| Wittgenstein:
(Emphasis in bold is inserted by Shawver to enhance commentary.) |
Shawver commentary: |
| 89. These considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense
is logic something sublime?
For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth
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In 89, Wittgenstein wants to study the idea that
logic is sublime, not challenge it. The question is: How did we come
to believe that logic is sublime? Is there any sense in which it
is?
The people of our culture have believed that logic is sublime for a
long, long time. Since Aristotle, at least, philosophers have
been inspired with the idea that logic is something something lofty.
It seems if we could only get logic right, define things precisely enough,
then we could make sense of all things.
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| --It takes its rise, not from an interest-- in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp cause connexions: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand. | This glorification of logic emerges, not from our
need to grasp particular connections, (such as what specifically causes
what), but a desire to find a key that will open up the world for us, make
it all make sense. The quest is not to uncover something new, but to understand
something that is already before us, but confuses us.
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| Augustine says in the Confessions "quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex
me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio".
|
this translates as: "What therefore is time? If you don't ask me, I know - if you ask me, I don't know." In other words, this lofty logic is something we understand until we are asked about it. Then, suddenly, we see how confusing it is to us. |
| -This could not be said about a question of natural science ("What is the specific gravity of hydrogen?" for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (An it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.) | This feel that we understand until we think about
it is characteristic of logical problems, but not of scientific ones.
There are many scientific problems that we either no the answers to or
we don't. The answers to scientific problems do not typically have
this strange capacity to slip away from us when we think more about them.
|
| 90. We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not towards phenomena, but,
as one might say, towards the 'possibilities' of phenomena.
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When we feel that logic is lofty, we feel as though we had to penetrate phenomena, but we do not actually look at what we are studying in order to try to penetrate it with our logic. We simply think about things, or study them, in our reflection, which is sometimes quite divorced from any kind of observation. We might ask about our subject, for example, in relationship to certain possibilities. We might ponder, for example, if time would continue to exist if the world stopped turning. |
| We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement
that we make about phenomena.
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"And we remember," we might say to ourselves, "that time seems to be pass more quickly when you're busy. What does that mean about time?" So, this kind of logical reflection is more reflective than observational. |
| Thus Augustine recalls to mind the different statements that are made
about the duration, past present or future, of events. (These are, of course, not philosophical statements
about time, the past, the present and the future.)
Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away.
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So our investigation is not based on observations
of new data. Instead, it is a study of the things we say or have
said. Our purpose is to clear away certain misunderstandings that
seem to block clarity about the topic that interests us. It is grammatical
in the sense that we might ponder the meaning of certain terms.
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| Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other
things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different
regions of language.
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Many of these misunderstandings result from the fact that there are superficial similarities between different regions of langauge. If I say "love" when I am scoring tennis, this does not mean the same thing as when I speak endearingly. These things continuously confuse us. |
| -Some of them can be removed by substituting one form of expression
for another; this may be called an "analysis" of our forms of expression, for the process is sometimes like one of
taking a thing apart.
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Some of this confusion can be removed by replacing words with other words that seem less confusing. "Love" we might say, "means zero" so instead of saying the score 30-love. We might say that the score is 30-zero, in order to be less confused and confusing. There are many multiple uses of most terms that get confused this way, and we are scarcely aware of them. When we do study them, unravel the equivocations, this we might call "analysis." |
| 91. But now it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light. When this is done the expression is completely clarified and our problem solved. | When we analyze the equivocations, straighten things
out, it sometimes begins to appear as though we could finally get a picture
of the accurate meaning, that we could invent, even, ways of talking that
allowed tus o speak in ways that are completely clear, so that the problem at hand is solved.
|
| It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation. | When we are mystified like this, we think we can find a way to put things that will eliminate all misunderstandings. It will just require, so we think, more exactness. It even seems that exactness, not clarity, is the real goal of our investigation. |
| 92. This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought. | So, when philosophers ask about the essence of language they often strive for more exactness. |
| -For if we too in these investigations are trying to understand the essence of language - its function, its structure, --yet this is not what those questions have in view. | It may seem that this is what we, in this book, are
trying to do as well. But the questions we ask are different.
|
| For they see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but
something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which
we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out.
|
Their questions are about essences and ours or not. They are looking for something real that lies beneath the surface. They want to dig out something deep that they are looking for. We are trying to understand that which is in view, but which we somehow have difficulty understanding. |
| 'The essence is hidden from us': this is the form our problem now assumes.
We ask: "What is language?", "What is a proposition?" And the answer to these questions is to be
given once for all; and independently of any future experience.
