I. New LiBht on WittBenstein MORE than four years ago 1 I ventured to put forward some ideas about the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The publication, within the last year or two, of a number of important books of Wittgensteiniana 2 has seemed to offer a good occasion for reviewing this earlier essay. The present article proposes to assess these books and, in the light of them to reconsider the writer's earlier interpre­tation of Wittgenstein, as well as to embark on a more ambitious study of Wittgenstein's later thought. I shall begin with some general remarks about the books in question.

1. Introductory During the past twenty-five years one of the great causes of

misunderstanding of Wittgenstein and hence of misconceived advocacy as well as of mischievous criticism, has been the lack of published texts. It has been said that Wittgenstein ' inspired two important schools of thought (logical positivism and the analytic or linguistic movement), both of which he repudiated'.3 Professor von Wright remarks: 'To learn from Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of expression and catch-words and even to imitate his tone of voice, his mien and gestures, was almost im­possible. The danger was that the thoughts should deteriorate into a jargon '.4 Professor Malcolm quotes Wittgenstein as having once concluded a year's lectures by saying: 'The only seed that I am likely to sow is a certain jargon '.5 Wittgenstein has certainly suffered more than most great philosophers from ' the misfortune of having disciples'. But both the misinterpretation and the , jargonising' of his thought by self-styled disciples, were made inevitable by the way in which his teaching was relayed through

1 See • Irish Theological Quarterly', April, 1956, pp. 112-150. 2 The Blue and Brown Books. Preliminary Studies for the' Philosophical Investi­

gations '. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958, pp. 185. 25s. An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. By G. E. M. Anscombe. London:

Hutchinson University Library, 1959, pp. 179. lOs. 6d. Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir. By Norman Malcolm. With a Biographical

Sketch by Georg Henrik von Wright. Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 100. 12s. 6d.

The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein. By David Pole. University of London: The Athlone Press, 1958, pp. 132. 15s.

Reference will also be made to Words and Things, by Ernest Gellner. Gollancz, London, 1959; and to Philosophy and Linguistic Analysis, by Maxwell John Charles­worth, Duquesne Studies, Philosophical Series, 9, Duquesne University, Pittsburg, Pa., 1959.

3 G. H. von Wright, in Ludwig Wittgensteill, A Memoir, p. 1. 'Ibid., p. 19. /; Ibid., p. 63.

5

6 PIDLOSOPIflCAL STUDIES

oral transmission or by lecture notes, more or less unoffically copied and more or less clandestinely circulated.

Yet it is unfair to accuse Wittgenstein of cultivated esotericism and to speak, as Mr. Gellner does, of his ' authoritarian, capricious, messianic and exclusive characteristics '.6 We must believe and we can rightly respect the reasons Wittgenstein himself gives us for his reluctance to publish. In 1945, when he wrote the Preface to Philosophical Investigations,? he said:

Mter several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into [a systematic] whole, I realised that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination-and this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation: for this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. . .. Thus this book is really only an album.

Wittgenstein was also extremely pessimistic about the reception his thought might have. He continues:

I make [my remarks] public with doubtful feelings. It is notim­possible that it should fall to the lot of this. work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or other-but of course it is not likely. I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if .possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own. I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.

The first two sentences above are usually cited in proof of Wittgenstein's maniacal pride. This is a great injustice. Wittgenstein was by temperament pessimistic. Professor von Wright tells us:

[He] had the conviction, he sometimes said, that. he was doomed. His· outlook was typically one of gloom. Modern times were to him a dark age. His idea of the helplessness of human beings was not unlike certain doctrines of predestination.8

Professor Malcolm concurs: It was [his] character to be deeply pessimistic both about his own prospects and those· of humanity in general. Anyone who· was on an intimate footing with Wittgenstein must have been aware of the feeling in him that our lives are ugly and our minds in the dark­a feeling that was often close to despair.9

'Words and Things, p. 242. Mr. Gellner, in a footnote which is surely' void of uncertainty' simply says: • Cf. N. Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London, 1958'. . 7 Basil Blackwell, Oxford (1953) 1958. German text with Englishtranslatiem by G, E. ~. Anscombe. l'hiswa,s the ·firstof the series of posthumously published wor-~~::ofWit.igenst~ !'9ited. by q. H;von Wright, R, Rhees ·and '(r. E:;~; Anscombe. . .

8 Ludwig Wlttgenstein. A Memoir, p.20 •.. • Ibid., p. 72.

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 7

His peSSIDllsm was not due to megalomania. Why have the people who repeat this charge not paid any attention to the quotation from Nestroy which stands alone on the title page of Philosophical Investigations? It says, simply and humbly: 'It is in the nature of every advance that it appears much greater than it actually is '. Malcolm, who was in a position to know, grants that:

He did not think of the central conceptions of his philosophy as possibly in error. He certainly believed most of the time that he had produced an important advance in philosophy. Yet 1 think that he was inclined to feel that the importance of this advance might be exaggerated by those who were too close to it. . .. I do not believe that [he] ever thought of his work as greaf.9a

Wittgenstein was, however, despondent about the future; of philosophy and of serious thinking in general. To quote Malcolm again:

He was constantly depressed, I think, by the impossibility of arriving at understanding in philosophy. But he was worried perhaps even more deeply by the stupidity and heartlessness that present them­selves daily in the world in forms that command respect. . . . Often as we walked together he would stop and exclaim ' Oh, my God!' looking at me almost piteously, as if imploring a divine intervention in human events.l0

It was surely possible in 1945 to be pessimistic about the lot of mankind and about the future of philosophy without having any messianic pretensions. In 1960, when we look back on twenty-five years in which Wittgenstein's thoughts have been so often garbled <J.nd his method so much abused, we can perhaps agree that his pessimism about the future of his own teaching had justification. In 1945, he already knew something about the garbling and the abuse. In the same Preface, he wrote:

Up to a short time ago, I had really given up the idea of publishing my work in my lifetime. It used, indeed, to be revived from time to time:. mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered· down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it.

