eye and its visual field. The conclusion reads as follows: “You do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye” (TLP 5.633). In other words, the right conclusion for a commentator of the Tractatus should be that, according to Wittgenstein, a solipsist, if he thinks out his position strictly, has no argument to back up his belief in the existence of the transcendental self. David Pears explained why TLP 5.633 is the thesis saying that consequent solipsism is a nonsensical venture. Under Pears’ interpretation, Wittgenstein wanted to say that “solipsism loses its intended meaning on the way to achieving the truth

446 “The metaphysical subject is the bearer of good and evil. Why is it not part of the world? Wittgenstein merely hinted at an argument by way of analogy. The metaphysical subject is related to the world as the eye is related to the visual field. Nothing in the visual field entitles one to infer that it is seen by an eye. The eye of the visual field (…) is the source of the visual field, not a constituent of it” (Hacker 1972/1986, p. 86–87).

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that it aspires to achieve”447. Solipsism claims that the world is the subject’s world because the limits of the world “are fixed from the inside by their relation to the subject”448. According to Pears, Wittgenstein fights with this thesis. He betrays the polemical frame of the mind exactly in the question directed at the imaginary solipsist: “Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?” (TLP 5.633). Wittgenstein’s adversary has two answers at his disposal. He could say that the subject is in the world, but that answer would for a solipsist be obviously self-refuting. He is then forced to say that the self is outside the world. The best he can do, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, is to use the metaphor of the eye and the visual field and claim that there is an analogy between this picture and the relation between the transcendental self and its world. But, according to Pears, this is exactly where the solipsist falls into a trap, because by removing the subject from the world he cannot verify his belief in the existence of the transcendental self. His claim that the subject is outside the world is empty. The solipsist could naturally answer that this accusation does not apply in the case of the subject of experiences, because the identity of the subject of experiences is transparent for the solipsist. The subject is directly experienced, and hence the questions: “Which subject?” or “Whose experiences?” do not even arise. Pears thinks that “it is against this defence that Wittgenstein uses the analogy between ego and eye”449. If one sticks to the analogy consequently, then one notices that nobody experiences his own seeing directly and, therefore, if the transcendental self is the analogue of the eye, then it is not accessible in introspection either. Moreover, Wittgenstein learns from the analogy of the eye and the visual field that “the self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated” (TLP 5.64). This makes the solipsist’s attempt to point at himself as the way of identifying the transcendental self an empty gesture; as empty as the theory of solipsism. If Pears’ intuitions are true, it would turn out that what at first sight looked like an iteration of Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism is in fact a critical response to it.

4.3.3.3  “There is no a priori order of things” (TLP 5.634). I sympathise with Pears’ interpretation because his conclusion that the analysed fragment of the Tractatus is polemical with the idealistic tradition has strong confirmations in two theses that follow the analogy of the eye and the visual field. First, in thesis TLP 5.634, Wittgenstein admits that: 447 Pears 1993, p. 59. 448 Pears 1987, p. 164. 449 Pears 1993, p. 60.

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This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is at the same time a priori. Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things.

Why does the fact that whatever we see could be other than it is weighs in favour of the anti-transcendental reading of the analogy of the eye and the visual field? In my opinion the most obvious answer refers to the fact that, according to transcendental idealism, a part of our experience is a priori just because the transcendental self constitutes experience. For example, we know a priori that every effect has its cause because this is the way the subject cognises the world450. Everything we experience is placed in time because time is the form of the inner sense451. From somebody who believes in the transcendental ideality of time (and Hacker ascribes this view to Wittgenstein452) we would expect rather an acknowledgement that there are some aspects of experience which cannot be other than they are. And yet, Wittgenstein says quite the opposite. The reason for that is, in my view, the fact that in the previous thesis he rejected the existence of the transcendental self. If nothing imposes in advance the shape and form of experience, and if nothing determines reality, then, in fact, everything could be different than it is, and we have no guarantee that we capture the necessary features of experience. Talking about an a priori order of things is unjustified. In the next thesis (TLP 5.64), Wittgenstein claims that: Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism (TLP 5.64).

For Peter Hacker this thesis means that for Wittgenstein there would be “no practical disagreement [between a solipsist and a realist] (…), nor will they 450 “The only genuine and convincing proof that we are conscious of the law of causality prior to all experience is actually found in the very necessity of making a transition from the sensation of the senses, given only empirically, to its cause, in order that perception of the external world may come about” (Schopenhauer 1844/1966b, p. 37). 451 “We ask what time is; we investigate time as though it were something quite objective. And what is this objective thing? (…). It exists only in the heads of beings that know, but the uniformity of its course and its independence of the will give it the right and title to objectivity. Time is primarily the form of the inner sense” (ibid., p. 35). 452 “Wittgenstein’s solipsism was inspired by Schopenhauer’s doctrines of transcendental idealism (…) It involves a belief in the transcendental ideality of time (and presumably space), a rather perverse interpretation of the Kantian doctrine of the unity of apperception together with the acceptance of Schopenhauer’s quasi reification of the unity of consciousness, and other related and obscure theories about ethics, the will, aesthetics, and religion” (Hacker 1972/1986, p. 99–100).

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quarrel over truth-values of propositions of ordinary language”453. The transcendental truths such as: “Every experience is necessarily my experience” and “The world is my world”, which differentiate solipsism from realism are nonsensical for both of these standpoints. A solipsist and a realist agree that they have no truth-value at all. There is nothing a realist truly and meaningfully claims that could not also be affirmed by a solipsist. Cora Diamonds reads TLP 5.64 as also equating solipsism with realism. Both of these standpoints fail to say anything; both are equally nonsensical. Why such a conclusion? According to Diamond, in the background of the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus is the discussion with Russell’s theory of description. As I mentioned in the previous chapters, for Russell, in order to understand a judgement one had to be acquainted with all of its elements. I cannot be acquainted with, for example, Bismarck’s experiences but, nevertheless, I can talk about (reach them indirectly) them by means of a description454. The theory of description, however, depends on Russell’s conception of quantifiers. For example, one reaches indirectly to others’ private experiences when x goes proxy for private objects in the formulas: “(Ǝx) Fx” or “(x) Fx”. But, according to Diamond, “sentences with quantifiers are not seen by Russell as they are by Wittgenstein, as constructions from sentences which do not contain quantifiers”455. According to Wittgenstein, a proposition containing a quantifier is a complex proposition – a conjunction of elementary propositions. The consequence of Wittgenstein’s view on quantifiers is that one can understand a sentence containing quantifiers only if one understands all the elementary sentences that constitute it. If one cannot refer to the private experiences of Bismarck in an elementary proposition, then one cannot refer to them by means of a description either. Under Russell’s proposal, speaking metaphorically, quantifiers offer a bridge from the world of private objects to the world of public objects. But if Wittgenstein is right in thinking that one cannot express what solipsism means (that we cannot cross the boundaries of private experience), as claims Diamond, then the whole idea of a bridge leading to objects “outside” our experience becomes meaningless. If the concept of a private experience, on which solipsism is based, is meaningless and plays no role in language, so the concept of objects is independent of our experience456. 453 Ibid., p. 104. 454 “You or I or anyone else can think about Bismarck only via some description; we are not directly acquainted with the object which he denotes by ‘I’.” (Diamond 2000b, p. 265). 455 Ibid., p. 270. 456 The solipsist does not rigorously follow his solipsism; if he did, it would lead him to a non-Russellian realism. A one-limit view [limit of our experiences] self-destructs; we

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Diamond’s interpretation is based on a dubious premise. She claims that a realistic standpoint is inconceivable without the conceivability of solipsism; that a realist can explain his position only in opposition to the theory assuming the existence of private experiences. In Diamond’s eyes, Wittgenstein regarded realism as a mirror reflection of solipsism, and he expressed this conviction in TLP 5.64. This, in my opinion, is dubious, especially if we take into account an extended version of TLP 5.64, i.e. an entry from the Notebooks. It turns out that Wittgenstein’s thesis is in fact an autobiographical remark about his own philosophical development: This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way solipsism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out (NB 15.10.16, p. 85).

It is a description of the intellectual journey which ends in accepting realism – the claim that on the side where, according to solipsism, is the transcendental self, there is nothing, and that I (a person who expresses this standpoint) belong to the world. It is rather that than the observation that both positions – solipsism as well as realism – are nonsensical. Wittgenstein started his philosophical career as a proponent of idealism (probably inherited from Schopenhauer) and then, as he reports, he had a solipsistic period of thinking. But solipsism places the self outside the empirical world. It cannot identify its transcendental subject nor provide an answer to the question of the relation between the transcendental subject and the subject of everyday experience. The transcendental subject shrinks to a point. We are left only with the empirical world. If that is the conclusion placed just after the analogy of the eye and the visual field, then Pears is right in saying that TLP 5.64 implies that Wittgenstein was a realist457. Concluding, I have tried to argue that theses proclaiming that there is no a priori order of things and that solipsism strictly thought out leads to realism prove that the metaphor of the eye and the visual field is in fact a polemics with transcendental solipsism and the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein, against the proponents of the transcendental interpretation, rejects solipsism in TLP 5.6-5.641. In sections 4.3.3.1 and 4.3.3.2 I was arguing in favour of the interpretation that the real significance of Wittgenstein’s claim: “the world is my world” is existential. Fragment TLP 5.6-5.641 is often labelled the solipsistic are not left, at the end of the Tractatus, with a philosophical view about a “far side” of the “limit,” but merely with there being the sentences of our language (ibid., p. 282). 457 Pears 1987, p. 188.

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part of the Tractatus. The main conclusion of section 4.3.3.3 is that this label is obviously wrong. In section 4.3 I analysed those interpretations which, on the basis of Wittgenstein’s remark that what solipsism means is quite correct, claim that he approved solipsism and hence that the transcendental reading of the Tractatus is the most appropriate. In sections 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 I analysed specific forms of this interpretation and I pointed at their deficiencies. At best, they make early Wittgenstein’s philosophy inconsistent. Even if Wittgenstein truly accepted a kind of egocentric language theory, it does not follow that the transcendental self exists. One can always answer that even if the accusation is correct, a belief in the existence of the transcendental self is simply there, in the text of the Tractatus. Accordingly, I tried to reject this response in section 4.3.3 by showing that there are no textual pieces of evidence supporting transcendental solipsism. Concluding, there are neither substantial nor textual arguments in favour of the transcendental interpretations. Of course, one cannot forget that Wittgenstein claims that what solipsism means is quite correct (TLP 5.62), i.e. that life and the world are one (TLP 5.621), that the subject is a limit of the world (TLP 5.632), and that there is a sense in which a philosopher can talk about the self (TLP 5.641). It is a job left to the opponent of the transcendental interpretation to explain positively how to understand these theses without invoking transcendental associations. I shall take on this task in Chapter 5. Before I do so I shall address the third kind of transcendental interpretation, i.e. the one emphasising Wittgenstein’s remarks on life, death and the end of the world.

4.4  Tractarian understanding of death Ireneusz Ziemiński straightforwardly approves the transcendental interpretation of the Tractatus. The originality of his interpretation consists in taking at face value Tractarian theses 6.431 that “at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end” and 6.4311 that “death is not an event in life”. According to Ziemiński: “Such an understanding of death indicates a discrepancy between objectivity (the world of facts) and subjectivity (the self aware I)”458. Strange as they may sound, these theses are quite comprehensible in the light of Wittgenstein’s other remarks, and they do not have to result in the conclusion that the existence of the world is conditioned by the existence of the self. We could say, for example, that the death of an individual person is the end of the world for that person and the end for the world of that person, and there would be nothing

458 Ziemiński 2007, p. 53.

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odd in saying this. As I mentioned before, I understand the thesis: “I am my world” (TLP 5.63) not ontologically but existentially. There is no reason not to think the same way about TLP 6.431-6.4311. Ziemiński reads Wittgenstein much more strongly. It seems that he reads TLP 5.621 as an ontological identification of my world with the world. Saying that my world – the world possessed by the self – is the only existing world proves, according to him, that the existence of the self is a “prerequisite for the world”459, and only by ascribing this conviction to Wittgenstein can we explain why he wrote that together with the death of the self also comes the end for the world. If the self is a condition for the existence of the world, then the disappearance of the self means annihilation of the world: “Death as an absolute annihilation of the subject and world has a profoundly metaphysical dimension and constitutes final triumph of nothingness over existence”460. According to Ziemiński, death is not an event in the world because it belongs to the history of the self and not the history of the world. Because the self is not a part of the world, then death is not a part of the world either. I do not agree with these strong conclusions. As I noted before, we should interpret TLP 6.431-6.4311, although they appear mysterious and “profoundly metaphysical”, as in fact quite trivial existential remarks about the ends of our lives. Who is right? The difference consists in understanding the identity: “my world = the world”. Ziemiński claims that the above equation should be read ontologically. There is only one world and it is my world, the world of which I – the self – is the owner. I have already provided arguments supporting the claim that TLP 5.621 is an existential claim. I think that my interpretation is confirmed by the fragment of the Tractatus, in which Wittgenstein, in preceding the TLP 6.431-6.4311 remarks, compares the worlds of a happy and an unhappy person. He clearly does not mean that since there are two worlds of individuals, then there are two objective worlds, and each of them will come to an end with the death of their owners but, rather, he speaks about two different attitudes towards the same world. Most of all, in thesis TLP 6.4311, directly in the next sentence after: “Death is not an event in life”, he explains that “we do not live to experience death”, which I think is an unfortunate translation of the German original text: “Den Tod erlebt man nicht”, which sounds like consolation to somebody who is afraid of death, and not as a remark about the end of the world. The biographical context also speaks in favour of the existential reading of TLP 6.431-6.4311. One should remember that the

459 Ibid., p. 53. 460 Ibid., p. 63.

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theses in question were written when Wittgenstein fought at the fronts of World War I. It is much more probable that at that time he was seeking reassurance in the face of possible death rather than was deep in abstract thought regarding the ontological dependence of the world on him461.