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If we are in their frame of reference, and we ask questions about the essence of things, we look for answers that can be given now and do not require future experience. The essence of language cannot change. If langauge has an essence, so they think, it exists everywhere that langauge exists, and we need to unravel it without looking at future language. Not so for us. We will look at changeable aspects of language that happen to create patterns during our cultural experience. For example, whereas they will look for what "truth" really is, apart from any true statement, we will be inspired to notice the ways in which this term is used in our culture. |
| One person might say "A proposition is the most ordinary thing in the world" and another: "A proposition - that's something very queer!" --And the latter is unable simply to look and see how propositions really work. The forms that we use in expressing ourselves about propositions and thought stand in his way. | When they are looking for essences they do not look
at the way the statements actually work and how we use them. They
look for something hidden from us. We look for something we can watch and see.
|
| Why do we say a proposition is something remarkable? On the one hand,
because of the enormous importance attaching to it. (And that is
correct). On the other hand this, together with a misunderstanding of the
logic of language, seduces us into thinking that something extraordinary,
something unique, must be achieved by propositions.
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When this logic of propositions seems remarkable, it is for two reasons. One I endorse: There is much importance attaching to language, and why and how that is so is worthy of our reflection. The second reason we think logic is remarkable is that we are seduced by certain illusions that tell us that language is alien to other things in the world. We will find the distinction between language and non-language quite blurry. Our culture tends to polarize the world, mistakenly I feel, into language and not-language, failing to see that the distinction is not so complete as we at first think. |
| -A misunderstanding makes it l ook to us as if a propositions did something
queer.
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Our recognition of the importance of language, plus our having been seduced into seeing it as something completely different from non-language, makes langauge propositions (statements) seem very odd, indeed. |
| 94. 'A proposition is a queer thing!' Here we have in germ the subliming
of our whole account of logic.
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And so we say, in our state of mystification, "a statement that talks about things, that is a proposition - is a very odd thing." Seducing ourselves into this mystification I will call "subliming" our account of logic. It is the way in which we make logic, and language, mysticial. |
| The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional
signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves.
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When we sublime the logic of our langauge in this way, we turn it into a kind of ghost which is seems to work as an intermediary between the statements we make and the words we say. We try to get rid of the words (signs) themself and stare at the essence, this linguistic ghost, so to speak, that connects our words with the facts they are meant to portray. |
| -For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing
that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras.
|
Seduced by the ghost of language into seeing apparitions between words and things (into seeing "selves" "minds" "schizophrenia" as things), for example, we are distracted and do not notice the ordinary that is involved. |
| 95. "Thought must be something unique". When we say, and mean, that
such-and-such is the case, we -- and our meaning-- do not stop anywhere
short of the fact; but we mean: this-is-so. But this paradox (which has the form of a
truism) can also be expressed in this way: Thought can be of what
is not the case.
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This aphorism simply talks about the puzzle that
is of interest in this section of the text. We should let ourselves
feel this aporia as much as possible, I think, so Wittgenstein can help
us learn our way out -- because although we may be alert to the paradoxes
and confusions here, we are not always so alert, and can't be, because we have to
let down our guard, so to speak, to let language function with us so we
can understand what people are saying.
This notion that "thought can be of what is not the case" is a matter
of some profundity in philosophy. The paradoxes in philosophy that
that thought produces have been known since the pre-socratic Parmenides.
Socrates met Parmenides when he was a young man and it is arguably Parmenides that started the whole tradition of Platonic illusion. Parmenides
thought that "all was one" and that we should resist the thought that we
can think negations. It is negations (thought about what is not the
case) that confuse us, Parmenides argued. To consider the paradoxes
of "thinking about what is not the case" - consider the statement "Where
does the hole in the donut go when you eat the donut?" Thinking about what
is not the case leads us into paradoxical aporias, Parmenides would have
said and many philosophers who have come later have struggled with this
paradox (especially Sartre in his work Being and Nothingness). But
the point here in LW is that it seems, nevertheless, that we can do it.
We can think "It is not the case that today is Thursday." This is
perplexing if langauge is designed to point to objects. We might
also say, "There are no unicorns." And, since unicorns are fictions, and (according to the old theory), words work
by pointing to objects then language is functioning in a most mysterious
way -- so it seems. It seems, can you tell, that language can actually
point to something mysteriously ghostlike that corresponds with the words. I don't mean that we can point to a picture of a unicorn.
We could point, so this way of thinking suggests, to the concept of a unicorn
that exists for all of us that know the name. But, where does this
ghostlike thing, this concept, exist?
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| 96. Other illusions come from various quarters to attach themselves
to the special one spoken of here. Thought, language, now appear to us
as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts proposition,
language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent
to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game
in which they are to be applied is missing.)
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In this aporia, we say to ourselves, it seems that various illusions attach to the notion that we can point to this mysterious object of meaning. It suddenly appears, when we are pointing that thought, say the unicorn, or the hole in the donut, must create a picture of something in the world. But, in our aporia, we ask ourselves, "How can that be?" How can we, point to something that isn't there? How can we, for example, point to the "self" when the self is a ghost of some kind, a ghost of meaning? How can we point to the hole in the donut? How can we point to "language"? "Thought"? etc. And, thinking this way, langauge seems like something unique, something that can point beyond the visible world, point deep into something hidden and mysterious. Language appears to be us to be something remarkably powerful, almost magical. And, if we decide we cannot point to these things, do these words "hole" "mental picture of the world" make any sense? |
| 97. Thought is surrounded by a halo. --Its essence, logic, present
an order, in fact the a priori order of the world: that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world
and thought. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to a experience, must run through all
experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it --It must rather be of the
purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete,
as it were the hardest thing there is (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus No.