Da Ibid., p. 60. From RosTO Cottage, Renvoyle P.O., Co. Galway, in May 1948, he wrote to Mrs. Malcolm: 'My work is only so-so; but then my talent is only that size and I'm getting a bit shop-worn, and nothing can help this' (ibid., p. 76: cf. p. 97). Dr. M. O'C. Drury in a broadcast (see The Listener, 28 January, 1960) gives further examples of Wittgenstein:s humility. 'Once when I was discussing a personal problem with him, he said to me: .. One keeps stumbling and falling, stlffilbling and falling, and the only thing to do.is to pick oneself up and try to go on again. At least that is what I have had to do all my life" '. When they were discussing a title for what came to be called Philosophical Investigations, Drury proposed the title, 'Philosophy'. Wittgenstein was indignant: 'Ilow coul<i J take a word like. that which has,mean( so lnuch in the history of mankin!i; as i(m.y writings were a"nything more thana small fragment of philosophy;. .

10 Ibid.. p. 32.

8 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

The publication of The Blue and Brown Books, which existed in typescript since 1933-5, enables us to judge of the extent of the plagiarism of Wittgenstein which was going on for nearly a quarter­century, before the publication of the first posthumous work, Philosophical Investigations. We can now better appreciate the dignified restraint of the following words of the Preface:

For more than one reason, what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing today.-If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine,-I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.11

It is now plain how much of the good philosophy of post-war Britain has been in fact good Wittgenstein, with source frequentlyunacknow­ledged; how much of the (more abundant) bad philosophy has been pseudo-Wittgenstein, frequently claiming the authority of the Master.

The publication of The Blue and Brown Books, therefore, is an important event in Wittgensteinian scholarship. The title has a curious and quite banal origin. The Blue Book names the notes which Wittgenstein dictated to his class in Cambridge during the session 1933-4. He had stencilled copies made of these and the lot was bound in blue wrappers. The Brown Book was dictated by Wittgenstein to two of his pupils, Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose, during 1934-5. Only three typed copies of these notes were made and Wittgenstein allowed only very close friends and pupils to see them. 'But people who borrowed them made their own copies, and there was a trade in them '. We have been quoting from the Preface by Mr. Rush Rhees. This is written in the best imitation­Wittgenstein manner by one of his favourite pupils. It is allusive, elusive and obscure. But it has illuminating hints about the develop­ment of Wittgenstein's thought. We shall return later to the importance of the text for the study of this development.

Miss Anscombe, surely one of Wittgenstein's most authentic as well as most profound pupils, has, in her Introduction, made an important contribution to our understanding of the Tractatus. In public correspondence, she has repudiated any suggestion of the , authoritativeness' of her exegesis.

Anyone who read my book, I thought, would see that my interpre­tation was argued from the text and that I laid no claim to a knowledge derived from acquaintance with Wittgenstein. . .. I shall be glad if my account of the Tractatus is judged in the light of what Wittgenstein wrote and in that light alone.12

11 Compare Malcolm, Memoir, p. 58: '[Wittgenstein] once exclaimed to me with vehemence that he would gladly see all of his writings destroyed if along with them would vanish the pUblications of his pupils and disciples. He was sometimes visited by the fear that when his work was finally published posthumously the learned world might believe that he had obtained his ideas from philosophers whom he had taught, because there might be some resemblance between his work and those writings of theirs that had been published before his own '. Compare ibid., pp. 56.7.

)1 Times Literary Supplement, 29 May. 1959.

NEW LIGHT ON WITIGENSTEIN 9

There is no denying, however, that her contact, over many years, with the mind of Wittgenstein in action, does give a quite special importance to anything she writes about him.

Professor G. H. von Wright of Helsingfors and Professor Malcolm of Cornell are both excellently qualified for giving biographical information and personal impressions about Wittgenstein; both belonged to the small circle of his intimate friends. Professor von Wright wrote a Biographical Sketch of Wittgenstein for The Philosophical Review, published by Cornell University, in 1955. He has revised this for inclusion with Professor Malcolm's memoir. Perhaps the most important parts of Professor von Wright's sketch concern the early idealistic-mystical tendencies of Wittgenstein; and the transitional thought between the Tractatus and his return to philosophy. Professor Malcolm's Memoir is both a series of privileged reminiscences, a moving In Memoriam, and a philos­ophical appraisal. It cannot be neglected by any student of Wittgenstein.

Mr. David Pole's book, The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein has the rare distinction of being approved by Mr. Ernest Gellner as an exposition of what he calls' linguistic philosophy'. This is a bad sign. It would be difficult to pack more prejudice, misunderstanding and mistakes between two covers than Mr. Gellner has packed into Words and Things. Everyone of the substantive criticisms which he makes of ' linguistic philosophy' is, in so far as it is Wittgenstein who is being indicted, a sheer mistake. The criticisms may be valid of some so-called Wittgensteinians; but Mr. Gellner gives so few references that it is impossible to identify his victims or to test his wild generalisations. The fiercely abusive tone of the book does not help. Indignation has its place in philosophical criticism; but it must be based on an honest attempt to be fair to, or simply to understand, the doctrines one is attacking. Mr. Gellner has not understood and has not tried to be fair. His book should stand as a model to the rest of us of how not to write about doctrines we disagree with.

Mr. Pole's book is, however, much better than Mr. Gellner's. It has honestly tried to understand Wittgenstein's later thought and to expound it fairly and sympathetically. The exposition is clear and in great part accurate. But Mr. Pole's criticisms, which are found also in the more responsible pages of Mr. Gellner, all miss the point completely. It is not true either that Wittgenstein's theory of meaning is behaviouristic; or that he fails to allow for the development of language; or that he commits a 'naturalistic fallacy' of language by deducing what 'ought to be' said from 'what is' said in current usage. Yet Mr. Pole avoids Mr. Gellner's worst mistakes and especially his bad temper. There has been far too much bad temper in recent philosophical writing in English.

10 PHILOSOPIDCAL STUDIES

How foolish now seem the words written two years ago by G. J. Warnock:

For my own part, I am inclined to think that they only need to feel strongly hostile to contemporary philosophy who have cause to fear or to dislike a clear intellectual air and a low temperature of argument.I3

But no side has a monopoly of steam andheat.Wittgenstein himself wrote to Malcolm in 1950 that Oxford was • a philosophical desert '. He was rumoured to have referred to the philosophical circles of Oxford as 'the influenza area '.14 Yet Mr. Gellner ties him up in the same sack as those whom he amiably calls the 'Narodniks of North Oxford '. All that we need, to complete this little exchange of greetings is to speak of the' Popperites of the London School of Economics', of whom Mr. Gellner is obviously one.15 Wittgenstein, who had greatly admired the intellectual seriousness of Russell in the days before 1914, said of Russell in 1946: 'Russell isn't going to kill himself doing philosophy now'.16 The title-page of Gellner's book carries the following quotation from Russell: 'The later Wittgenstein . . . seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would' make such an activity unnecessary '. The onlooker can conclude that the emotional score is a draw and that the match must be replayed on different ground.