4.5  General remarks about the transcendental interpretation In the last three sections I presented three kinds of a transcendental interpretation one can come across in Wittgensteinian literature. They refer to Tractarian ethics (4.2), the solipsistic theses (4.3) and remarks on death (4.4). Of course, the division between these three kinds is not sharp, and it is easy to find a transcendental interpretation which refers to the ethical as well as to the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus. In the following section I want to sum up the results of the previous discussions. I would like to bring our attention to two points. In the last three sections I argued that Wittgenstein rejected transcendentalism. But this could be answered by saying that although it is true that Wittgenstein held, for example, solipsism as nonsensical, he thought at the same time that this nonsense gives new insight into reality. Literally false transcendentalism conveys at the same time an inexpressible truth. A discussion regarding this claim shall be the first topic of the summary of chapter 4.5.1. Secondly (4.5.2), I want to go back to the claim with which I started my analysis, that the main motivation for accepting the transcendental interpretation is the fact that it reflects the modernistic anxieties of early Wittgenstein. After examining the specific forms of transcendental interpretations, we are now in the position to claim not only that Wittgenstein did not use the metaphysics of the self to safeguard the values of the human world, but that he also could not use it. Hence, if it is true that one of his main problems during the period of writing the Tractatus was to find a place for these values in the scientific worldview, then one has to indicate Wittgenstein’s different solution.

461 Waugh cites two of Wittgenstein’s letters to his family coming from the time of the Russian offensive in June of 1916: “Ich habe fruchtbare Szenen erlebt (…) ich fühle mich sehr schwach und sehe keine äussere Hoffnung. Wenn es mir jetzt zu Ende geht, so möge ich einen guten Tod sterben eingedenk meiner selbst. Möchte ich mich nie selbst verlieren”, and two days later: “Wir sind in unmittelbarer Nähe des Feindes (…) Jetzt wäre mir die Gelegenheit gegeben, ein anständiger Mensch zu sein, denn ich stehe vor dem Tod Aug in Aug. Möge der Geist mich erleuchten” (cited in: Waugh 2010, p. 136). Exactly from this period of time come his thoughts about the meaning of life and about death.

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4.5.1  Is the nonsense of solipsism illuminating? What does the phrase: “illuminating nonsense” mean? I will explain this expression on the example of a typical representative of the transcendental interpretation – Peter Hacker. His thought proceeds along the following lines: first, we should take the concept of the metaphysical subject seriously, for Wittgenstein took moral values seriously, and because moral values were not illusory for him, so their bearer was not either462. Hacker makes all of these claims by being fully aware of the fact that, according to Wittgenstein, and in contradiction to Schopenhauer, transcendental solipsism cannot be meaningfully expressed. But the literal absurdity of solipsism does not mean that it nonetheless does not convey knowledge about the world. A group of scholars admit that, according to the Tractarian criteria of a meaningful proposition, transcendental theses are nonsensical, but they respond that they give us insight into the real nature of the world; they help us to see the world aright. For example, Rush Rhees admits that in the Tractatus there are no meaningful ethical propositions but, nevertheless, according to him Wittgenstein “still thinks that speaking of good and evil means something”463. A.W. Moore is convinced that Wittgenstein’s transcendental idealism consists in the belief that “our rational engagement with things – that part of our engagement with things which is made possible by the fact that we are rational, thinking beliefs – is not exhausted by whatever finds expression in propositions with sense”464; that rational engagement with things “is not just a matter of discursive knowledge”465 (as non-discursive engagement with things he mentions evaluation, practice of philosophy, and understanding of propositions). In another example, according to Birk, although solipsism is inexpressible it is nevertheless the right attitude of a subject to the world466. In my opinion, the same claim of the illuminating nonsense is expressed by Atkinson when he writes that in order “to make sense of what cannot be said, one must see the world from a viewpoint that is outside the world”467. The case with Atkinson is slightly complicated because he regards his own position in opposition to the transcendental interpretation. But his declaration seems to

462 463 464 465 466

Hacker 1972/1986, p. 67. Rhees 1965, p. 17. Moore 2007, p. 184. Ibid., p. 185. “[Solipsismus ist die] ethisch richtige Haltung des kontemplativen Subjekt zur logisch strukturierten Welt” (Birk 2006, p. 80). 467 Atkinson 2009, p. 90.

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me to be lip service since he claims, for example: “Conant’s view is that simply there is no ‘it’ to be either said or shown”468. By “it” is understood here the transcendental reality existing outside the empirical world, so Conant’s opinion seems to be the one that one should accept if one wants to reject the transcendental reading. But Atkinson comments Conant’s view as follows: “In contrast to Conant, I believe more plausible position is that ‘it’, as he calls it, cannot be put into words and cannot be said either to exist or not to exist”469. It seems as if he distances himself from the simple rejection of the transcendental reality in favour of a statement that the transcendental reality (including its existence) cannot be meaningfully expressed. It still resembles the transcendental reading of nonsense which nonetheless reveals something. How does one respond to authors who, wildly simplifying, claim: “Yes, we know that literally transcendental idealism cannot be true. But nevertheless it reveals something ‘deep’ about the nature of the world”? In contrast to the proponents of the resolute interpretation, I think that there are several kinds of nonsense470. This means that I allow the possibility that although a proposition says nothing, it still shows something. For example, strictly speaking, the proposition: “There are at least two objects in the room” is nonsense because “object” is a pseudo-concept. What this sentence tries to express could nonetheless be meaningfully shown by a proposition: “There are at least two books in the room”471. I will repeat the thesis I defended in Chapter 2, i.e. the difference between substantial nonsense and mere nonsense consists in the fact that in the case of substantial nonsense one can show what nonsense aims to express by means of other meaningful propositions. But in my opinion the transcendental claims are examples of mere nonsense, and the reason for that, as TLP 6.42 says, is that these propositions aim to express something higher than facts – the world of values. To be exact, Wittgenstein speaks in TLP 6.42 about the ethical

468 Ibid., p. 105. 469 Ibid., p. 105. 470 For example, Child indicates three kinds of nonsense: propositions about logical features of the world, metaphysical propositions and ethical-evaluative propositions (Child 2011, p. 69). On the other hand, a proponent of the resolute reading, Ostrow, thinks that a reader of the Tractatus should “realize that, in the end, all the pronouncements of [Wittgenstein’s] text are just so much gibberish” (Ostrow 2002, p. 5). 471 “Wherever the word ‘object’ (‘thing’, etc.) is correctly used, it is expressed in conceptual notation by a variable name. For example, in the proposition, ‘There are 2 objects which. . .’, it is expressed by ‘(Ǝx, y)…’. Wherever it is used in a different way, that is as a proper concept-word, nonsensical pseudo-propositions are the result” (TLP 4.1272).

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theses but, as we remember, the aim of the whole transcendental venture was to tear off the veil of deception and to look outside the sphere of appearances. In this sense, Wittgenstein’s critical remarks refer not only to ethics, but one could also employ them to other kinds of transcendental interpretations. The argument that ethical propositions are nonsensical because they do not aim to describe reality was repeated in Lectures on Ethics. Wittgenstein talked there about the metaphor of someone who would like to pour a gallon of water (an ethical proposition) into a cup (a descriptive form of a proposition)472. Ethical pseudo-propositions are not on the same level as descriptions and, therefore, one cannot give an example of a proposition which would show what an ethical proposition purports to say. For example, even a detailed description of a murder in terms of facts cannot show what the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill” purports to convey: If in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be an exactly the same level as any other event, for instance, falling of a stone (LE, p. 6).

Also, transcendental claims are not on the same level as descriptions because they aim to express the limits and conditions of the world. Hence, Wittgenstein’s idea that sometimes one could show what nonsense intends to say has no application in the case of transcendental interpretation. Sometimes the proponents of a theory that assumes the importance of transcendental nonsense indicate “the mystical” part of the Tractatus. But what is mystical, according to Wittgenstein, is the fact that the world exists473. One cannot express directly the truth of what is mystical (The sentence expressing the mystical experience: “It is astonishing that the world exists” is nonsense because one can be astonished only by something that exists contingently. I cannot imagine a non-existing world, hence being astonished by the existence of the world is senseless), but the mystical astonishment is shown in every true sentence (because every true sentence assumes the existence of something). And even if one does not accept this explanation, it is clear that the astonishment: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” belongs rather to ontological considerations or to the philosophical proofs of the

472 “Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it” (LE, p. 7). 473 “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (TLP 6.44).

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existence of God (mentioning Leibniz and his Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason should be sufficient here) than to transcendental considerations about the limits of the world. Therefore, thesis TLP 6.522 cannot be used in support of the claim of illuminating nonsense. The proponents of the resolute interpretation compare nonsense to childish babbling. An infant confers no information, communicates nothing. But if an infant in its babbling imitates grown-ups, we could say that it is trying to say something. Similarly as in the case of transcendental discourse. All one could state is the need to cross the boundaries of sense, or “an urge to transcend our limitations”474 – a tendency which Wittgenstein respected but nonetheless saw it as “hopeless”: This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (…) But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it (LE, p. 12)

The transcendental interpretation invokes those formulations of early Wittgenstein which are reminiscent of the formulations of a transcendentalist. But their presence in Wittgenstein’s writings does not mean that their author accepted transcendental philosophy. This presence could be more easily explained by the respect that Wittgenstein had for the tendency of the human mind to attack the limits of sense; the tendency that he held as hopeless. Why hopeless? For example, in the Tractatus one reads: “When an ethical law of the form, ‘Thou shalt…’ is laid down, one’s first thought is ‘And what if I do not do it?’ ” (TLP 6.422). In contrast to the Road Runner’s conviction that he is not affected by the law of gravity because he has never learnt about it, there is nothing paradoxical or amusing in not being affected by ethical laws. The physical laws are grounded in something objective, i.e. in facts, and, therefore, one cannot even question: “And what if I do not follow the laws of physics?”. In contrast to them, ethical laws are grounded in nothing objective; nor do they express ineffable features of reality. Hence, every effort to express something ethical in language results in an infant’s babbling. Concluding, the theory of illuminating nonsense was, so to speak, the last redoubt of the transcendental interpretation. The defence proceeded along the following lines: one can reject the theses of the transcendental idealism; these are not the theses which truly count but are the right attitude to the world which idealism somehow shows. In the light of Wittgenstein’s writings a transcendentalist could be compared to a child imitating a (scientific) conversation of grownups. In contrast to nonsensical expressions containing names referring to logical pseudo-objects, there is nothing he aims to say. He cannot, therefore, show what 474 Moore 2007, p. 178.

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the right point of view of the world is. The proponents of the transcendental interpretation rightly claim that in the Tractatus we observe dissatisfaction with the achievements of science (TLP 6.52). But they are wrong if they think, as it seems they do, that the problems of life could be solved by childish babbling.

4.5.2  Transcendental reasoning In the last section of the chapter I want to collect the results of the previous discussions. In my first remark about the transcendental interpretation I said that its appeal consists in two things: (1) it reflects Wittgenstein’s intention to find a place for moral values and a meaning of life in the materialistic worldview of natural science, and (2) it offers a specific solution with respect to (1), which has the appearance of plausibility due to numerous similarities between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the Tractarian system (sections 4.1). Then I argued in sections 4.2-4.4, when reviewing specific transcendental interpretations, that in fact (2) is false. One has no proofs that Wittgenstein applied the transcendental solution to the modernist challenge. In the conclusion of the chapter I want to further emphasise this result. I claim that on the basis of what we know about the system of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein not only did not, but also could not believe in the existence of the transcendental self. This claim is already contained in the previous sections. In what follows I shall not say something substantially new, rather, I will extract conclusions from the previous discussions. The main thesis reads as follows: Wittgenstein could not be a transcendentalist because transcendental idealism makes usage of transcendental reasoning (later in the text called TR)475. By TR I understand reasoning of the following form: Premise 1. There is an ineffable feature of reality – feature (x) (in many different versions of transcendentalism, x goes proxy for moral values or a phenomenon of subjectivity or a phenomenon of a linguistic meaning). Premise 2. A pure factual, descriptive discourse does not capture the notion of (x). The existence of (x) remains unexplainable on the basis of factual discourse. Conclusion: There must be a bearer X of a feature (x), and the existence of X explains the existence of x (in some versions it guarantees the existence of x) (In different versions of the transcendental interpretation X goes proxy for the notions

475 It is a form of reasoning introduced by Kant. As a Kantian scholar, Ralph Walker, writes: “Kant’s transcendental arguments start from the premise that we have experience, or knowledge.(…) Kant’s transcendental arguments typically have a second premise, to the effect that p is a condition of the possibility of experience. This is tantamount to a conditional of the form ‘If there is experience, then p.’ ” (Walker 1993, p. 61–62).

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of the willing subject, the metaphysical self, the solipsistic self or the user of language; all of which refer to the transcendental self). We recognise this form of reasoning from the review of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and from the review of the transcendental interpretations. In what follows I want to argue that TR could not occur in Wittgenstein’s writings. First of all, in the Tractatus there cannot be any TR simply because it would speak against the main conclusion and result of the book, i.e. to discern meaningful and senseless discourse by saying nothing more than the propositions of natural science: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one (TLP 6.53).

A proponent of the presence of TR in the Tractatus has problems reconciliating TR with TLP 6.53. The intention of the former is to overcome the limitations of science and to gain insight into the world behind appearances. The intention of the latter is to get these desires under control. In my opinion, holding both TR and TLP 6.53 is untenable; hence there can be no transcendental reasoning in the Tractatus. Another reason to push ahead is that, according to the Tractatus, meaning and value cannot be meaningfully expressed. A proponent of the transcendental interpretation would claim then that the inexpressibility of human values is Premise 1 of TR. But why does a transcendentalist accept this premise? After all, famous predecessors of transcendental idealism – Schopenhauer and Kant – would not have accepted it. It is strange even for a proponent of the transcendental argumentation – Peter Hacker: “The argument in support of the ineffability of ethics is tenuous to say the least”476. Why did Wittgenstein limit meaningful discourse to discourse referring to empirical facts? Of course, there is a simple answer – the one which the proponent of the materialistic interpretation of the Tractatus would give. It is because ultimately only material objects exist. At the same time, it is the answer that a proponent of the transcendental reading cannot accept because, in his view, the Tractatus allows for the existence of entities ontologically irreducible to material points. The transcendental interpretation accepts a claim (ethical truths are nonsensical) whose acceptance is 476 Hacker 1972/1986, p. 83.