5.5563).
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In this aporia,
it seems, that thought is surrounded by a kind of halo. This halo
of thought is "essence" or "logic", and this logical-essence-halo seems
to hold the world in some kind of order, to organize it. Without
that organizing halo the world would appear chaotic. But this organizing
halo must be completely simple, perfect in someway. It would not
work for this metaphysical-halo of essences to have something confused about it, something fuzzy. And, we must
have this organizing principle prior to our being able to make sense of
anything. Without this organizing principle, all if confusion.
-- folks, this is pure Plato. The Platonic
writings we have include beautiful tales about how this works. In
the Platonic dialogue, The Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates
saying, "[t]here abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible
essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul." Many postmoderns
refer
to this writing, this writing that seemed to cast an illusion over the
way we think. See Nietzsche and
Derrida, for example, as well as Wittgenstein. And, see my writing - which I'll send you an Electronic
copy of if you like, describing how postmodern philosophies have seen this
mystification to have emerged out of the writing of Plato. I describe
this in the first part of my paper, "Postmodernizing the Unconscious.
http://www.california.com/~http://postmoderntherapies.com/pmth.html/shawver.htm I believe that this is where Wittgenstein and Derrida begin to come together. This mystification here that Wittgenstein is talking about is Derrida's "logocentrism." He talks about it quite explicitly in Of Grammaology, and I go over that, as I recall, in my paper. |
| We are under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential, in our investigation, resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the order existing between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on. This order is a super-order between --so to speak-- super-concepts. Whereas, of course, if the words "language", "experience", "world", have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words "table", "lamp", "door". | And, so, in this state of mystification we are under the illusion that there is some essence of langauge, some magical essence, and that we are trying to grasp this essence, which is just beyond our grasp. This essence consists in the organizing principles, concrete almost, ghostlike organizing principles. And these appear to be permanent fixtures in the world. How can they change, we say in our illusions, they are the principles that control the world of human understanding? See #91 |
| 98. On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language
is in order as it is'. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal,
as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable
sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.-- On the other
hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect order.
So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence.
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But there is aporia while in this mystification,
because, for example, we know that it is a bit odd to say that we can point to nothing,
and yet it seems we can. It seems with my concepts, I can point to
the fact that John is not in his seat. I see the seat empty.
How can I do that? Then, noticing this aporia and we think that the
problem is that the language that we use is not quite perfect enough, so we want
to make it more perfect, more exact. This perfect language awaits
our construction. What will it be like? Well, it seems, it
will be much like the one we have, only more exact, more perfect.
Thinking like this, we say to ourself that the organizing principle that controls everything
is there even in the fuzzy imperfect principle, but still, things do not
quite work correctly. The organizing principle is perfect, we just
have a language that is an imperfect picture of it. There are a few
flaws, and we must figure them out and fix them.
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| 99. The sense of a sentence --one would like to say-- may, of course,
leave this or that open, but the sentence must nevertheless have a definite
sense. An indefinite sense-- that would really not be a sense at all. --This
is like: An indefinite boundary is not really a boundary at all. Here one thinks perhaps: if I say "I have locked the man up fast in the
room --there is only one door left open"-- then I simply haven't locked
him in at all; his being locked in is a sham. One would be inclined to
say here: "You haven't done anything at all". An enclosure with a hole
in it is as good as none. --But is that true?
|
In this perfect language, that, in our mystification
it seems we must construct (if we are to gain any clarity) we may, of course,
allow for a sentence to have some flexibility. We might have a structure
like, "The book is on the table" that could be adapted to "The pen is on
the table." But, it seems, there must be something quite definite
in the boundaries of it all. We can't have the basic rules be flexible.
If I leave any of the basic rules flexible, it seems, I might as well not
have any rules at all. (Think how this relates to Lyotard and his
notion that we negotiate the basic rules of our language in paralogy.
We can say, now, in our postmodernism, "This is what I mean by X" and, sometimes,
people can follow us.)
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| 100. "But still, it isn't a game, if there is some vagueness in the
rules". -- But does this prevent its being a game? -- "Perhaps you'll call it a game, but at any rate it certainly isn't
a perfect game." This means: it has impurities, and what I am interested
in at present is the pure article. -But I want to say: we misunderstand the role of the ideal in our language.
That is to say: we too should call it a game, only we are dazzled by the
ideal and therefore fail to see the actual use of the word "game" clearly.
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And so, let me ask you, must there be exact rules in order for us to
have a "game"? Or is this just an illusion of our logocentrism?
The mystified voice responds, well, you can call this game without precise
rules a game if you wish, but it is not a perfect game. But, now,
as I think through this, finding my way out of the fly bottle, Wittgenstein
says, I want to say that we misunderstand the nature of our task here.
We are far too dazzled by the dream that increased precision will show
us clarity.
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