It is a matter for satisfaction to thomists that some of the most perceptive writing about Wittgenstein has come from thomist circlesY High place must here be granted to Philosophy and Linguistic Analysis, by Dr. Maxwell John Charlesworth, a young Australian who, since his post-graduate studies at the University of Louvain, has been lecturing in philosophy, first at the University of Auckland and now at his own University of Melbourne. This book is in the best orientation of modem thomistic writing. It is worth reflecting on what he says in the Preface:

Criticism may be either of an internal or external kind. In other words, one may show the need to adopt another standpoint by exposing the inadequacy of a philosophical. position in terms of the position itself. Or, one may criticise a position in a completely

18 English PhilosophY since 7900, Home University Library, Oxford University Press, 1958, p. 173.

14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir, p. 98. During the war, he wrote to Malcolm, who used to send him American detective magazines: • I often wonder how anyone can read Mind with all its impotence and bankruptcy, when they could read Street and Smith mags'. (Ibid., pp. 35-6).

15 Cfr. Margaret Masterman in The Cambridge Review, 14 November, 1959. 16 Memoir, p. 68. 17 Professor Trevor-Roper, in a barely coherent exsuffiation in praise of Gellmir

and in damnation of Wittgenstein (see The Sunday Times 11 October,1959), says~ • Religion is now perfectly compatible, being quite outside philosophy: indeed some of the mosfcaverll()us of linguistiC philosophersaie RomariCathoIics when they come up from the cave '; . .

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 11

external and mechanical way. condemning it simply because it does not measure up to one's criteria: This latter type of criticism-all too common among Scholastic Philosophers, alas!-is very satis­fying to the critic but unfortunately convinces no one else. . . . It is not necessarily those who cry, 'St. Thomas says this " • St. Thomas says that', who are his only, or even most authentic followers.

Is not this in line with the teaching of St. Thomas himself, who in the Prooemium to the Summa Contra Gentiles calls attention to the difficulty of disputing with non-Christians; a difficulty due in the first place to the fact that it is necessary to argue with them on the basis of their own propositions, whereas it is so hard to determine accurately what their propositions are; and due secondly to the fact that it is useless to quote to them the authority of Christian scripture, which they do not acknowledge; and it is therefore necessary to situate the debate on the plane of the principles of reasoning, which are common to both parties.

Dr. Charlesworth's method is the only one which can have any efficacy in a Thomist dialogue with Wittgensteinians. J. O. Urmson has observed how development within analytic philosophy has come about exclusively through internal criticism and discussion. Diatribes from without were absolutely without effect.

Merely hostile criticism rarely has any effect in philosophy and for very good reasons. . .. The objectors to analytic philosophy . . . were mostly too ignorant of the precise doctrines of their opponents to put their objections in a form which could have much effect on them, so that they could fairly easily forget their troubles when they wished .... 18

2. The Tractatus and Empiricism In the 1956 article referred to above, I maintained that the

Tractatus • actually presupposes a Humean type of psychological and epistemological empiricism and assumes that language cannot be logically analysed except in empiricist terms '.19 In a postscript I considered and tried to counter the opposite view of Miss Anscombe as maintained by her in an article in The Tablet. Miss Anscombe wrote, in refutation of this, a letter which was published in the subsequent number of the Irish Theological Quarterly. I am now quite certain that the empiricist interpretation of the Tractatus is a mistake. In particular, the sentence quoted above, assimilating Wittgenstein to Hume is exegetically quite wrong and misses one of the basic intentions of the Tractatus.

This is one of the points definitively established by Miss Anscombe in her new Introduction. Wittgenstein' never read more than a fe'Ypages of Hume'.20 So far from presupposing an empiricist

·18 Philosophical Alialysis. Its· Development between (he 'Two World Wars.. Oxford. 1956, pp. 100 and 147.

19I.T.Q. April, 1956, p. 123. ~o Op. cit., 1" 12.

12 PHlLOSOPlflCAL STUDIES

epistemology, Wittgenstein was confident that he had emancipated logic from psychology and epistemology. He held that the theory of knowledge was mere psychology; and claimed that his own theory of meaning was purely logical and had nothing to do with psychological considerations.21 This attitude towards psychology is a constant also of the Philosophical Investigations.

Fortunately, however, the interpretation of Wittgenstein which I put forward is largely independent of this question of his empiri­cism. I am satisfied that its basic points remain valid. The positivism of the Tractatus was made to depend mainly on its theory of meaningful propositions. According to this, necessary propositions (i.e., tautology and contradiction) are' without sense • (sin loss) but not' nonsensical • (unsinnig); in other words, they are meaningful, but 'are not pictures of the reality . . . present no possible states of affairs '.22 Factual propositions, on the other hand, are meaningful in the quite different sense of being pictures of 'possible states of affairs' in the world, but have no manner of necessity.23 Necessity belongs solely to logic which is trans­cendental, acosmic; statements about what • is the case' are non­necessary, contingent. ll4 It is from this doctrine, I argued, that the positivist and anti-metaphysical character of the Tractatus pro­ceeded. With this, Miss Anscombe concurs.25

Now this was advanced by Wittgenstein as a logical doctrine. But it remains true that it is found in Hume as well, where it is associated with an atomistic psychology.2sa The parallels I drew between Wittgenstein and Hume remain valid and are important. But the differences between them, even in their apparently common anti-metaphysics, are, as I argued, profound and decisive.

The empiricist interpretation of the Tractatus is not, however, either altogether without intrinsic plausibility or without import­ance historically. Wittgenstein regarded his • objects' (' entities', 'things " Gegenstiinden)-combinations of which were 'atomic facts • (Sachverhalten)-as necessary postulates of his logical theory of propositions and of meaning.26 They are the postulated, simple

21 See op. cit., p. 27. • Wittgenstein evidently did not think that epistemology had any bearing on his subject-matter. We find epistemology put in its place at 4.1121: .. Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy than is any other natural science. The theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology" '. Compare p. 152.