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unexplainable in terms of the transcendental assumptions. A transcendentalist says that ethical propositions are nonsensical from the point of view of natural science. In contrast to this view, Wittgenstein claims that ethical propositions are simply nonsensical. Just this difference should indicate that there cannot be any TR in the Tractatus. Thirdly, there is also something confusing and intractable in the conclusion of TR. If in the conclusion we affirm the existence of a bearer of ineffable features of reality, then the following question arises: “What is the relation between a transcendental self and a self of everyday life that is the embodied individual?”. It seems that it is not the relation of identity. Wittgenstein precisely says that the metaphysical subject is not the human being; it is a limit of the world, not a part of it (TLP 5.641). But if we cannot identify the selves of everyday experience with transcendental selves, and if the transcendental self lies outside the empirical reality, then we do not have any means to identify such a self (so, for example, we do not know if, in fact, there is one or perhaps more metaphysical selves coordinated with one empirical reality). It follows that the concepts of the metaphysical or the willing subject are empty ideas. This is a conclusion with which a transcendentalist should agree – after all, he claims that all we know about the transcendental self is that it is a condition of the empirical world, and that we do not even know if the category of an object applies to it. This metaphysical practice of conferring no meaning on signs was exactly the target of Wittgenstein’s condemnation (TLP 6.53). He clearly distanced himself from this way of “making” philosophy. Again, it seems impossible that Wittgenstein could employ TR in his philosophy.

Summary The result of the analysis of the chapter is that the transcendental interpretation fails: its principles fail and it fails in providing arguments in its defence from the text of the Tractatus. In my opinion, if Wittgenstein was concerned with the uncontested triumph of science, then he did not search for the means to safeguard the world of human values in the transcendental philosophy. This philosophy, as well as the dualism of mind and matter that was analysed in Chapter 3, was rejected by Wittgenstein. Both of these philosophies pretend to say something, whereas they are nonsensical. They do not confer any meaning on the concepts they use. The modernistic anxiety of Wittgenstein must have found a different way of comfort. In the next chapter I shall show what this way was, and I shall do so by explaining what, in my opinion, Wittgenstein truly had in mind when he talked about the truth of solipsism and the world which coincides with my world. 219

Chapter 5. Ethics in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings In the previous chapters I advanced arguments in favour of the thesis that the Tractatus grants science exclusive authority in discovering the truth about reality; that the simple objects of the Tractatus are physical atoms and that, on the other hand, the metaphysics of the self (independently whether defined in the dualistic or the transcendental tradition) fails to safeguard the world of values and meaning from the claims of scientism. This interpretation of the Tractatus places early Wittgenstein in the wider intellectual movement (pervading philosophy, literature and theology) of the first decades of the 20th century called modernism. This interpretation, however, leaves some questions unanswered. In this context I mentioned in Chapter 4 the Tractarian remark that: what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest (TLP 5.62).

The second claim with which the naturalistic view on the ontology of the Tractatus has interpretational difficulties is thesis TLP 5.641, in which Wittgenstein states that (although it seemed that he rejected both the dualistic as well as the transcendental conception of the self) there is a specific, philosophical sense of the notion of the self. The sense of this notion falls, however, outside the scientific and psychological definition, and it is connected with the fact that the world is my world: There really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it (TLP 5.641).

These claims, i.e.: (a) the correctness of solipsism, (b) identification of the world with my world, and (c) the claim that the self of which philosophy is talking about is the limit of the world, should make us aware of the dialectical situation of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein accepts in his book, on the one hand, methodological scientism (TLP 4.11) and, at the same time, he holds scientific solutions as insufficient answers to the problems of life (TLP 6.52). This tension between the basic claims of the Tractatus led its author to the conviction that there are two aspects of the book: one aspect consists in what is explicitly claimed and the second consists in what was purposely left unsaid. As Wittgenstein admitted in his letter to his publisher, Ludwig von Ficker,: 221

My work consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important point. For the ethical gets its limit drawn from the inside, as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous of drawing those limits; (…) I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it (cited in: ProtoTractatus, p. 16)

If we looked at the Tractatus through the eyes of its author, then we would notice that his main concern and problem was to reconcile naturalism (expressed in the convictions that the correct method of philosophy is to say nothing except what the natural sciences say, or that the fact that we cannot meaningfully express the problems of life suggests that the riddle does not exist, etc.) with defence of the views of those who are sensitive to moral, aesthetic and religious values. I called this main concern the fundamental problem of the Tractatus. The hypothesis that in the Tractatus one observes two contradictory tendencies, and the explanation for this observation consisting in a conjecture that probably Wittgenstein wanted to find a place for ethics and religion in a worldview shaped mainly by natural science, is nothing new in Wittgensteinian literature477. However, what is original in my interpretation is that I try to answer the fundamental problem after having fully acknowledged the ontological materialism of the Tractatus478. I admit that early Wittgenstein fully embraced the consequence of the naturalistic worldview, according to which the world consists only of masses (or whatever will turn out to be the most elementary particle of physics) and their movements. I claim that this is the standpoint from which Wittgenstein tried to secure the legitimacy of moral judgements or religious experience. In my conclusions I assume that Wittgenstein’s views with respect to the fundamental problem of the Tractatus have not changed, at least until the delivery (in November of 1929) of a lecture on ethics to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University479. My answer to the fundamental 477 “Wittgenstein is concerned to understand how there can be meaning and worth in the seemingly nihilistic world of modern science where the order of nature has been divorced from any conception of value” (Kelly 1995, p. 571); a similar view is represented by, among others: Birk 2006 and Stokhof 2002. 478 Most of the time there are the proponents of the transcendental interpretation who undertake this effort. 479 One confirmation of this could be the fact that in 1929 Wittgenstein still held the basic principle of the Tractarian system, i.e. its atomism – although, as Peter Hacker wrote, it was “the last gasp of Wittgenstein’s atomism” (Hacker 1986a, p. 85). In the Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein repeats his earlier conviction that a true and complete description of the world would consist only of propositions of science; that to be an omniscient person it is enough to have knowledge about movements of bodies and states of minds (“Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew

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problem assumes that Wittgenstein in A Lecture on Ethics expressed explicitly what was left unsaid in the Tractatus. In this chapter I shall chiefly concentrate on Wittgenstein’s account of ethics. One should keep in mind that, according to Wittgenstein, ethics is the enquiry into what: –– –– –– –– ––

is valuable is truly important is the meaning of life makes life worth living is the right way of living480.

all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived…” (LE, p. 6)). He admits that the scientific propositions contain no ethical concepts (for instance, the concept “good” in its absolute meaning). He rejects the idea (exemplified by Shakespeare’s Hamlet) that states of mind are facts which could be described as good or bad: “What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad” (LE, p. 6). He concludes, therefore, that a state of affairs with an ethical quality is a chimera (“I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge” (LE, p. 7)). An ethical sentence is sensu stricto nonsensical; every time we try to express our experiences of absolute (ethical) values, we formulate something incomprehensible (“The first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give to these experiences is nonsense! If I say ‘I wonder at the existence of the world’ I am misusing language” (LE, p. 7). “But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing” (LE, p. 8).). The existence of these motifs in the Lecture on Ethics suggests that there is no substantial change with respect to ethics in Wittgenstein’s thinking from the time of finishing the Tractatus. The only difference consists in the fact that this time Wittgenstein does not follow his own advice and he speaks about what cannot be said. He succumbs to the temptation to cross the limits of language and he tries to express what an attitude to the world as a whole could be – what one claims when one says: “X is good”. 480 “Now instead of saying ‘Ethics is the enquiry into what is good’ I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned with” (LE, p. 5).

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Accordingly, as moral values I shall understand not only the traditionally mentioned values of good and evil in this context, but also, for instance, the meaning of life or the values which make life meaningful. Wittgenstein’s views on religion are not the subject-matter of this presentation. I shall, however, use these views as a convenient analogy to his views on ethics. Consequently, I shall use the term: “an ethical sentence (expression, utterance)” as referring to those sentences which aim at expressing the claims of ethics (in the meaning accepted by Wittgenstein481), and as synonymous with the term: “an axiological sentence (expression, utterance)”. In the following passages I shall be interested in Wittgenstein’s reasons to claim that ethical sentences are meaningless (section 5.1). On the basis of the conclusions from these considerations I shall next formulate the position I call subjectivism with respect to ethics. In short, I will defend the interpretation according to which early Wittgenstein supported the following theses (section 5.2): (A) “X is good” expresses the attitude of the speaker (B) An attitude is subjective, which means it is not based on reason. By reason I understand something which is (1) a fact that is accessible independently of a subjective point of view and (2) has persuasive power. A rational person confronted with such a defined reason has to change his or her mind or attitude. The aim of this description of reason is to exclude from the scope of reasons mystical experiences and Kantian imperatives. (C) The subjective turn in Wittgenstein’s philosophy consists in the fact that an attitude comes from an individual decision, a point of view or a recognition of what “the world as a whole tells me”. Next I shall show how subjectivism helps us to reconcile the materialistic interpretation with the Tractarian theses that: what solipsism states is quite correct, that the metaphysical self is the limit of the world and that the world is my world (section 5.3). In this way I hope to defend the ontological materialism of the Tractatus and, at the same time, I intend to deliver a probable answer to the fundamental problem of this book.

5.1  The nonsense of ethics in the eyes of early Wittgenstein The answer to the fundamental problem of the Tractatus can be found in the letter to von Ficker that I quoted earlier: Wittgenstein defends the world of human 481 “I am going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics” (LE, p. 4).

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values by recommending silence about things that, in his eyes, truly matter. There is a realm of facts which one can express in propositions, and there is an aspect of the world which can only be shown. And because it can only be shown, it cannot be said482. If it cannot be said, then one should keep silent about it. Of course, this is the proper answer in accordance with the text of the Tractatus but, on the other hand, we feel that without a closer look at the presented line of reasoning it sounds slightly mysterious and dogmatic. We cannot understand how silence about values can protect them from the claims of natural science. In the following sections I shall elaborate on Wittgenstein’s claims. According to the Tractatus, the sentences of ethics are meaningless: It is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental (TLP 6.42-6.421).

In the previous chapters I indicated two criteria discerning propositions from any linguistic expressions. First, the elements of a proposition have to occur in it according to their roles in logical syntax. This condition is fulfilled by the ethical sentences. Secondly, the referents of all elements of a proposition must exist. In Chapter 1 I advanced arguments in favour of the hypothesis that early Wittgenstein adhered to a realistic theory of meaning, which assumes that there are “bits” of reality existing independently of our cognising capacities or of the systems of representations by means of which we represent reality. If Wittgenstein claims that there are no ethical propositions, then clearly he thinks that among the objects of the world there are no objects that would make an ethical sentence true or false. Indeed, the Tractatus seems to adhere to a sharp distinction between facts and values: In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value (TLP 6.41).

But what does it mean that there are no values in the world? A very attractive hypothesis suggests that it means that values are transcendental, i.e. existing “outside the sphere of what happens”.

5.1.1  The absoluteness of moral values The hypothesis that ethical sentences are meaningless because ethical notions are empty, and they are empty because moral values belong to the realm of what is higher as opposed to the realm of empirical facts, seems to be supported by some 482 “What can be shown, cannot be said” (TLP 4.1212).

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of early Wittgenstein’s utterances. In the Tractatus we read that “if there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case” (TLP 6.41). The thesis that there are no ethical propositions seems to be connected with the thought that “propositions can express nothing that is higher” (TLP 6.42), which could suggest that ethics aims to express something that is higher. Finally, Wittgenstein claims that “ethics is transcendental” (TLP 6.421). Later, in A Lecture on Ethics, we also find expressions that bring to mind a transcendental solution to the problem of finding a place for values in the world of scientific facts. For example, with respect to the ethical values, Wittgenstein uses a metaphor of a teacup (propositions of science) into which one wants to pour a gallon of water (ethical values). He writes: Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it (LE, p. 7).

The choice of words – ethical values are supernatural and absolute – is peculiar: again, it could suggest that the existence of values is somehow “higher” than the existence of facts, which is reported by means of scientific propositions capable of conveying only “natural” sense. It could be reminiscent of the practice of the proponents of the apophatic theology who claim that the reason for which we cannot express propositions about God is the fact that His being is too perfect and transcends everything, and that His perfection entails that our words cannot refer to Him. Interestingly, commentators who pay attention to the religious awakening of Ludwig Wittgenstein during the time of World War I and his openness to the problem of values usually interpret his conversion as a turn in the direction of transcendental philosophy. A typical example in this respect is Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, where the mystical part of the Tractatus is summed up as a restatement of Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism483. Wittgenstein, once freed by Frege’s and Russell’s realism from the enchantment of idealism, according to this interpretation, “apparently relapsed back into it”484. In Chapter 4 of this dissertation I analysed which fragments of Wittgenstein’s writings could invoke associations with transcendentalism, so I will not repeat these arguments

483 “Wittgenstein’s remarks on the will and the self are, in many ways, simply a restatement of Schopenhauer’s ‘Transcendental Idealism’ ” (Monk 1991, p. 144). 484 “Frege, the thinker Wittgenstein credited with freeing him from his earlier Schopenhauerian idealism, was not, apparently, told of his relapse back into it” (ibid., p. 144–145).

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here. I shall just recall that, in my opinion, a closer look at the process of writing the Tractatus reveals that there is indeed a transcendental stage (which finds its reflection in the Notebooks) in Wittgenstein’s thinking, but it was overcome by the time of the final composition of the text. One can point at the moment of withdrawal from the metaphysics of the transcendental self – it must have been the winter of 1917/1918. From that period on we have at our disposal correspondence between Wittgenstein and his friend, Paul Engelmann. In one of the letters, Engelmann noticed another change of attitude in Wittgenstein: “It seemed to me as if you – in contrast to the time you spent in Olmütz, where I had not thought so – had no faith”485. Wittgenstein confirmed his friend’s conjectures. In his response he wrote: I am far too bad to be able to theorize about myself; in fact I shall either remain a swine or else I shall improve, and that’s that! Only let’s cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw (Englemann 1967, p. 12; mine emphasis)

Wittgenstein’s moral self-examination is of lesser interest to me. What interests me is the apparent aversion to “the transcendental twaddle”. This state of mind could explain why, by the time of having finished the Tractatus, all transcendental ideas of the self existing outside the empirical world, the dichotomy of the world of noumena and the world of appearances, etc. vanished from Wittgenstein’s book. Are moral values the last vestiges of transcendentalism in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy? In my opinion, the choice of words should not mislead us: for example, in the Tractatus not only ethics but also logic is described as transcendental (TLP 6.13). In the latter case this can mean that logical truths have nothing to do with what the world looks like (“Logic is prior to every experience – that something is so” (TLP 5.552)) or that they are senseless (“Tautologies and contradictions lack sense” (TLP 4.461)). Similarly, in my opinion the point of using the notion “transcendental” with respect to ethics is to underline the dichotomy between facts and values. It also means, as I argued in Chapter 4, that in the eyes of Wittgenstein, ethical expressions “attack the limits of language”; they transcend, so to speak, the limits of what one can meaningfully express. Some of Wittgenstein’s formulations, as I mentioned before, seem to link the idea of the meaninglessness of ethics with the view that propositions express facts of the empirical world, and as such they are not capable of conveying the absoluteness of values and the necessity of moral laws. It is true that with respect to values Wittgenstein uses the predicate “absolute”, but it does not indicate the nature of 485 Cited in: Monk 1991, p. 152.