224.46-4.4661. 13 5.133-5.1361; 6.362--6.372. 1& 1-2.0121; 5.552; 6.13. 25 See op. cit., pp. 78 and 80-82. 25a D. F. Pears says: • What Russell did was to present [Hume's doctrine] logically

instead of psychologically, and he called the simple qualities atomic " The Revolution In Philosophy, introd. by Gilbert Ryle, Macmillan, London, 1956, p. 51; cfr. pp. 42, 44, 55. This resembles what I argued, in the earlier article, about Wittgenstein's relation to Hume.

26 2.02; 3.2-3.26.

NEW UGHT ON WITfGENSTElN 13

ultimates of his logical analysis.27 It is significant that Russell, with whom Wittgenstein was in close contact during the time of his 'incubation' of the Tractatus, was led by a similar logical doctrine and by a similar theory of analysis, to postulate sense data as ' the ultimate simples out of which the world is built'. In other words, from premisses similar to Wittgenstein's, Russell feels impelled towards a theory of 'logically proper names', which involves an epistemological doctrine of 'knowledge by acquaint­ance " which in turn rests on a psychological doctrine of sense data. Russell's logical atomism is at the same time a Humean­type psychological atomism.28

There can be little doubt that Russell was more consistent in this particular than Wittgenstein. Miss Anscombe quotes a letter he wrote to Russell in 1919, from a prisoner-of-war camp at Monte Cassino. Russell had asked him what he held to be the' con­stituents of a thought '. Wittgenstein replied:

I don't know what the constituents of a thought are but I know that it must have constituents which correspond to the words of language. Again the kind of relation of the constituents of the thought and of the pictured fact is irrelevant. It would be a matter of psychology to find out.29

Professor Malcolm reports that Wittgenstein later came to regard this point of view as absurd.30 • On the quoted passage, Miss Anscombe comments: 'That this is fantastically untrue is shewn by any serious investigation into epistemology, such as Wittgenstein made in Philosophical Investigations '.31 In fact, she suggests that when Wittgenstein speaks of 'the propositions containing the

27 3.23: • The postulate of the possibility of the simple signs is the postulate of the determinateness of the sense'. 3.25: • There is one and only one complete analysis of the proposition'. 4.221: 'It is obvious that, in the analysis of proposi­tions, we must come to elementary propositions, which consist of names in immediate combination '. Miss Anscombe quotes from the note-books out of which the Tractatus was composed: '. " 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 leading to them' (op. cit., p. 29). She calls them • eternal, changeless simples' (p. 43). Wittgenstein later compared them with the simples of Plato's Theaetetus (Philosophical Investigations, 46).

28 Compare J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis, pp. 22-44, 54-5, 82-6, 138-9, 190-2.

29 Op. cit., pp. 27-9, 33, 43. Compare J. A. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Duckworth, London, 1957, p. 355: • Wittgenstein was not interested in nominating examples of simples. The point for him is that there must be simples; what they are is a matter of secondary importance '.

so Memoir, p. 86. '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 a purely empirical matter! It was clear that he regarded his former opinion as absurd'. In Philosophical Investigations, 47, he wrote: • It makes no sense at all to speak absolutely of the " simple parts of a chair" '.

31 Op. elt., p. 28.

14 PIDLOSOPIDCAL STVDtES

primitive:sign~' asbdng. able to: be understood only' if one is acquainted with the references of these signs ',32.' it is quite possible that (helhadroughly.' in mind something like. Russell's theory. of 'knowledge by acquaintance' of sense data.33 In Philosophical Investigations, when Wittgenstein is rejecting all claims to reduct­ively analyse the structure of language so as to lay bare its primary elements, and with it, repudiating all forms of the theory of logically proper names, he refers to Plato's Theaetetus and remarks: 'Both Russell's "individuals" and my "objects" were such primary elements '.3'" It is significant that Wittgenstein's self-criticism of the Tractatus, in his later writings, is at the same time a criticism of Russell; he recognised the same principles of error in both.

I called attention in the earlier article to the Tractatus doctrine that 'the totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences) '.35 Although Wittgenstein was not a logical positivist, all this enables us to see 'how the Tractatus generated logical positivism '.36 There was even an interior gravitational pull towards logical positivism in the work itself; and it is not surprising to learn that' in the period between the Tractatus and the time when he began to write Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein's own ideas were more closely akin to those of the logical positivists than before or after '.37 There is one published article of Wittgenstein's from this transitional period. It is entitled: 'Some remarks on Logical Form '.38 The argument of

81 3.263. The translation is Miss Anscombe's (italics ours). She points out that the received translation of the Tractatus by C. K. Ogden, is ' notoriously very bad '. In particular, Bedeutung and bedeuten, should not be rendered by 'meaning' and • mean', but by 'reference' and ' stand for'.

aa Op. cit., pp. 26-7. Compare pp. 36 and 49. On p. 158, she writes: • Wittgen­stein offers [in the Tractatus] an extraordinarily over-simplified account of knowledge, which would presumably have to be filled out with an account of .. acquaintance with facts" '. crr. pp. 154-5, 161-2 .

• < Op. cit., 46; cfr. 38. 864.11; cfr. 5.135-5.1361; 6.52. Charlesworth, in Philosophy and Linguistic

Analysis, observes how' Wittgenstein slides from purely formal logical considerations into making certain extra-logical assumptions', going beyond • a purely logical definition of .. facts" and [identifying] "facts" with empirical facts, the facts of the natural sciences' (pp. 98-9; cfr. pp. 102-3) .

• eMiss Anscombe, op. cit., p. 152. 37 Loc. cit • • 8 Aristotelian Society Proceedings V. XXX, 1929. It is the only article Wittgen­

stein ever published, and in fact the only item he published after the Tractatus. The date was almost immediately after his return to Cambridge and his resumption of philosophy. It was to have been read by him to the annual meeting of British philos6phers-the Joint Session of· the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. The text of the papers of these Sessions is printed and circulated in advance, and subsequently published. But Wittgenstein did not speak on the prepared topic at all; he spoke instead on the notion of the infinite in mathematics. Prof. Karl Britton has recorded that, when he told Wittgenstein in 1946 that next year's Joint Session would be held in Cambridge, Wittgenstein replied that for him this was' just as if you had told me that there will be bubonic plague in Cambridge next summer . . . and I shall make sure to be in London'. (Sec The Listener, 16 June, 1955.)

NEW LIGHT ON WlTTQENSTEIN 15

this is. stilt~IQs~:tQ that of t~ Tractatus bU.tmovesrather- c1escr: to the· Russeni~Jl.Ulldersjanding. of reductiveanalysis.311 Professor von Wright refers to ':two bulky typescripts.' which reveal Wittgenstein'sphilosophic standpoint of about the year 1930. 'The reader is struck', he says 'by the formulations with which he is familiar from the writings of Schlick and other members of the Vienna Circle':l0 It was not an accident that the logical positivists claimed Wittgenstein as a founder. The list of people who have interpreted and who still interpret the Tractatus empiricisticaJly is not unimpressive.41.

3. The Picture Theory of Language In the earlier article, I devoted only one sentence to Wittgenstein's

picture theory of language. 42 This was seriously to underestimate the important place this theory occupies in the doctrine of the Tractatus. Fortunately, again, the basic conclusions of the article were not invalidated by this omission; because in fact the theory is solidary with the doctrine of ' analytic and synthetic' propos­itions, on which my conclusions were primarily based. Clearly, however, a more thorough study of the picture theory is necessary for an adequate exposition of the Tractatus. Miss Anscombe devotes much space in her Introduction to this topic; and her examination of it is one of the best things so far written about Wittgenstein.

The picture theory of language has been misrepresented by many (quorum pars minima fui!) as an empiricist theory of knowledge. Professor von Wright enables us in one sentence to put Wittgenstein's problem in its true context: 'It was the question of the nature of the significant proposition '. He quotes from one of the pre-Tractatus

S9 Compare J. A. Passmore, op. cit., pp. 358-9. 40 Memoir, pp. 14-15. 41 J. O. Urmson, in Philosophical Analysis, gives a flatly empiristic version.. (He

even attributes to the Tractatus a ' strong' Verification Principle. This, of courso;. is quite wrong.) He notes in his Introduction that many have now come to doubt this interpretation; but he pleads as excuse for ignoring these doubts that the empiricist interpretation, right or wrong, was the one which was accepted in . the inter-war period about which he is writing, and has therefore been of historical importance and influence. 'For our purposes, it is what Wittgenstein was thought to mean that matters'. Professor Popper, in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, Allen and Unwin, London, 1957, calls Wittgenstein's' elementary propositions' 'observation statements' and ascribes to him' an empirical-verification-principle (see PIl.163-4). This is referred to by Miss Anscombe in op. cit., pp. 25-6. Compare Margaret Masterman's references in the same symposium, pp. 287-9. Ayer says that the Tractatus 'to a considerable extent set the pattern which, at least in its early days, the Vienna Circle followed' (' The Vienna Circle' in The Revolution in Philosophy, p. 70). G. A. Paul makes no attempt to differentiate between the Tractatus Wittgenstein and Russell as 'logical Atomists' (' Logical Atomism: Russel and Wittgenstein " in The. Revolution in Philosophy, pp. 41-55). Neither does G. J. Warnock (see English Philosophy since 7900, pp. 32-42, 64-6). On the question of the Tractatus and logical positivism, compare Charlesworth, op. cit., pp. 77-8,. 99-103, 125, 132, 175 .

.. Even this sentence was vitiated by a. footnote which assimilated the theory to 'Hume's doctrine of ideas copying impressions '.

16 PIDLOSOPHICAL STUDIES

note-books: • My whole task con!lists in the explanation of the nature of the proposition'. 43 He records Wittgenstein's own account of how the idea of the picture theory first occurred to him, during his service with the Austrian Army in the First World War.

He was in a trench on the East front, reading a magazine in which there was a schematic picture depicting the possible sequence of events in an automobile accident. The picture there serv.:d as a proposition; that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It had this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the picture and things in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a proposition serves as a picture by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined-the structure of the proposition-depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs."

Wittgenstein's theory is not, as the accident-diagram example might seem to suggest, a naive representationist theory of knowledge or a correspondence theory of truth. It must continually be remembered that Wittgenstein sees himself as concerned with the logical question of meaning; and he seeks to answer it in logical terms, independently of any theory of perception or any appeal to empirical verification. Furthermore, his theory does not as has been suggested, propose to make ideographic hieroglyphic script the model of language.46 This is clear from the variety of picture­models which Wittgenstein gives. He refers to a musical score, a gramophone record, a tableau vivant, a scale.46 We could speak

•• Memoir, p. 7. For helpful accounts of the picture theory in addition to that of Miss Anscombe, see J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis, pp. 75-101, 141-5, 194-9; and J. A. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, pp. 356 If.

"OP. cit., pp. 7-8. Compare Malcolm in op. cit., pp. 68-9 . •• It is true that in 4.016 he writes: • In order to understand the essence of the

proposition, consider hieroglyphic writing, which pictures the facts it describes'. But this is only to give one example of one type of • fact-picturing', in which the essence of propositional picturing may be grasped. (It is somewhat like the appeal to imaginary primitive language-games in the Philosophical Investigations.) Immedi­ately after the words we quoted above, he went on: • And from it came the alphabet without the essence of the representation being lost'. Obviously the' essence of the representation' is not the hieroglyphic character of the writing as such.

u 4.01. The proposition is a picture of reality. The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.

4.011. At the first glance the proposition-say as it stands printed on paper..,­does not seem to be a picture of the reality of which it treats. But nor does the musical score appear at first sight to be a picture of a musical piece; nor does our phonetic spelling (letters) seem to be a picture of our spoken language. And yet these symbolisms prove to be pictures-even in the ordinary sense--of what thoy represent.

4.012. It is obvious that we perceive a proposition of the form aRb as a picture. Here the sign is obviously a likeness of the signified.

4.014. The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation which holds between language and the world.

4.0311. One name stands for one thing, and another for another thing, and they are connected together. And so the whole, like a living picture, presents tho atomic fact.