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the values486. In A Lecture on Ethics he elaborates on the subject and on the basis of his remarks one can discern two meanings of the concept of the absolute value. In the negative sense the claim that moral values are absolute says that they are not relative. It is not the same as to say that early Wittgenstein opposed moral relativism (understood as a claim that the truth and justifications of moral judgements are absolute). In fact, I do not think that his position prevents one from accepting relativism. Wittgenstein intends to discern two uses of the predicate “good”, i.e. the trivial and the relative sense of “good”, and an ethical and absolute sense of “good”487. The predicate “good” is used in a relative way, according to Wittgenstein’s description, when it is possible to express a sentence containing evaluative notions with the help of a sentence containing purely descriptive notions. Let us take, for example, the expression: “Usain Bolt is a good runner”. Obviously, this expression, strictly according to Tractarian rules, is nonsense because there is no such quality of objects as “good”, but it is a substantial nonsense. One can show what it is trying to say by means of the proposition: “Usain Bolt runs regularly 100 metres under 10 seconds”. On the other hand, to say that moral values are absolute amounts to saying that one cannot express ethical sentences by means of meaningful expressions. One cannot give any example of a proposition which would show what the expression: “Helping others is good” is trying to say. The notion of an absolute value in its positive sense expresses the binding character of some experiences. According to early Wittgenstein, the absoluteness of moral experience (or of moral values) means that in this experience one evaluates something, and this evaluation necessarily changes one’s behaviour or attitudes. For example, one can evaluate the ability to play tennis as something good, and, at the same time, not have a need to improve one’s tennis play. One, however, cannot stay indifferent with respect to moral evaluations: if I evaluate that helping others is morally good, then necessarily I will feel obliged to help others (it is a different story if I indeed do so). There is definitely something strange and paradoxical in the utterance: “I evaluate feeding starving children as morally valuable but still I do not feel any inclination to do so”488. When Wittgenstein says that ethical values 486 In A Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein uses the expression: “a judgement of absolute value”, but he introduces the distinction absolute-relative values using the term: “an absolute judgement of value” (LE, p. 5). 487 LE, p. 5. 488 “Supposing that I could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said ‘Well, you play pretty badly’ and suppose I answered ‘I know, I’m playing badly but I don’t want to play any better,’ all the other man could say would be ‘Ah then that’s all right.’ But suppose I had told one of you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said

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are absolute, he means that if one evaluates something as morally right or wrong, then it necessarily affects one’s attitudes. However, this does not mean that moral values are transcendental or that they belong to the higher and objective order of things. Moral values even cannot belong to the transcendental and objective order of things, because if they did, then just by being confronted with them or by experiencing them we would have to react in a particular way. There would be no differences in people’s evaluations and, consequently, in their conduct and attitudes. And Wittgenstein was aware that that is not the case: And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera (LE, p. 7).

In early Wittgenstein’s ethics there are no contradiction between the absoluteness of a value and its subjectivity or moral relativism. Even if I am aware that it is my subjective evaluation that it is good to feed a starving child and, perhaps, other people evaluate the same state of affairs differently, this does not stop me from feeding it. Still, my evaluation inclines me to behave in a certain way.

5.1.2  The sense of proposition and the idea of objectivity Ethical sentences, in the assessment of the Tractatus, are nonsensical. This means that they contain empty names. Wittgenstein expresses this thought by saying that there are no values in the sphere of what happens or in the sphere of what is the case. In the last section I tried to argue in favour of the thesis that these statements do not necessarily mean that he puts moral values in the higher (one could as well use such adjectives as transcendental, non-empirical or supernatural) order of things. In the following section I shall test the hypothesis that the claim that there are no ethical propositions is a result of the dichotomy between facts and values. In this view, ethics does not deal with facts but with the evaluations or interpretations of facts. Because evaluations and interpretations are subjective, then sentences aiming at expressing these evaluations are meaningless. Correctness of such a hypothesis would mean that one could classify early Wittgenstein’s position in ethics as subjectivism.

‘You’re behaving like a beast’ and then I were to say ‘I know I behave badly, but then I don’t want to behave any better,’ could he then say ‘Ah, then that’s all right’? Certainly not; he would say ‘Well, you ought to want to behave better.’ Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas the first instance was one of a relative judgment” (LE, p. 5).

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Young Wittgenstein clearly connects the concept of a meaningful expression with the idea of objectivity. In thesis TLP 4.06 we read: A proposition can be true or false only in virtue of being a picture of reality.

A proposition has to correspond to something which is objective, independent of the mind or of a system of representation (including language), something which is accessible to more than one cognising subject; something to which we can refer in case of a discussion or disagreement, and something which one simply states without considering what its meaning or value is: “A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand” (TLP 4.022). One could argue in favour of the truthfulness or falsity of a given proposition because there is something that both sides of a contention can agree on – it is the existence of simple objects – an existence which is not dependent on any subjective preferences or predilections, individual knowledge or emotions of both sides of a discussion or their particular point of views: “In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality” (TLP 2.223). In the system of the Tractatus the sense of a proposition is identified with what is pictured by a proposition: “What a picture represents is its sense” (TLP 2.221). A proposition pictures a concatenation of simple objects which, if I was correct in Chapter 2, are physical atoms. The only thing to settle is the answer to the question whether physical atoms are connected with one another in such a way as is mirrored by a given proposition. If that is correct, i.e. if the notion of sense in the Tractatus is truly connected with the idea of objectivity, then it gives an indication of the status of ethics. From this perspective, if an expression is nonsensical then it can mean, among other things, that it expresses something subjective, irrational, partial, biased, or accepted only on the basis of a subject’s own point of view or predilection. In my interpretation of the Tractatus this is the case for moral judgements. Sentences of ethics are nonsensical because their aim is not to express facts but evaluations and interpretations of facts. The larger picture of Wittgenstein’s account is expressed in thesis TLP 6.43: If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man (TLP 6.43).

It seems that Wittgenstein says here: everything in the world that has value, has it because of will. It is the will that permeates with meaning an otherwise cold world of brute, empirical facts. The world is described in the Notebooks as “a world in which there is only dead matter” (NB 2.8.16, p. 79). Wittgenstein repeats twice 230

that: “The world in itself is neither good or evil” (NB 2.8.16, p. 79). If we describe states of affairs in moral terms it is because of the relation of things to the will: “Things acquire ‘significance’ only through their relation to my will” (NB 15.10.16, p. 84)489. The quotation marks around the word “significance” are important. They indicate that it is not the case that my will makes things valuable, or that my will is a special way of looking at things which discovers features that are hidden from scientific research. I think that Wittgenstein is saying here simply that we evaluate things as significant to us. The expression: “Killing is wrong” has no factual meaning, it is incapable of conveying any content, it is neither true or false; it expresses only the attitude of the speaker of that expression, one’s disapproval, terror or some other negative emotion towards an event in the world, or one’s negative evaluation of an event. The expression: “Killing is wrong” is not a proposition but rather a substitute for an avowal. Confirmation of this understanding of Wittgenstein’s views on ethics I find in A Lecture on Ethics, in which he analyses the case of a murder. According to his position, a description of events referring only to facts would contain nothing indicating the moral meaning of the events. In this respect there would be no difference between a deed we call a murder or a deed we call watching a film. Descriptions of both of these events would contain only propositions referring to movements of physical things, and on the basis of such a description one could not conclude which event is the subject of moral disgust: If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone (LE, p. 6)

A murder is definitely devastating to the family and friends of the victim. This event makes their world miserable, but if they said to the murderer: “You should not have done it”, they would simply be evaluating his deed. A purely factual description of the event would not even contain the notion of a murder but the movements of bodies, such as taking a stone, throwing it at the victim, hitting the victim on the head, etc. The world seen sub specie aeternitatis is indifferent to the moral values of facts. According to my interpretation of Wittgenstein, it is through individual evaluations of a subject that things acquire moral meanings. This means that, according to subjectivism (similarly to transcendentalism), values enter the world because of the activity of the subject (the transcendental version of this claim says that 489 As Wittgenstein once noted: “The human gaze has the power of making things precious” (CV, p. 3).

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values enter the world through the activity of the willing subject). The advantage of subjectivism, however, consists in the fact that it does not assume any metaphysics of the self. It does not place the self outside the world of empirical facts. The problem of the transcendental interpretation was to show the connection between the willing subject and the subject of everyday experience. Subjectivism, on the other hand, can simply identify the evaluating subject with the subject of an everyday experience. It was Ludwig Wittgenstein – a human being – who wondered about the existence of the world or felt safe whatever happened in the world, or whatever happened to him. These experiences, in this sense, are nothing exceptional490, they are not transcending the realm of empirical things and they do not indicate at the existence of some outer reality. They are simply the experiences of a human being who was known to the world as Ludwig Wittgenstein. Secondly, the transcendental interpretation claims that Wittgenstein, in securing the position of values in our worldview, made use of ontotheology; that he tried to sketch a picture of the world which would be competitive and more comprehensive to the scientific one. In my opinion, this is in disagreement with Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the role of philosophy. Its role was to guard the limits of sense. Subjectivism does justice to this conception because its account of ethics is a direct consequence of the considerations on what can be said. The authority of science refers to the realm of facts. Moral judgements, because they express nothing more than one’s attitudes towards the world (in other words, one’s evaluations), cross the limits of sense, and Wittgenstein, consequently, counsels silence with respect to them. Someone who is a proponent of subjectivism in ethics does not compete with the scientific worldview; he does not claim that they are aspects of reality that escape scientific research and can admit that all that can be said is said by the natural sciences. He only states that we interpret reality, react to reality and evaluate it in different ways; that, for example, the totality of facts says something to some of us. In the next section we will see that reality was saying to Wittgenstein something such as: “Nothing can happen to me” or “The existence of the world as a whole is mysterious”, which, obviously, for naturalistic or neo-positivistic sensitivity is quite confusing but, on the other hand, it is also something that subjectivism accepts by admitting that ethical utterances convey no content.

490 The exceptionality of ethical expressions consists in their effort to convey the necessary binding of moral values; that one having evaluated something as a moral value is inclined to change an attitude or a behaviour.

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5.2 Early Wittgenstein’s subjectivism In my opinion, if we reflect on the question as to how one could defend the views of those sensitive to moral or aesthetic values, since the world is nothing more than the totality of physical particles, then early Wittgenstein’s answer could be classified as subjectivism. In this section I shall develop the topic of Wittgenstein’s subjectivism491 (section 5.2.1). I will often refer to Wittgenstein’s A Lecture on Ethics and his views on religion. I shall also show that subjectivism explains why the Tractatus ends with the cousel of silence (section 5.2.2). At the end I shall compare my understanding of Wittgenstein’s position with Russell’s emotivism (section 5.2.1).

5.2.1 Ethical sentences as expressions of attitudes According to my interpretation, with respect to ethics early Wittgenstein held the following theses: (A) the aim of an expression: “X is good” is to inform about an attitude to the world (or, in other words, when A says that X is good, he or she evaluates X as valuable492). (B) an attitude to the world has nothing to do with the facts; it is a subjective interpretation of what the world looks like to me. Earlier I connected the notion of reason with the notion of fact. Hence, if attitudes or evaluations have nothing to do with facts, then they are not based on reason. AD (A) Earlier I pointed to the Tractarian theses and notes from the Notebooks which prove that Wittgenstein believed in the dichotomy between facts and values. One of the consequences of his standpoint was that there are evaluations of a subject that cast moral values on the world of empirical facts. In the talk given to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University, Wittgenstein was more specific when it comes to ethical questions. He described, for example, ethics as a desire to 491 The term “subjectivism” is not fortunate. It can suggest that early Wittgenstein formulated a theory similar to those adhered to by Ayer or Stevenson. I shall later compare the views which I ascribe to early Wittgenstein with emotivism propagated in the same period by Russell. For now I just want to stress the fact that Wittgenstein obviously did not contrive any ethical theory. I simply extract from different fragments of Wittgenstein’s early writings his silently accepted assumptions. There is no explicit confirmation of subjectivism in the Tractatus but, in my opinion, if we interpret its position on ethics as subjectivism, we are able to make Wittgenstein’s views consistent – we can show how one can reconcile ontological materialism with a mystical attitude to the world. 492 For the purposes of this chapter I think of evaluations as of a kind of attitude to the world.

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say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good or the absolute value. In his view, ethics mirrors not what happens in the world493 but our attitudes to the world. This hypothesis – that ethics reflects our attitudes to the world – is strengthened when one takes into account what Wittgenstein compares the experiences of the absolute values with. When pushed to express what experience of the absolute good consists in he mentions: a feeling of wonder at the existence of the world, a feeling of absolute safety and its negative – a feeling of guilt. I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’ I will mention another experience straight away which I also know and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.’ (LE, p. 8)

I think that I am not distorting Wittgenstein’s thinking when I reconstruct his thought into the form of a subjectivist theory that (A): when one says: “X is absolutely good”, one expresses an attitude to the world (in the case of Wittgenstein this would be his attitude of wonder and trust, or of evaluating something as worthy of his trust and admiration). My reading of early Wittgenstein’s writings is in this respect similar to Anscombe’s. She provides a metaphor of the world as a face. The look of a face is a matter of facts. What is true (or false) about the world is also a matter of facts. But just as one can interpret a face in different ways (it could seem happy or sad to us, grave or grim, scary or funny), we can also interpret the facts of the world494. In Wittgenstein’s view a religious believer and a non-believer can agree when it comes to stating the facts; the difference consists in the conclusions they draw from the same set of facts. In my opinion, Wittgenstein wants us to say that the conclusion has nothing to do with the facts495. He himself experiences

493 “What [ethics] says does not add to our knowledge in any sense” (LE, p. 12). 494 “There is a strong impression made by the end of the Tractatus, as if Wittgenstein saw the world looking at him with a face; logic helped to reveal the face. Now a face can look at you with a sad or happy, grave or grim, good or evil expression (…). And so he speaks of the world ‘waxing or waning as a whole’, i.e., in terms of my analogy, as having more or less expression, or a good or evil expression. The world thought of, not as how things are, but as however they are – seen as a whole – is the matter of logic; thought of as my life, it is the matter of ethics” (Anscombe 1965, p. 172). 495 “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world. The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution” (TLP 6.432-6.4321).