NEW UGH! ON WITrOENSTEIN 17

also of a map, a contour-sketch, a graph, a temperature chart.47

What is common to all these different models of ' picturing'? It is that there must be a correspondence between the internal structure or configuration of the elements in the sign (e.g. the marks on the musical score) and the structure or configuration of the elements in the signified (e.g. the musical notes); and also that there must be a systematic correlation between the elements them­selves of the sign and the. elements of the signified; so that, given a ' rule of translation' we can pass from the structure of the one to the structure of the other. If we remember that, for Wittgenstein, a primary concern was to develop a logical theory of meaning, we shall expect the idea of structural correspondence of sign and signified to predominate. Propositions can signify reality because of a logical structure common to both. To identify the elements actually signified would be an empirical not a logical question. &8

And yet, the question of factual reference cannot be excluded from a theory of meaning. Consideration of it is made imperative, in the first place, because of the problem of negative propositions, or pictures which are used to deny, not to affirm, the existence of the state of affairs they depict.49 A picture may have the internal structure of a picture; may even have the same structure as outside reality would have, if there were such; but there may in fact be no corresponding reality and no coordination between the structured

47 Compare Gilbert Ryle •• Ludwig Wittgenstein " Analysis, 12.1, October, 1951, pp.4-6 •

.. Compare the following passages. The first immediately follows the sentence from 4.014, quoted in note 46.

4.014. (Continued). To all of them the logical structure is common. 4.023. Propositions describe reality by its internal properties. 2.12. The picture is a model of reality. 2.13. To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture. 2.131. The elements of the picture stand. in the picture, for the objects •. 2.14. The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one

another in a definite way. 2.15. This connexion of the elements of the picture is called its structure,

and the possibility of this structure is called the form of representation of the picture. 2.1511. Thus the picture is linked with reality; it reaches up to it. 2.1512. It is like a scale, applied to reality. 2.1514. The representing relation consists of the co-ordinations of the elements

of the picture and the things. 2.1515. These co-ordinations are as it were the feelers of its elements with

which the picture touches reality. 2.16. In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with

what it pictures. 2.161. In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in

order that the one can be a picture of the other at all. 2.18. What every picture, of whatever form, must have in common with

reality in order to be able to represent it at all-rightly or falsely-is the logical form, that is, the form of reality. Compare 2.2.

"The importance for Wittgenstein of the problem of negation and its central position in the whole doctrine of the Tractatus is definitively shown by Miss Anscombe in her Introduction.

18 J>HlLOSOJ>HlCAI. STUDIES

el~ments . in the pictur~ and the. strJlctured elements outside it. 'fhtt picture which depicts the existence of a state of affairs and: t4~ pictur~ which depicts the non -existence· of the. ~saiq _ sta.te of affairs is one and the same picture. There is no picture of JI. fact's not existing.5°TlJ.at is why Wittgenstein is continuailyrepeating that propositions pIcture possible states of affairs. 51 In itself, a pro­position contains' the possibility of expressing' a sense, ' the form of its sense', 52 In order actually to be given a sense, the' content' of its sense, it must be used by us to assert or to deny a claim to agree with reality. A proposition-picture, therefore, has in itself two possible senses, positive or negative. It can be used to affirm or deny the existence of the state of affairs it pictures. Affirmation and denial are not elements of the picture but operations we perform with the picture. Furthermore the actual sense of a proposition is independent of its truth or falsehood: I know what a proposition means when I know what would be the case if it were true, and without having to know whether in fact things are so or not.53

The criterion of meaning which emerges from this has been illterpreted as a fully-fledged logical positivist doctrine of empirical verification, 54 This is not so. Wittgenstein wanted to avoid such epistemological questions entirely and to remain on the plane of a logical enquiry into meaning. He saw himself as concerned only with, the logical conditions of the possibility of languages as the mirror of reality. 55 I shall try to show, first, that he cannot and

60 See 4.0621. • The propositions .. p .. and .. not-p" have opposite senses, but tothem corresponds one and the same reality'. Compare Miss Anscombe, op. cit., pp. 69-71.

. 6' See 2. 201-3; 2.21. 62 3.13. 6. See 2.201. The picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of the

existence and non-existence of atomic facts. 2.202. The picture represents a possible state of affairs in logical space. 2.21. The picture agrees with reality or noti it is right or wrong, true or

false . . ~.22. The picture represents what it represents, independently of its truth

or falsehood, through the form of representation. 2.221. What the picture represents is its sense. 2.222. In the agreement or disagreement Qf its sense with reality, its truth

or falsity consists. 2.223. In order to discover whether . the picture is true or false, we must

compare it with reality. 2.224. It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or

false. 4.021. The proposition is a picture of reality for I know the state of affairs

presented by it, if I understand the proposition. . . 4.022. The proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it san

that they do so stand. 4.023. The proposition determines reality to this extent, that one only needs

to say • yes' or • no' to it to make it agree with reality. 4.024. To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is

true. (One can therefore understand it without knowing whether it is true or not). One understands it if one understands its constituent parts.

14 See e.g., J. O. Urmson, op. cit., p. 111. 55 Compare Miss Anscombc, op. cit., p. 92.

NIlW LlGHT ON wrtrGENSTEIN 19

does not slicceed in evading the epistemological question; and that his doctrine of meaning slides almost inevitably towards an· expir­icism of the Russell or early-Ayer variety. I shall then point out how, even on the logical level, Wittgenstein's theory of meaning excludes metaphysics just as peremptorily as does the Verification Principle.

The picture theory involves, as we have seen, a community of structure and a systematic correlation of elements between the picture and the pictured. Given the ' rule of translation' or ' law of projection', we could reconstruct the reality from the picture or recreate the picture from the reality. 56 This doctrine must postulate some form of one-to-one correspondence between each element of the proposition-sign and each element of the reality-signified.07 It involves the possibility of an analysis, single and complete, of propositions, such that from them the irreducible simples of reality, to which they ultimately refer, would be revealed.08 This is surely to embark on the road which led Russell into the bog of reductive analysis, in which he vainly pursued the will-o'-the-wisp of the , logically proper name'. This was to be a single inerrant name for a unique indubitable thing, and was to provide the incorrigible basis (the ' sentitur ergo est ') for all knowledge. It had, however, the disadvantage that it could be uttered only to oneself, for no-one else could have my sense datum; and that its object (' this-red­patch-now') had ceased to be before the name was uttered. 59

•• See 4.0141. In the fact that there is a general rule by which the musician is able to read the symphony out of the score, and that there is a rule by which one could reconstruct the symphony from the line on a gramophone record and from this again-by means of the first rule-construct the score, herein lies the internal simi­larity between these things which at first sight seem to be entirely different. And the rule is the law of projection which projects the symphony into the language of the musical score. It is the rule of translation of this language· into· the language of the gramophone record .

• 7 See 3.2. In propositions thoughts can be so expressed that to the objects of the thoughts correspond the elements of the propositional sign.

3.21. To the configuration by the simple signs in the propositional sign cor­responds the configuration of the objects in the state of affairs.

4.04. In the proposition there must be exactly as many things distinguishable as there are in the state of affairs, which it represents.

Compare 4.0311, cited in note 46 above and several of the propositions cited in note 48.

68 See 3.2. Cited in the previous note; and especially 3.201 which immediately follows it: 'These elements I call" simple signs" and the proposition" completely analysed" '.

Cfr. 3.25. There is one and only one complete analysis of the proposition. Cfr.3.26.

58 Compare J. O. Urmson, op. cit., pp. 38-41, 54 ff., 138-9. He quotes the fol­lowing delightful piece of dialogue from the end of one of the lectures published in the Monist: 'Q. If the proper name of a thing, a ,his, varies from instant to instant, how is it possible to make any argument? Mr. Russell: You can keep " this" going for about a minute or two. I made that dot and talked about it for ·!ome little time. I mean it varies often. If you argue quickly, you can iet some little way before it is finished ... .' (p. 69).

20 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Wisdom went as far in this line as it was possible to go-until his sense of humour got the better of him.60 .

It is interesting to note that Wittgenstein himself realised the danger of his slipping down the Russell-slope towards psychologism and empiricism.81 A doctrine which holds that all propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions 82 seems committed to a method of analysis which would be capable of revealing the ultimate atomic facts constitutive of reality; and it is not easy to see how these can fulfill their purpose in the theory unless interpreted somehow in terms of sense data.82a Those who interpreted Wittgenstein as a logical positivist could at least claim that they were filling in a gap in his theory which did not seem capable of being filled in in any other way. Although the Tractatus Wittgenstein was not an empiricist, he was an unsatisfactory sort of a non-empiricist.

Wittgenstein shared with Russell a common concern to clear up the ambiguities in ordinary language whereby people are led to postulate fictitious metempirical entities. If we suppose that every element in a proposition is correlated with some element in reality, then we shall be led to look for ' negative facts • to correspond to the negative element in propositions; for' universal entities' to correspond to general terms; for Subsistent Being to correspond to the copula, and so on. Russell, in his Meinong-ian hey-day, had a heaven queerer than any animist's, peopled with 'Numbers, the Homeric Gods, relations, chimeras and four-dimensional spaces'. 83

I. It is again to Urmson that we owe the reference, • Making up new logically proper names, .. thet" and .. thot ", to eke out the slender existing supply, he translates the sentence, .. The son of the brother of the mother of the boy kissed the girl with the almond eyes", first of all to read, .. This is the son of thet, and thet is the mother of thot and thot is a boy, and this Kissed Sylvia" ' •• This sentence nearly pictures a fact', added Wisdom, • and if we eliminate words which merely emphasise spatial order and write, .. This son that, and that brother thet, and thet mother thot, and that boy, and this Kissed Sylvia ", we have a sentence which pictures a fact' (p. 138). In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein finds this kind a performance of typical philosophical disease. See 38. In this section, he insists that • this' is not a name at all. Compare 410-2, 514, 620.

114.1121. Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy than is any other natural science.

The theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology. Does not my study of sign-language correspond to the study of thought processes which philosophers held to be so essential to the philosophy of logic. Only they got entangled for the most part in unessential psychological investigations, and there is an analogous danger for my method.

82 Urmson defines truth-function thus: • When the truth or falsity of a complex statement can be determined solely from the truth and falsity of its constituent statements it is called a truth-function of its constituent statements. Thus" he is old and he is tired ", is a truth-function of .. he is old" and .. he is tired "; .. p or q" is a truth-function of p and q; not-p is a truth-function of p; and so on' (p. 9). On the implications of this view, see op. cit., pp. II, if.

81a The idea of • one and only one complete analysis of the proposition' (3.25) is of course, systematically criticised in the Philosophical Investigations; and the Tractatus along with Russell are the target of the criticism. See 60-64, 87-90.

18 The quotation is from The Principles of Mathematics, 1903. See Urmson, op. cit., pp. 2-3; cfr. pp. 70-5.

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 21

It will be noticed that most of these 'entities' are postulated to provide existential correlates for the 'logical constants', such as 'is', 'is not', 'all', ' some', 'if-then '; 'implies', 'is related to'. Now Wittgenstein's Occam's Razor is sheathed in the principle that logical constants 'do not represent'.

4.0312. My fundamental thought is that the' logical constants' do not represent.

That the logic of the facts cannot be represented. They are not elements of the ' picture' but operations we perform with the picture. 'Negative facts' disappear at the first razor­slash. 'Universals' disappear in the process of (truth-function­wise) analysis of complex propositions into elementary propositions. The once unending source of metaphysical myth-making which is the word 'is', is drained dry when we realise that it serves to connect things that are represented but does not itself represent.63a

Concepts corresponding to 'logical constants', such as 'existence', , identity', 'relation', 'number', 'fact', are 'formal concepts' as distinct from 'proper concepts'. 'Proper concepts' are those which 'can be substituted for the variable x in a propositional function, "x exists" for instance '.64 But' formal concepts' cannot be so substituted; they belong to the structure of language, not to its employment. They are shown in speaking but cannot be spoken about. If we confuse the 'formal concepts' with , proper concepts' we are at once propelled into a pseudo-space peopled with pseudo-existents such as Being, Truth, Goodness, Identity, Equality, Relation, etc. Wittgenstein holds that 'the confusion of formal concepts with proper concepts runs through the whole of the old logic '.65 But' the question about the exist­ence of a formal concept is senseless' 66-because one cannot say in language what can only be shown in the saying of something else. Now it is precisely confusions of this sort 'of which the whole of philosophy is full '.67

Hence most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot there­fore answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senseless­ness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

Baa 3.323. In the language of every-day life it very often happens that the same word signifies in two different ways-and therefore belongs to two different symbols ---or that two words, which signify in different ways, are apparently applied in the same way in the proposition. Thus the word • is' appears as the copula, as the sign of equality and as the expression of existence; • to exist' as an intransitive verb like • to go '; • identical' as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening!