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this almost religious wonder at the existence of the world, but he definitely did not conclude that the world’s existence as a whole is mysterious on the basis of facts. Hence, the second claim of Wittgenstein’s subjectivism is: (B) An attitude is subjective that is not based on reason. AD (B). Wittgenstein admits that although he chose three of the aforementioned feelings as expressing absolute values, he does not exclude that other people would choose other ones. With respect to attitudes to the world as a whole, Wittgenstein says: In my case, it always happens that the idea of one particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a sense, my experience par excellence” (LE, p. 8, mine emphasis).

He is aware that his attitudes to the world as a whole are his own interpretation of the facts. It is in his case that when facing the world he experiences wonder at its existence. Others could have different interpretations and evaluations and, therefore, different attitudes. Important clues as to what Wittgenstein thought of ethical judgements are contained in his remarks about religion. It was Wittgenstein himself who admitted that there is an analogy between ethical and religious judgements. He admitted, for instance in A Lecture on Ethics, that all experiences of the absolute values have their counterparts in the religious language. The wonder at the existence of the world is a counterpart of a religious belief that the world was created by the omnipotent and loving Being; the feeling of being safe whatever the case and the feeling that nothing that happens in the world can hurt me finds its counterpart in the religious belief that God protects me, that one is saved by the grace of God, and that salvation of the soul is what truly matters, and, finally, the feeling of being guilty corresponds to the religious belief that some of our deeds are considered by God as sinful and that God sometimes condemns one’s conduct496. If, in the eyes of Wittgenstein, there is a close similarity between religious and ethical utterances, then we can suspect that what Wittgenstein said about religion also sheds light on his views on ethics. It was Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief that shaped Wittgenstein’s thinking about religion. Wittgenstein was probably fascinated by Tolstoy’s focus on Jesus’ 496 “This allegory also describes the experience which I have just referred to. For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what people were referring to when they said that God had created the world; and the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we feel safe in the hands of God. A third experience of the same kind is that of feeling guilty and again this was described by the phrase that God disapproves of our conduct” (LE, p. 9–10).

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moral preaching and his lack of interest in Jesus’ miracles or in the theological disputes about the divine and the human nature of Jesus497 which definitely helped such a naturalistic-oriented mind as Ludwig Wittgenstein to accept the evangelical teachings498. One can easily recognise the influence of Tolstoy on the Tractatus. Tolstoy tried to find a solution to the problem of life499, which was also Wittgenstein’s concern. After Tolstoy, Wittgenstein understood the problem of life as a question whether life has a meaning500. Finally, in the thought of both of them we find a modernist anxiety that scientific progress somehow deprives things of their meanings501. The topic of Tolstoy’s influence on Wittgenstein is interesting on its own, but with respect to the subject of this chapter I shall concentrate on two features of Tolstoy’s views on religion. First, for Tolstoy, Christianity was not a doctrine. It describes nothing objective; it is not a competition for a scientific worldview. What it offers is not another standpoint of what the world looks like but making one’s life meaningful502. One can sum this up in the following way: a sentence of a religious language p does not inform us about facts in the world but about the way a person interprets those facts. One who believes in God interprets facts in such a way that one sees one’s life as having meaning. Conversely, an atheistic profession of a lack of faith amounts not to (the question if it is a justified view on atheism is secondary) denying that a

497 “I sought a solution to a problem of life, and not of a theological or historical question; and that is why I was indifferent to know whether Jesus Christ is or is not God, and from whom proceeds the Holy Spirit” (Tolstoy 1896, p. 10). 498 Obviously, the circumstances of time also played a huge role in Wittgenstein’s fascination. He bought a copy of the book in Tarnów during the time he was feeling depressed by the company of his evil and malicious fellow soldiers. Ray Monk even claims that reading the book saved Wittgenstein from committing suicide (Monk 1991, p. 115). 499 Tolstoy 1896, p. 10. 500 “I sought to find the sources of light. And I found them in the Gospels (…). And when I reached this source of light I was dazzled with its splendour, and I found there full answers to my questions as to the purport of the lives of myself and others” (ibid., p. 9). On the other hand, Wittgenstein writes: “I know that this world exists (…). Something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning” (NB 11.6.16, p. 72–73). 501 Tolstoy: “After getting the reply that I was a fortuitous concatenation of atoms, and that my life was void of purport (…) I became desperate and wished to put an end to my life” (Tolstoy 1896, p. 8). Wittgenstein, on the other hand: “As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant (…) A stone, the body of a beast, the body of a man, my body, all stand on the same level” (NB 8.10.16, p. 83; NB 12.10.16, p. 84). 502 “The great mass of men who hold to faith and are uncorrupted by wealth, possess the meaning of life” (Tolstoy 1896, p. 8).

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certain object exists, but expresses a rather depressing attitude to one’s life as being void of meaning. Secondly, according to Tolstoy, faith is something subjective not only because it expresses individual attitudes, but also because it is accepted not on the basis of reason, evidence or arguments. He was aware that he could not provide any arguments advancing his own religious point of view. What, in his opinion, could convince his reader to accept his interpretation of the Gospel were the features of his disquisition: unity, fullness, and its harmony with the inner feelings of his readers: The justness of a conception of this kind is better proved, not by arguing particular points, but by its own unity, clearness, fullness, as well as by its harmony with the inner feeling of all who seek truth (Tolstoy 1896, p. 6).

Wittgenstein saw religion in a similar way. Also, for this Austrian philosopher Christianity was not a matter of doctrine: Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul (CV, p. 32).

He analysed religious utterances as expressing attitudes to the world: To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning (NB 8.7.16, p. 74).

The sentence: “God exists” is, in other words, a proclamation of someone’s evaluation of life as meaningful. The second aspect of the subjectivity of religious beliefs – the fact that one cannot justify religious convictions on the basis of reason or argue in favour of them – is also visible in Wittgenstein’s thinking: And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul, needs, not my speculative intellect. For my soul, with its passions, as it were with its flesh & blood, must be redeemed, not my abstract mind. Perhaps one may say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: it is love that believes the Resurrection (CV, p. 38–39)503.

For Wittgenstein, faith is a matter of heart, which I understand as a claim that faith is something felt or chosen by an individual, not something which is deduced by intellect. Religious tenets have meaning, but only as expressing my attitudes to the world of empirical facts which, of course, is a confusing claim for someone – indifferently if for a believer or for an atheist – who takes religious utterances as

503 C. f.: “Religion says: Do this!–Think like that! but it cannot justify this and it only need try to do so to become repugnant; since for every reason it gives, there is a cogent counter-reason. It is more convincing to say: ‘Think like this! – however strange it may seem or: ‘Won’t you do this? – repugnant as it is’ ” (CV, p. 34).

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describing a supernatural reality504. For such a person an utterance about the Last Judgement is an utterance (true for a believer and false for an atheist) about a future event. In contrast to this objectivist view on religious beliefs, Wittgenstein claims: A historical proof is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by a human being believingly (i.e. lovingly): That is the certainty of this “taking-for-true”, nothing else. The believer’s relation to these messages is neither a relation to historical truth (probability) nor yet that to a doctrine consisting of “truths of reason” (CV, p. 38).

In other words, for Wittgenstein, if one holds some religious beliefs, then one does so not on the basis of some rational arguments. The utterances of believers inform us of how they see the world, but not about what belongs, according to them, to the region of facts. Wittgenstein also admits that such a view on faith makes it incomprehensible and, hence, nonsensical for non-believers. It is because one simply has a religious attitude to the world or not; one feels safe and under divine protection or not. There is nothing here one could learn or argue in favour of. If the analogy between Wittgenstein’s thinking about religion and ethics holds, then in his remarks on Christianity we would find another confirmation of his subjectivism with respect to ethics. According to this argument, in Wittgenstein’s view, ethical judgements express people’s attitudes to the world (thesis (A)). Moreover, ethical attitudes to the world are not justified by facts. There is nothing with respect to facts that confirms or rejects the standpoint of a moral nihilist as well as the standpoint of somebody who evaluates certain deeds as morally right or wrong (thesis (B)). In the subsequent paragraphs I want to compare my subjectivist interpretation with the commentaries of others. I especially want to analyse the differences between what I call Wittgenstein’s subjectivism and Russell’s early views on ethics, which are usually labelled emotivism. Before that, however, I would like to analyse how my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views on ethics could illuminate the conclusion of the Tractatus, i.e. the Tractarian incentive for silence with respect to things about which we cannot speak (TLP 7) and the claim that one cannot express ethics (TLP 6.42-6.421).

5.2.2 Ethical subjectivism and Tractarian silence My thesis reads as follows: the assumption that for Wittgenstein ethical judgements are subjective (in the mentioned meaning that ethical sentences express

504 For instance, Anscombe notices: “The truth of the Tractatus theory would be death to natural theology” (Anscombe 1965, p. 78).

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somebody’s attitudes and that they are not justified by facts) explains why he counsels silence with respect to things one cannot meaningfully express. This is because one of the consequences of my interpretation is the futility of expressing ethics. If one does not confer any content on ethical sentences, then why would anyone bother to engage in discussions about the moral values of some deeds? Of course, the classical proponents of emotivism, such as Ayer and Stevenson, defended the practice of formulating moral judgements because they thought that there is always a chance to persuade an interlocutor, to incline him or her to change his or her views505. An adversary of the emotivists could respond that what inclines us to adopt somebody else’s moral views is the truth of these views. Therefore, the accusation claims that, according to the emotivists, there is nothing in moral judgements that could attract other people to change their minds. The question: “Why bother to engage in moral conflicts or discussions? Why should I bother about somebody’s subjective evaluations?” still holds. On the other hand, Wittgenstein admits that if ethical sentences are neither true or false, if they convey no content, if they simply express subjective attitudes and are not justified by facts (one cannot therefore argue rationally in favour of them or against them), then there is truly no point in engaging in moral disputes. Hence, one should keep silent with respect to his or her moral convictions: Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense? (TLP 6.521)

Let us suppose that somebody discovered what the sense of life consists in. For Wittgenstein, this is exactly the kind of discovery that is accomplished by the heart and not by intellect. There is no surprise, then, that one cannot put it into words and substantiate it rationally. One can, of course, express sentences such as: “I feel safe even in the face of death”, but because this does not express anything objective, one cannot point at any facts that could support or explain one’s view. There is nothing in the aforementioned sentence with which another person could agree or disagree. The only thing to say is perhaps: “I feel the same way” or “I feel differ-

505 According to Stevenson, the method of settling ethical disagreements “is persuasive, not empirical or rational; but that is no reason for neglecting it” (Stevenson 1963/1975, p. 29). He also writes: “Ethical terms are instruments used in the complicated interplay and readjustment of human interests (…) Being suited for use in suggestion, they are a means by which men’s attitudes may be led this way or that” (ibid., pp. 17–18).

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ently”. Wittgenstein fully embraces the conclusion of the meaninglessness of ethical judgements, and this is why in the last thesis of the Tractatus he states: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence (TLP 7).

Wittgenstein notices the need to express moral or aesthetic judgements: This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life (…) can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense (LE, p. 12)

But, at the same time he acknowledges that when one tries to fulfil this desire to communicate one’s attitudes with respect to the meaning of life or moral evaluations of certain facts, one fails. It is then better to be silent about them. Although ethical expressions are examples of nonsense, we find in the Tractatus the following thesis: There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical (TLP 6.522).

Before I proceed in my interpretation, I should warn that the things I am about to say in the following sentences are a matter of speculation. Wittgenstein himself was not clear on these topics. But, on the basis of the aforementioned thesis, I incline to think that Wittgenstein indeed thought argumentation as futile with respect to ethics. I am also inclined to think that despite the fact that he saw a way of “convincing” others to accept certain moral standpoints; only this time not by means of rational arguments, and definitely not by means of propaganda, but by means of an example. It is an example of life, a fascination with somebody’s conduct, a desire to be like an admired hero which will convince people to change their moral views. We know that Wittgenstein was deeply fascinated by the Gospel (through Tolstoy’s version) during the time he was finishing the Tractatus, and there is indeed something from the evangelical: “Come and see”506 in his description of Christianity: Amongst other things Christianity says, I believe, that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) That all wisdom is cold; & that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights, than you can forge iron when it is cold. For a sound doctrine need not seize you; you can follow it, like a doctor’s prescription.- But here you have to be seized & turned around by something.- (I.e. this is how I understand it.) Once turned round, you must stay turned round. Wisdom is passionless (CV, p. 61).

506 “Nathanael said to him, ‘From Nazareth? Can anything good come from that place?’ Philip replied, ‘Come and see’ ”. John 1, 46.

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and in his description of ethics (that one finds in Wittgenstein’s conversation with Feigl): It was necessary to get rid of metaphysics in order to make room for den Ernst des Lebens, the seriousness of life. Deep commitment was required, not rational justification, and whoever had the former would not worry his head about the existence of the world or the ultimate substance of it (cited in: McGuinness 2002, p. 191)

If it is true that for the moral cognitivists one needs to show the truth of some moral judgements in order to incline others to change their moral standpoints, and if it is true that for the emotivists, such as Russell or Stevenson, one needs rhetoric skills, then for Wittgenstein one needs an example of the saints. Summing up, in the previous sections I tried to show the consequences of the thesis that expressions of ethics are nonsensical. I ascribed subjectivism to early Wittgenstein (section 5.2.1). Moral judgements, in this view, express nothing more than the attitude of the person who formulates those judgements. As such, these utterances are subjective – one cannot argue in favour of them rationally. Therefore, as I noticed in section 5.2.2, Wittgenstein, at the end of the Tractatus, counsels silence. If I am correct in my reading of the early writings of Wittgenstein, one can show what solutions to the problems of life consist in only by the example of life. The subjectivist hypothesis, therefore, fits nicely in the system of the Tractatus; it respects its final conclusion and the importance of the showing/saying distinction.

5.2.3  Wittgenstein’s subjectivism and early Russell’s emotivism At the end of section 5.2 I would like to make my interpretation of early Wittgenstein’s views on ethics clearer by comparing it to those of an author who was a contemporary of Wittgenstein and to whom one very often ascribes emotivism, i.e. to the views of Bertrand Russell. Interestingly, one can notice a similarity between the paths of both Russell and Wittgenstein that led them to their ethical views. Russell was before World War I a famous logician and mathematician, and with respect to ethics he was a proponent of Moore’s intuitionism. He believed in the objectivity of moral values such as goodness or badness. There were horrifying events of the war that forced Russell to abandon the conviction that moral values are obvious. Both sides of the barricade held as obvious contradictory moral judgements – the Germans held killing the British to be morally good and justified; the British, naturally, held killing the British to be morally appalling but, on the other hand, maintained that killing the Germans

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was morally justified507. Since it seemed that no arguments could convince people to abandon their views, and since it seemed that in Europe there could be no moral agreement on what is good and bad, then – concluded Russell – perhaps the whole discussion was not about something objective? Perhaps the only thing conveyed by both sides of ethical contention are emotions? Similarly, young Wittgenstein, who before World War I was fervently enagaged in specialist discussions on logic, evolved spiritually because of his wartime experiences. If I am correct that Wittgenstein was a proponent of subjectivism, then after the war Russell and Wittgenstein – both of them now interested in practical philosophy and both subjectivists – should have gotten along very well. We know, however, that their reunion resulted in a disaster – they could not understand one another. To Russell’s horror, Wittgenstein turned out to be some kind of a mystic508. If I claim that Wittgenstein was an ethical subjectivist, then how can I explain this feeling of alienation between these two philosophers? Obviously, in my opinion, the similarities in their ethical views are superficial. It is true that they both held moral judgements to be of no truth-value, that in the scientific project of describing the world they did not see a place for values509, that they would both agree that moral judgements express attitudes or feelings towards the world taken as a whole510, and that neither of them contrived a theory of 507 “Russell began to understand that the good was not as obvious as Moore’s intuitionism made it out to be. Those around him, in England and all over the world, appealed to similar values, similar rules, and made similar accusations against one another. Each thought good was embodied in their own actions and causes, evil in the others. The British regarded the Germans as wicked, and thought is good to slaughter them. Germans felt likewise about the British” (Potter 2006, p. 12). 508 In a letter to Lady Ottoline he wrote about his first meeting with Wittgenstein after the war: “I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he was a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk” (Letters, p. 82). 509 “So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words” (TLP 6.42-6.421). “The opposition between a philosophy guided by scientific method and philosophy dominated by religious and ethical ideas may be illustrated by two notions which are very prevalent in the works of philosophers, namely the notion of the universe, and the notion of good and evil. A philosopher is expected to tell us something about the nature of the universe as a whole, and to give grounds for either optimism or pessimism. Both these expectations seem to me mistaken” (Russell 1914b, p. 57). 510 “I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it [the experience of the absolute good] I wonder at the existence of the world” (LE, p. 8); “What is valuable

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meta-ethics (in the case of Russell at least not at this stage511) because their interests were focused on solving particular ethical dilemmas rather than on the theory of what is good512. Despite these similarities, the difference between the attitude of both of these philosophers to ethics is enormous. There are, for instance, different morals they draw from their standpoints. As I said before, Wittgenstein embraces the consequence of the meaninglessness of ethical judgements – the impossibility of formulating one’s own ethical positions – so, at the end he counsels silence. According to my interpretation of Wittgenstein, one can argue in favour of an ethical judgement only by the example of a decent life. For Russell, silence was not an option. He was in favour of moral activism even despite the fact that he thought that moral judgements had no truth-value. In this view, even if a moral activist has no rational arguments in his or her arsenal, he or she can still convince others to share his or her views by means of rhetoric, propaganda or persuasion: “Russell has no difficulty accepting the claim that, in a moral dispute, we become preachers or proselytisers, using rhetoric and other persuasive methods to propagate our attitudes”513. Secondly, I would point to the different aims lying behind these two ethical views. For Wittgenstein, saying that moral judgements are nonsensical is also a way of underlining the difference between ethical and other values, i.e. the difference between absolute and relative values. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly (…) not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on

is the indication of some new way of feeling towards life and the world, some way of feeling by which our own existence can acquire more of the characteristics which we deeply desire” (Russell 1914b, p. 64). 511 I compare Wittgenstein’s view with the early form of Russell’s emotivism expressed in On Scientific Method in Philosophy (1914). 512 According to Rhees, in one of his private conversations with Wittgenstein his mentor expressed astonishment with why books on ethics do not contain “genuine or moral problems” (Rhees 1965, p. 21), where moral problems are those which have at least two probable solutions, such as, for instance, a dilemma that a scientist could face: “Should I sacrifice my family and continue my research on cancer or should I sacrifice the research and help my wife who is terminally ill?” (ibid., p. 23). On the other hand, with respect to Russell, Potter notices: “The fact that Russell spends most of his time at this stage applying his theory might explain why he spent so little time explaining it” (Potter 2006, p. 73). 513 Potter 2006, p. 71.

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the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language (LE, p. 11).

In the eyes of Wittgenstein, what is distinct by moral values, and what makes moral experiences absolute (whatever the progress of science will be), is that one who evaluates something as morally good is bound to change one’s attitude and behaviour. This feeling of obligation to change one’s behaviour is a part of moral evaluation. Opposite to this project, Russell’s conclusion that moral truths are not objective clearly aims to fight the idea that one, after having evaluated something as morally good, should necessarily feel inclined to change one’s attitudes. According to Potter, before the World War I Russell had “a growing conviction that belief in absolute value leads people to become hateful and intolerant”514. Up to this day there are people who are ready to kill others just because, in their opinion, they hold a wrong conception of God. On the contrary, although a discussion about, for instance, the superiority of Chopin’s music over List’s could be fervent, it is hardly imaginable that one could be ready to die in defence of Chopin’s Mazurkas. It seems that disagreements in tastes are violent to a lesser extent than discussions about truth, and as far as I understand Russell, his saying that moral judgements express only our evaluations aims to reduce the level of hatred and intolerance. It would, however, mean that, in contrast to Wittgenstein who wanted to emphasise the unique character of moral judgements, Russell tried to present moral judgements merely as another kind of opinion. The difference does not consist in the fact that one of them believed in relativism and the other did not. In fact, both of them rejected the connection between moral judgements and truth-values. The difference lies in the role played by the fact that moral judgements express subjective evaluations. Wittgenstein, who formed his views in the trenches of the World War I battles and who despite witnessing evil and maliciousness tried to preserve his own decency and courage, insisted on the fact that others’ behaviour does not matter. Still, if I evaluate an action or a conduct as morally good, it obliges me to behave in a certain way. In ethics he was, so to speak, addressing himself and, therefore, he insisted on the binding character of moral values (or, using his vocabulary, on the absolute character of moral values). On the other hand, Russell, who also formed his early emotivism during the World War I, and who, as a civilian, experienced particularly badly the evil and maliciousness of public opinion, was addressing mainly the so-called ordinary people. Having experienced that 514 Ibid., p. 10.

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being blindly bound to one’s own moral evaluations can have a disastrous effect, he postulated a greater distance to our own subjective convictions. One way to achieve this is to stop ascribing a distinctiveness to moral judgements and to start seeing them as simply mere tastes in the same way we usually treat musical tastes. This biographical interjection could also explain the third difference between Russell and Wittgenstein. According to Russell, our moral instincts are a result of our being social animals: Ethics is essentially a product of the gregarious instinct, that is to say, of the instinct to cooperate with those who are to form our own group against those who belong to other groups. Those who belong to our own group are good; those who belong to hostile groups are wicked (Russell 1914b, p. 63).

Ethics, in his view, is an effort to present our own herd as justified515. These thoughts would be extremely alien to Wittgenstein, as he never thought of ethics as directed against some group of people. Ethics by no means is a result of a gregarious instinct; it is a result of our personal investigations into the meaning of life. It is not society which tells us what the meaning of life consists in but it is the task of an individual to discover or recognise what his or her purpose in life is. In other words, whereas Russell presents a rather pessimistic view according to which values are held by people as a result of their conformism and an ability to adapt to the requirements of the group, Wittgenstein sees people more optimistically. In moral evaluations he saw a way to defend one’s independence from the influence of the social environment or even from happenings in the world. If I were forced to express this difference in the form of a theory, I would say that whereas for Russell the moral judgement: “X is good” expresses the attitude of the whole group to which a speaker of this judgement belongs, then for Wittgenstein the same moral judgement expresses just the attitude of a given speaker. This particular difference between Russell and Wittgenstein reveals an important feature of Wittgenstein’s views on ethics. In the aforementioned Gospel in Brief, Tolstoy interprets the temptation of Christ in the desert as a metaphor for a struggle between a body (which represents the empirical world) and a soul: “Then temptation ceased, and Jesus knew the power of spirit”, concludes Tolstoy516. This motif of the power of spirit – the internal core of a human being consisting in his or her most intimate and important beliefs – which can rest intact against the

515 “When the animal has arrived at the dignity of the metaphysician, it invents ethics as the embodiment of its belief in the justice of its own herd” (Russell 1914b, p. 63). 516 Tolstoy 1896, p. 27.

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influence of the external world (all adversities of fate, hostile people, etc.) or even in some cases master it, is a frequent motif in Wittgenstein’s writing: How can man be happy at all, since he cannot ward off the misery of this world? (…) The life of knowledge is the life that is happy in spite of the misery of the world. The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world (NB 13.8.16, p. 81) I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings (NB 11.6.16, p. 73) I can make myself independent of fate (NB 8.7.16, p. 74)

Up to this moment when I was talking about the subjectivism of early Wittgenstein, I had in mind his conviction that (A) ethical sentences express the attitudes of their speakers and that (B) there cannot be arguments based on facts in favour of or against moral judgements. This comparison of Wittgenstein’s thought with Russell’s emotivism reveals that there is also another meaning of Wittgenstein’s subjectivism, which I describe as his “subjective turn”. In this meaning, subjectivism refers to the fact that the source of the meaning of life and of happiness is in us. It is the claim of the radical dichotomy between facts and values. Whatever the case, in Wittgenstein’s view it is irrelevant to us feeling happy or unhappy, if we see our lives as meaningful or not: If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts—not what can be expressed by means of language (TLP 6.43).

One could juxtapose his position with a view which would welcome the supposition that, for example, the theory of evolution could scientifically explain why people evaluate facts and events the way they do. When Wittgenstein claims that our attitudes have nothing to do with facts, he is also referring to the facts from the natural history of people. This feature of Wittgenstein’s thinking adds an air of mysticism to his philosophy – one speaks here about the power of spirit, an internal core, a source of meaning and happiness – and probably this element of Wittgenstein’s conversion worked so discouragingly for Bertrand Russell. Hence, although there are superficial similarities between his and his pupil’s ethics, then in the details these standpoints are so distant from one another that the opinion that Wittgenstein’s subjectivism is of a very original kind seems to be justified.

5.3 Solipsistic theses of the Tractatus under a subjectivist reading In the previous sections I presented what in my opinion was early Wittgenstein’s view on ethics. I defended the thesis that on the basis of the mystical part of the 246

Tractatus, A Lecture on Ethics and Wittgenstein’s views on religion, one could ascribe subjectivism to his early ethics. The sentence: “X is good”, according to such an interpretation, expresses the attitude of the speaker. The second claim of my interpretation was that moral evaluations are independent from the facts. Because of this, one can always prove the nonsensicality of ethical judgements. In my opinion, this was the reason for which Wittgenstein advised silence with respect to what truly matters at the end of the Tractatus. Finally, I pointed to one of the consequences of Wittgenstein’s division between facts and values. If moral attitudes and valuations are independent from the facts, then they are held just upon the strength of the individual’s personal decision. I hope that we are now in a position to go back to the initial questions of the chapter: how does someone who sees the Tractatus as defending ontological materialism and as being reluctant to theoretical philosophy understands the Tractarian theses that (a) what solipsism means is quite correct, (b) the world is my world, and (c) that the self enters into philosophical considerations as the limit of the world? I have already pointed out in Chapter 4 that these theses are similar to the ideas contained in The World as Will and Representation, and that a scrutiny of Schopenhauer’s text suggests that the aforementioned problematic theses should not be read as ontological or epistemological ones, but rather as existential and sapiential truths. If we read the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus this way, then subjectivism can indeed account for their rightness. 1. The world is my world. In the Notebooks Wittgenstein writes: What has the history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world (NB 2.9.16, p. 82)

The world consists of the totality of what is the case. We are all living in a world where Spain won the world championship in football in 2010, where Henry Dunant founded the Red Cross, and where Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope on 13 March 2013. The subjective interpretation does not deny this; it states only that from an individual point of view besides the facts there are also interpretations and evaluations of these facts which, using the Tractarian metaphor, “wax and wane” the world as a whole and make the world different for different people. Because Wittgenstein’s position in ethics assumes that these interpretations are personal and subjective, then the world seen from an individual point of view will always be something specific – it will be “my world”, as Wittgenstein describes it. The subjective interpretation in contrast to the solipsistic one does not have to assume the existence of non-natural beings, such as the self. Likewise, the problem of the belief in the existence of other subjects does not even arise. 247

2. What solipsism means is quite correct. Two attitudes dominate in the literature with respect to the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus: the first takes the Tractarian dictum at face value. Wittgenstein was truly a solipsist in the meaning ascribed to this position by philosophical dictionaries517, but he could not, according to the Tractarian theory of meaning, express this position meaningfully (just as Christians who claim that the dogma about the Trinity is true but every expression of its truth leads to nonsensical and paradoxical statements). The second group of commentaries acknowledges the fact that Wittgenstein did not take solipsism at face value. It assumes that in the eyes of early Wittgenstein the importance of solipsism lies not in its direct formulations but in what solipsism intends to express. We have seen an example of a religious believer who thinks that the sentence: “God exists” describes the world, whereas, in fact, in Wittgenstein’s opinion it expresses the believer’s hope that life has meaning. Why should we not think that Wittgenstein had the same attitude to philosophical theories? He treated the great works on metaphysics and theology with reverence as books which contain important insights, but, as was made clear on the example of religious utterances, in his view their authors were mistaken when it comes to the aims of their judgements. This is an attitude according to which great thinkers of the past were consciously stating ontological and epistemological truths but, in fact, unconsciously they were expressing insights of a different kind. This could be the case with solipsism. What it shows is correct, but only if one does not take solipsism as describing the world or as stating an ontological truth. What solipsism states “consciously” is the claim that there is only one mind in the world. The “unconscious” truth of solipsism would be an expression of the helpless loneliness of somebody trying to justify his or her most precious and intimate convictions. According to Wittgenstein’s subjectivism, one using only rational arguments cannot convince or persuade others to accept one’s moral point of view. We are forced, in this respect, into silence. We are closed in our own worldviews, unable to communicate things which are important for us. In this sense a solipsist is right: in our worlds we are alone. And again, the fact that in the eyes of the author of the Tractatus solipsism is correct does not mean that he doubted in the existence of other people518. It expresses 517 “Wittgenstein seems to be committed to the strongly idealist view that the nature of the world depends upon me” (Morris 2008, p. 297). 518 On the contrary: “Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.” (TLP 6.51).

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a despairing solitude which is a result of the fact that we are forced to be silent with respect to what truly matters to us – with respect to the problems of life519. Secondly, solipsism taken at face value states that everything is dependent in its existence on me; “unconsciously”, however, solipsism would express the fact that it is up to us what meaning we ascribe to different things in the world and what values are the most important for us. And this is why, under the subjectivist interpretation, solipsism is, for Wittgenstein, quite correct. 3. The subject is the limit of the world. Wittgenstein, under the influence of Tolstoy’s book, regards as ideal a situation when we are independent in our attitudes from the influence of the world. It is possible to feel happy even in the face of death. It is the subject through which things acquire meaning. Its gaze makes things precious (CV, p. 3). On the other hand, “the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” (TLP 6.43). Metaphorically speaking, these worlds have different limits but not different contents: the same content is simply differently waxed. The content of the world stands in this metaphor for the facts, and waxing of the world stands for evaluating and interpreting. What is the meaning of the expression: “the limit of the world”, then? In my opinion it stands for subject. That is why in TLP 5.632 we read that the subject is a limit of the world, and in TLP 5.641 we read that the non-psychological talk of the self is connected to the fact that the self is a limit of the world, and not its part. Again, one does not have to read these formulations as the ontological claim stating the existence of an extra-mundane object. The interpretation which sees Wittgenstein’s theses as existential claims that in the identification of the self with the limit of the world, Wittgenstein expresses the evaluating activity of subjects. There are subjects that colour the world that is otherwise brute and indifferent. It is a matter of my individual attitude if life has meaning for me. It does not assume anything non-natural. The idea that Tractarian remarks about the correctness of solipsism should not be taken at face value is not new. This approach is represented by, among others,

519 Ernest Gellner was the author who first indicated the solitude of a person as the consequence of Wittgenstein’s standpoint: “The other and more conventional path to despair is by solitary confinement, imposed on the investigative self as it examines its data to see how far they will allow one to proceed, only to and that the data. themselves are the limit of the world, and that self and world are coextensive and identical. This theme is also conspicuously present in the Tractatus. It too guarantees total solitude, emptiness and despair” (Gellner 2004, pp. 60–61).

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Michael Kremer520. However, his interpretation of solipsism is quite different from my reading. First of all, he thinks that the Tractatus offers the reader a precise “path for life, a way to be followed”521, whereas in my view, in which Wittgenstein held ethical judgements to be substantially nonsensical, one could not put into words this kind of moral instruction even if one wanted to. I indicated earlier that the consequence of Wittgenstein’s standpoint with respect to the problems of life was ultimately silence (“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (TLP 7)). In Kremer’s view, “at the end of the Tractatus, we are left with ourselves. We are left, in particular with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author of this book, and his readers – human beings, capable of communicating with, and understanding, one another”522. In my opinion, this conclusion is in sharp disagreement with the Tractatus which underlines, among others, that those who have discovered the sense of life are unable to convey what this sense consists in523. Secondly, I think that solipsism by early Wittgenstein points at the solitude of a person in some relevant aspects of his or her life. Kremer, on the other hand, believes that the solipsistic stance amounts to spiritual counsel: “Act as if you are alone in the world”524. Again, I cannot agree with this interpretation, not only because it sounds slightly arbitrary, but mostly because I think, just like Frascolla, that for Wittgenstein there was no doctrine solving the riddle of life525. It is true that upon my reading Wittgenstein presents a view according to which happiness is independent of fate or events in the world, but I also claim that, according to Wittgenstein, how one understands happiness is an individual matter. On Kremer’s reading there is a very clear answer to the problem of life; and this answer consists in self-abandonment:

520 “I would prefer to say that solipsism is an intellectual, moral and mystical exercise aimed at bringing about a change in one’s spiritual life” (Kremer 2004, p. 59). Andrea Birk sees, on the other hand, in Tractarian solipsism an invitation to vita contemplativa – a contemplation of the logical structure of the world (Birk 2006, p. 80–95). 521 “ ‘Truth’ as something which one can do is not something we might be tempted to think of as expressible in a proposition. It is, rather, a way to be followed a ‘path’ for life. Insofar as the Tractatus communicates a ‘truth’ it is by demonstrating to us, in practice, how to follow such a path” (Kremer 2004, p. 63). 522 Ibid., p. 78. 523 “Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?” (TLP 6.521). 524 Kremer 2004, p. 68. 525 “There is no doctrine that can explain what the solution of the so-called riddle of life is” (Frascolla 2007, p. 213).

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In contrast, I will argue that the ultimate point of the Tractatus’ discussion of solipsism is left behind. This rejection of all forms of self-assertion, including the self-assertion found in certain misguided forms of asceticism, piety and false humility, is what the Tractatus really aims at (Kremer 2004, p. 60).

In my opinion, the original sin of Kremer’s reading, i.e. not taking into account that Wittgenstein ends the Tractatus with the counsel of silence, results in what I would describe as the latitude of his interpretation. Although I agree with Kremer that the solipsistic theses of the Tractatus should not be regarded as ontological ones, I do not think that Wittgenstein, by means of these theses, wanted to propose a concrete model of conduct. Even if he had an idea as to what a decent life consists of, it is the Tractatus itself which states that such ideas are incommunicable.

Summary I tried to show in this chapter how the proponents of the naturalistic reading of the Tractatus can read its solipsistic theses. The presence of these theses has caused many scholars to ascribe to early Wittgenstein solipsistic transcendentalism526, so it is a vital point of my interpretation to reconcile them with the conviction that the worldview of the Tractatus was materialistic. I hope that I have achieved this goal by interpreting the mystical part of the Tractatus as betraying Wittgenstein’s subjectivism in ethics. According to my reading, ethical sentences in the Tractatus express individual and subjective attitudes to the facts in the world: it is up to me if I see the world as created by God, or if I see some events in the world as miraculous or not, or if the goal of my life is wealth or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. In the Notebooks, directly after the solipsistic remark that I am my world, Wittgenstein noted: Things acquire “significance” only through their relation to my will (NB 15.10.16, p. 84)

This claim, however, is not an expression of ontological or epistemological solipsism but of, so to speak, existential solipsism expressing the inability to convey our convictions on the meaning of life. It seems to me that this solution allows, on the one hand, to retain the naturalistic reading of the Tractatus and, at the same time, it does justice to Wittgenstein’s wartime conversion resulting in his interest in the problems of life. The last and at the same time the most basic question in the dissertation reads as follows: how did Wittgenstein reconcile the values of the human world with the scientific worldview? In the conclusions I shall see if the solutions discussed in this chapter bring us any closer to the answers. 526 Zemach 1973, Engelmann 1967, Kannisto 1986, Stern 1995, Atkinson 2009.

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Final Thoughts. The Defence of Human Values by early Wittgenstein On the last pages of this dissertation I shall try to summarise its results. I wrote this work because I was interested in the question as to how Wittgenstein, who fully accepted the scientific worldview, solved the problem of ethics, i.e. the group of issues concerning moral goodness or evil, the meaning of life or aesthetic beauty. If, according to the naturalistic point of view, only physical particles exist – and by that Wittgenstein grants correctness to a proponent of the most farreaching scientism – then how can we talk about the values of the human world? Wittgenstein’s answer seems to me to be interesting exactly because he does not resort to shortcuts consisting of saying that although natural science has made progress, science is somehow limited, and that there are other, equally valuable points of view on reality. He assumes that it is basically possible that a set of true utterances about the world is tantamount to the totality of propositions of science. He asks from this standpoint: what is the role of philosophy? Is there a place in such a worldview for our strong intuitions that some of our deeds are right or wrong; or that some things or events in our lives present themselves as valuable? In my opinion, those interpretations of the Tractatus which emphasise its naturalism do not dedicate much attention to the so-called solipsistic and mystical parts of the Tractatus, or even if they do, it seems that their authors are slightly perplexed by the presence of the mystical theses in Wittgenstein’s early book. Russell, in his famous Introduction to the Tractatus, admitted that the mystical part left him “with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort”, because although Wittgenstein assures that one cannot talk about ethics, “nevertheless, he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions”527. James Griffin, one of the first commentators who interpreted the simple objects as physical atoms, passes over the mystical part or solipsism of the Tractatus in silence. Timm Lampert, who recently renewed the physicalistic interpretation of the Tractatus, claims that the concept of my world indicates merely the fact that I experience the world from the first-person perspective528, but he does not provide any convincing reason why such a trivial remark should account for the label of solipsism?

527 Russell 1922, p. XXIV. 528 “Der Ausdruck ‘mein Welt’ bringt zum Ausdruck, dass ich einen bestimmten Standpunkt in der Welt habe, der Ausdruck ‘die Welt’ nicht” (Lampert 2000, p. 309).

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On the other hand, interpretations which try to do justice to the mystical and solipsistic theses do so very often at the expense of taking Wittgenstein’s naturalism seriously. One group of these commentaries – the transcendental ones – claims that when Wittgenstein was saying that science describes reality completely, he had in mind an empirical reality which does not exclude his acceptance of the existence of a higher order of things529. The second group is represented by McGuinness, who rightly notices that, according to Wittgenstein, religion and ethics are not fact-stating discourses or that propositions of science distort the nature of ethics530, but because he asserts at the same time that Tractarian simples are “the truth-value potential of a certain expression”531, then he finds an exclusion of ethical utterances from the set of meaningful expressions “somewhat arbitrary”532. What is common to both of these strategies is denying that early Wittgenstein was a naturalist. But if he was not, then why did he propagate methodological scientism in TLP 4.11? Why did he say that ethical expressions necessarily cross the limits of language? And if someone answered that because these expressions try to convey necessary truths, then the question reads as follows: why then did Wittgenstein identify true meaningful propositions with contingent truths?533 If he truly believed in the existence of the transcendental self, and he truly had some arguments in favour of this thesis, then why did he claim that philosophy has merely two functions: to repeat what scientists say and to guard the limits of meaningful expressions (TLP 4.114)? As we saw in the work, interpretations which do not accept the thesis

529 “This is his one and ever-recurring thought: that the higher sphere, values, God do not form part of the contents of the world, are not something within the world, to be found in it and proved to exist; but are something manifested by the world seen from the outside” (Engelmann 1967, p. 98). 530 “The real point of isolating so clearly the nature of science turns out to be that any attempt at a scientific approach to human problems – moral, social, religious, or existential – involves a misconception of these problems (…). It is perhaps, a further point that problems in ethics, for example, are not to be dealt with like ones in science, using hypotheses, generalizations, thought-experiments” (McGuinness 2002, p. 128). 531 Ibid., p. 87. 532 Ibid., p. 78. 533 Instructive in this respect is Flanagan’s interpretation which states that Wittgenstein was a non-naturalist in ethics because he believed that the metaphysics of morality proclaims necessary truths (Flanagan 2011, p. 186). At the same time, Flanagan admits that Wittgenstein did not back up this position with conclusive arguments, and he passes over in silence the problem as to why Wittgenstein thought that only contingent truths are meaningful.

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that Wittgenstein granted ontological authority to natural science have their own insolvable problems. In my dissertation I tried, first of all, to find a balance between these contradictory views on the Tractatus. I tried to treat seriously the thesis identifying true propositions with the propositions of natural science. Second of all, I tried to see how this “balanced” take on the Tractatus can answer the fundamental problem posed by this book. Because I think that the naturalistic interpretations of the Tractatus are rather in defence, I made an effort in my work most of all to defend the view that Wittgenstein acknowledged the results and progress of natural science with all its consequences for our views on what exists. In the first chapter I defended the view, against the anti-metaphysical interpretation, that there is indeed in the Tractatus tension between the scientific worldview and our intuitions about ethics (the anti-metaphysical interpretation denies that there is any worldview in the Tractatus). I showed that Wittgenstein was interested in metaphysical topics (in the understanding of metaphysics as a theory of what exists). I stressed the fact that Wittgenstein himself admitted that his initial considerations on the nature of a proposition evolved into an inquiry into the nature of being. I argued that the picture theory of meaning assuming the idea of a comparison between a proposition and a respective state of affairs, so to speak, “introduced reality” into the scope of interests of early Wittgenstein. I was also advancing arguments in favour of a claim that the most fundamental ontological thesis of the Tractatus is TLP 2.02, which states that objects are simple. In the following chapter I tried to figure out what the simples of the Tractatus are. I defended the materialistic interpretation according to which Tractarian simples are physical atoms – the most elementary particles of matter (I defended this view against the phenomenalistic interpretation which sees the simple units of perception in the role of simple objects). One of the most important arguments in favour of the physicalistic interpretation indicates the way Wittgenstein analysed the language of sensations in the Tractatus. This analysis assumes the truthfulness of the physical concepts of colours and the priority of the language of physics over the language of sensations. In Chapter 2 I also addressed the issue concerning the nonsensicality of expressions which state the existence of objects. The problem reads as follows: if Wittgenstein held the sentence: “There are two objects in this room” to be nonsensical, then how can I sustain that he believed that the sentence: “Simple objects are the most elementary particles of matter” was true? By answering this accusation I made use of the distinction between substantial and mere nonsense. Utterances about simple objects belong to the first category, and this means that one can show what they aim to say by means of other propositions. In my view, only a materialistic interpretation of the Tractatus 255

can explain thesis TLP 4.11 (the identification of true propositions with the propositions of natural science). If Wittgenstein thought that all one can meaningfully say is said by physics, then there is no other option than to ascribe ontological materialism to him. In Chapter 3 I continued my considerations by showing how the materialistic worldview affects, in Wittgenstein’s eyes, the activity of philosophers. In the famous thesis TLP 6.53, he counsels philosophers to repeat what scientists have to say. If a philosopher wanted to break this rule, he counsels that that philosopher has not conferred any meaning on the (presumably non-scientific) signs that philosopher is using. In my opinion, Wittgenstein applied this strategy in TLP 5.545.5422. His theory of judgement stating that a belief consists in a relation between an event in the brain and a state of affairs aims, among others, to prove that Russell did not confer any meaning in his theory of judgement on the concept of the mind. On the example of this fragment of the Tractatus one can notice Wittgenstein’s scepticism towards ontotheology, i.e. philosophy which tries to guarantee the fundamentals for faith and moral values by providing competitive theories describing the world or by claiming that there is an aspect or part of the world – subjectmatter characteristic only of philosophy. Russell’s theory of judgement – belonging to the tradition of dualism – is a good example of such philosophy. Its silent assumption is the conviction that the realm of the mental is special subject-matter for philosophical inquiry and its goal is to guarantee the distinctive character of the mental. The second example of ontotheology is transcendental philosophy. In Chapter 4 I analysed the views of those who think that Schopenhauer’s influence on early Wittgenstein was so great that Wittgenstein himself could be classified as a transcendental idealist. What the transcendental interpretations capture correctly is the question of the fundamental problem of the Tractatus. However, I claim that the medicine the transcendental interpretation applies to the disease of modernity is harmful. Transcendentalists try to infer from the imperfections of the scientific worldview (which were also noted by Wittgenstein534) that there is a part of reality that is not captured by the scientific description of the world. For instance, if a scientific description of the world does not contain a reference to moral values, then one has to postulate the existence of a transcendental object (such as the willing subject) through which values enter into the world. In Chapter 4 I aimed to show that this was not and that it could not be Wittgenstein’s solution. According to the Tractatus, even if we experience the imperfections of science with respect to the

534 “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched” (TLP 6.52).

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problems of life, the only moral one should draw is that there are no meaningful answers to these kinds of problems at all: “Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer” (TLP 6.52). The results of these chapters are mostly negative: young Wittgenstein did not defend a transcendental view, but he was not a proponent of neo-positivism either (he did not intend to deny the importance of ethics). What then was his position? How did he reconcile ontological materialism with sensitivity to the problem of the meaning of life? In Chapter 5 I described his view as subjectivism. Remembering that for Wittgenstein, ethics includes not only issues connected with morality, but also with aesthetics and the meaning of life, I put forward a hypothesis that for him ethical utterances express the attitude of a speaker to the world. These attitudes are irrational, i.e. not based on facts. The events of the world have no impact on the attitudes one holds. For Wittgenstein, obviously, the expressions of these attitudes are nonsensical and one should, consequently, be silent about them. This solution, in my opinion, has an advantage over the transcendental interpretation because it does not contradict naturalism. Someone who accepts subjectivism is not bound to accept the existence of non-natural objects belonging to the higher sphere of reality. A proponent of subjectivism, in opposition to a transcendental philosopher, can grant natural science ontological authority. For him it is not the sphere of facts which is the subject-matter of discussion between people holding two different ethical opinions but rather the way they interpret facts. The subjectivist philosophy of the Tractatus does not compete with the scientific description of the world. It merely states that one can have different attitudes to what is described by science. At the same time, it admits that these attitudes (for instance that Somebody is taking care of me in this world, that my fate is in His hands) cannot be put into words meaningfully – they are mere nonsense under the Tractarian standards of sense. How then did this subjective turn address the fundamental problem of the Tractatus? Did early Wittgenstein succeed in the task of safeguarding values in a world that is observing a rapid influence of science on our thinking? In the Introduction I pointed at three aspects of this defence. One should protect human values from the claims of science because: 1. Science distorts ethical and religious notions and it can lead to treating human beings as objects. 2. Science treats religious and ethical convictions as premature views on the world. This entails that a rational person educated in the 20th or 21th century should reject naive ethics and religious beliefs. 3. The progress of science results in our lack of interest in the problems of life. 257

With respect to the last point I would say that it is an interesting question for sociology to decide what factors have the greatest impact on people’s interests. Does the lecture of the Tractatus stimulate ethical considerations in its readers? Obviously, this is not a philosophical question, and we do not know if Wittgenstein in this sense defended the world of human values. With respect to the first point, there are commentators who underline that the significance of the Tractatus also consists in its prohibition of seeing human beings as objects among other objects. Usually, these interpretations assume the transcendental reading of the book535. According to these interpretations the self is not an object of the empirical reality but its limit. Hence, one cannot apply the notion of an object to the self. The problem is that I do not think that the transcendental interpretation in general is right. I expressed my doubts if, according to the Tractatus, there is such a thing as the self. The only meaningful view, according to the Tractatus, with respect to human beings is to see them as bodies (TLP 5.631). This view alone can lead to treating human beings as objects. Moreover, if the subjectivist interpretation is right, then it is possible to see human beings as persons possessing value and dignity, but at the same time it limits the validity of this view just to my individual perspective. It does not give me any tools to criticise the view of somebody who, for example, does not value black people as persons. His view, according to Tractarian subjectivism, is just as nonsensical as mine. It turns out that one of the costs of Tractarian naturalism is that it does not give me any intellectual weapons in the fight with racism and other appalling moral views (remember, for early Wittgenstein the only efficient weapon in ethics with respect to convincing others is the infectious example of good behaviour). In my opinion, Wittgenstein’s defence of values works only with respect to the second point, but even here at a price which, for instance, the rational theists are not eager to pay. I would even say that the whole of Wittgenstein’s defence of the values of the human world could be reduced to the question of having the right to hold certain moral and religious judgements; the right which is supposedly endangered by scientific development. In my opinion, Wittgenstein’s tactics to defend the world of human values consists in two claims. First, if I am correct in my reading, moral judgements express attitudes and evaluations. Secondly, Wittgenstein believed in the dichotomy between facts and valuations. I argued in Chapter 5 that for this position there is no connection between interpretations and evaluations and facts.

535 Sluga 1983; Klagge 1989.

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Let us take the notion which clearly belongs to the human point of view, i.e. the notion of a miracle. A proponent of neo-positivism or scientism rejects the existence of miracles because the notion of a miracle assumes the intervention of a supernatural power536, and according to the naturalist worldview there is no place for such entities537. According to him, a believer commits a mistake when he or she believes, for example, that a recovery from a serious illness is a miracle. Science can provide a more accurate description of the sequence of events that led to the recovery. It is exactly this conviction which is the object of Wittgenstein’s fierce attack. The notions of ethics or religion under a subjectivist understanding are not supposed to describe the world or the sequence of events, so someone who accepts subjectivism can agree with the proponent of scientism with respect to what happened in the case of a recovery. He or she can not only concede the value of scientific explanation, but also agree that only naturalistic explanations are authentic. But the interpretation or the evaluation of the natural chain of events is a different thing. I underlined in Chapter 5 that this interpretation is subjective – it has nothing to do with the facts – not only the present facts but also facts from natural history (so the possible discoveries of evolutionary biologists do not have to have any influence on people’s evaluations, attitudes and interpretations). If it is not necessarily connected with the facts, then one has the right to hold the attitudes one holds. For example, one has a right to see in a particular recovery a miracle. If that is so, then, as Wittgenstein asserts: It is absurd to say: ‘Science has proved that there are no miracles’. The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle (LE, p. 11).

In other words, when a philosopher says that one, by believing in miracles, holds false convictions about the world, he is simply distorting the notion of a miracle. Wittgenstein’s view entails that nothing that science claims can force a believer to abandon his or her attitudes to the world. In a positivistic view, religious or ethical statements are provisory descriptions of the world, which one should reject when one acquires scientific knowledge538. On the other hand, according to Wittgenstein, one has the right to hold his or her attitudes to the world, attitudes

536 Vollmer 2007, p. 39. 537 “Strong naturalism asserts that the distinction between nature and a realm over or beyond nature is preposterous. ‘World’, ‘cosmos’ or ‘universe’ include every actually existing ‘thing’. There is no place (and space) for supernatural entities” (Sukopp 2007, p. 79). 538 “It is my belief that the ethical and religious motives, in spite of the splendidly imaginative systems to which they have given rise, have been on the whole a hindrance

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according to which one evaluates the events in the world as miraculous, valuable, good or evil. In this sense, in my opinion, Wittgenstein succeeds in safeguarding the world of human values. If propositions of science express states of affairs, then interpretations of facts (especially interpretations of the totality of facts) are not scientific. This means, however, that interpretations of facts cross the limits of meaningful discourse. If a believer says that it seems to him or her that the world is telling him or her that his or her existence was intentionally planned by a loving and omnipotent Being, then his or her utterance is nonsensical. It is exactly as nonsensical as the utterance of a positivist who says that the world tells him or her nothing (but is this a consolation for believers?). Both of them cross the limits of sense. If both utterances are equally nonsensical, then it is up to me which nonsense I choose. Although in the eyes of the author of the Tractatus it would be best to keep silent in this case, he himself could not despise the efforts of those who, nevertheless, cross the limits of language: My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (…) But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it (LE, p. 11–12).

This means that if I am correct in my interpretation, early Wittgenstein defends ethics and reconciles it with the naturalistic worldview at an undeniably high price. According to the Tractatus one has the right to hold ethical convictions at the expense of their nonsensicality. Whereas scientism claims that religious utterances are false, early Wittgenstein claims that sentences of religion, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless – one does not communicate any content by means of them. The consequence of the nonsensicality of ethics is the irrationality of ethical views. From the point of view of someone who tries to secure the world of human values from the demands of science, it has a bright side. In principle, nothing from the outside can force one to change one’s attitudes. This means that one is immune to what science can tell with respect to ethics. On the other hand, the immunity of our attitudes against the influence of the outer world makes us, in the eyes of Wittgenstein, similar to Leibnizian monads. In my opinion, this is why he says that what solipsism tries to express is correct (TLP 5.62). This view has a depressing practical consequence. Recall that the final conclusion of the Tractatus to the progress of philosophy, and ought now to be consciously thrust aside by those who wish to discover the philosophical truth” (Russell 1914b, p. 57).

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states that what cannot be said – and the problems of life are included under this rubric – should be passed over in silence (TLP 7). This means that in the eyes of the author of the Tractatus we should not talk with one another about the most important problems of our lives. Finally, my hypothesis of subjectivism of early Wittgenstein has another unpalatable consequence for those who would want to defend their right of expressing ethical or religious convictions. It particularly refers to religious utterances. According to Wittgenstein, someone who says: “I believe that God exists” in fact expresses his trustful attitude to the world. He interprets facts in the world in such a way that for him life has meaning539. We would probably find many believers who would agree that religious statements are not in contradiction with the propositions of science, and that religion has a different function than science (the former confers a meaning on lives; the latter describes the world). We would probably find many believers who conclude that God exists not on the basis of facts but simply by interpreting the world as a whole – they have this kind of sensitivity which allows them to look at things in the world and conclude: “Somebody has to stand behind all of this”. But exactly the last conclusion is not in accordance with the subjectivism I ascribe to Wittgenstein. Notice that a religious expression, according to subjectivism, expresses the speaker’s interpretation of the world but not his ontological convictions. In other words, faith means for Wittgenstein that when being confronted with the world one states that one feels safe, or that life has meaning; but not that being confronted with the world one concludes that there is a Creator of it540. Probably for this reason he was not seen by Englemann or Malcolm as a religious person in the traditional meaning of the word541. I am not sure if many believers would be ready to accept that they have the right to their religious convictions but at the expense of accepting that these convictions say

539 “To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning” (NB 8.7.16, p. 74). 540 “If the believer in God looks around & asks ‘Where does everything I see come from?’, ‘Where does all that come from?’, what he hankers after is not a (causal) explanation; and the point of his question is that it is the expression of this hankering. He is expressing, then, a stance towards all explanations” (CV, p. 96–97). 541 “Was Wittgenstein religious? (…) The idea of God in the sense of a Bible, the image of God as a Creator, hardly ever engaged Wittgenstein’s attention” (Engelmann 1967, p. 77). “I do not wish to give the impression that Wittgenstein accepted any religious faith – he certainly did not – or that he was a religious person” (Malcolm 1984, p. 60); von Wright wrote: “I do not know whether he can be said to have been ‘religious’ in any but a trivial sense of this word” (von Wright 1955/1967, p. 27).

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nothing about the existence of God. In other words, Wittgenstein’s subjectivism comes close to the accusation of distorting the nature of religious beliefs. This accusation is clear with respect to religious discourse. It is doubtful that religious persons would agree that their religions say nothing about God, the afterlife, etc. It is less clear (maybe it is the subject-matter for sociology) with respect to ethics. Would people agree that they have a right to hold their moral judgements, but only under the condition that they do not understand them as saying anything about objective moral values or moral laws? If they did not, then it would be another argument against Wittgenstein’s defence of the world of human values. The costs of reconciling the right to hold ethical and religious views with the naturalistic worldview are indeed great, but at least in my opinion only an interpretation which assumes such a subjective turn in the early writings of Wittgenstein is able to find a balance between the naturalism of the Tractatus and its modernistic anxiety about the impact of scientific progress on the world of human values. To put it in Wittgenstein’s words, it finds a balance between the written and the unwritten part of the book. However, it seems that Wittgenstein himself did not hold for very long this subjectivist answer to the fundamental problem of the Tractatus. We saw that already in 1929 in A Lecture on Ethics he gave in to the temptation to express the nonsense of ethics. He acknowledges there that ethics is a constant and invincible tendency in the human mind. In the later development of his philosophical career he tended to concede that ethical and religious expressions convey, after all, content – one just cannot cross them off as nonsensical. From his Tractarian starting point he had two possible paths to follow: he could choose the transcendental path, i.e. to sustain that meaningful expressions are only those expressed by science, but simultaneously admitting that there are objects and aspects of reality which science cannot capture, or he could deny that only propositions of science are meaningful. In my opinion, in Philosophical Investigations he chose the latter possibility. Dissatisfaction with the solution to the fundamental problem of the Tractatus was strictly connected with the idea as to what it means to convey content (or, in other words, with the idea of one final analysis of linguistic expressions – c.f. PI, 91). It is possible, then, that the fact that the bulk of Wittgenstein’s later work was devoted to the problem of the sense of propositions could easily be explained by the hypothesis that he was constantly searching for the answer to his fundamental problem; however, the development and justification of this hypothesis does not belong to the subject-matter of this dissertation.

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