B' Charlesworth, Philosophy and Linguistic Analysis, pp. 82-3. 65 4.126. Compare the whole of 4.127. 664.1274. 6' 3.324.

22 PHILOSQPlUCAL STUDIES

(They are of the same kind as the questions whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful). And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.88

We have here as iconoclastic an 'elimination of m~taphysics' as could be asked for; Ayer. in Language, Truth and Logic; Ryle, in his article 'Systematically Misleading Expressions', 69 were just using Wittgenstein's hatchet. The procedure is similar to that of Russell's Theory of Descriptions. Miss Anscombe tells us that 'Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of the proposition is much influenced by Russell's Theory of Descriptions. . .. He accepts [this] in its purely logical aspect '.70 Like Russell, he projected the ideal of a perfect logical language, a symbolism which would exclude the philosophical confusions lurking in 'the language of every-day life' by obeying' the rules oflogical grammar-oflogical syntax'.71 This would in fact realise the aim Ryle was later to assign to philosophy, that of detecting and eliminating' the sources in linguistic idiom of recurrent misconstructions and absurd theories'.71a One of the main themes of Philosophical Investigations will be the criticism of this. concept; and the target of the .criticism will be his former self as much as Russell. 72 ..

8S4.003. It Dating from 1931, the paper is reprinted in Logic and Longuage, First Series,

Ed. A. ~lew, Blackwell, Oxford, 1952, pp. 11-36. 700p. cit., pp. 41, 46. 71 3.323-3.325. The latter passage reads: • In order to avoid these errors (scll.

of which the whole of philosophy is full), we must employ a symbolism which excludes them, by not applying the same sign in different symbols and by not applying signs in the same way which signify in different ways. A symbolism, that is to say. which obeys the rules of logical grammar-of logical syntax. (The logical symbolism of Frege and Russell is such a language, which, however, does still not exclude all errors)'. Compare 4.002: Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means. . •• Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and . is not less complicated than it. From it, it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of the language. Language disguises the thought • • .; and 4.0031: All philosophy is • Critique of language' • • • Russell's merit is to have shown that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real form.

7laLogic (l1Ul Longuage, I, p. 36. . 7. Miss A:nScombe maintains (pp. 91-2) that the Tractatus does not (pace Russell's

Introduction, pp. 8-9), envisage the possibility of a logically perfect language. Wittgenstein already held by the well-known dictum of the Investigations that • ordinary language is all right as it is '. (She refers to section 95 of the Investiga_ tions; this is a misprint for 98). I find this hard to reconcile with the passages from the Traetatus quoted in the preceding note; and also with many passages in the Philosophical Investigations. See e.g., 81: • • • • The most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. But here the word .. ideal" is liable to mis­lead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect than our every-day language; and as if it took the logician to show people at last what a proper IjCn~nce looked like. All this however can only appear in the right Iightwhen one h!lS . attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding. meaning and thinking. For it will then also become clear what can lead us (and .did lead· me) to think that if anyone utters a.ljCntence.and means or understands it heds operating a calculus according" to fuCd niles'. C:Qmpare23;"' Ii ls" .interestln&to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multi­plicit)' of kin~ pf wpr4 !lI14 sen~nce, with wbat 10JicilU!$ have $lIi<l about the

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 23

There is another parallel route by which the picture theory leads to the 'elimination of metaphysics'. Let us recall the criterion of meaning which it involves. A proposition is allowed to be meaningful if we understand what state of affairs would correspond to it if it were true; or what factual difference its being true or false would picture or represent. 'States of affairs' or 'factual differences' are, however, matters of contingent fact, not oflogic.73

It follows that there can be no necessary propositions which are in this sense meaningful. 'There is no picture which is a priori true '.74 Analytic propositions are, however, a priori true. Witt­genstein classifies these as either contradictions or tautologies. These, he shows, cannot be 'pictures of the reality'. The reason is that their truth makes no factual difference, it is not correlated with any particular state of affairs. What is true for all possible states of affairs cannot be true of any particular state of affairs. Tautology is true in all possible circumstances; contradiction is true in no possible circumstances; therefore neither tells us any­thing about any possible circumstances. What is unconditionally true has no factual truth-conditions; in other words has no bearing upon existence, tells us nothing about the world.75 Wittgenstein suggests a simile. He has said earlier that ' the picture represents a possible state of affairs in logical space'. 76 He here says that tautology and contradiction cannot represent a possible state of affairs within logical space because they cover the entire extent of logical space. Tautology is true throughout the whole range of possible reality. Contradiction cannot be true at any point of possible reality. Their necessary truth is bought at the price of

structure of language. (Including the author of the Traetatus Logico-Philosophicus) '. Compare 108-116. See also the Blue Book, p. 28. Miss Anscombe refers to Tractatus 5.5563: • All the sentences of our every-day language, just as they are, are logically in. perfect order'. But is not this said on the supposition that we understand its logic and are thus proof against its misleading ambiguities? The construction of an • ideal language' is only a methodological device for showing us this logic. The latter passage of the Traetatus is referred to in Investigations 97; and Wittgenstein seems there to associate it with the mistake which he now abjures, of looking for a • hard crystalline purity', in language, • trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language '. We could, I think, say that the difference between the two treatises in their attitude to language is that the former looks for' the Logic of Language'; the latter for • the logics of languages'.

73 See 1, 1.21, 2.0271-2, 2.04, 2.061-2, 5.634. 742.225. Compare 3.04-5. • An a priori truth would be one whose possibility

guaranteed its truth. Only if we could know a priori that a thought is true if its truth was to be recognised from the thought itself (without an object of comparison)'. (It .is worth noting in passing how frequently it has been supposed by anti­metaphysicians that all metaphysics is as such committed to the principle of the ontological argument). See the whole section 2.02-3.02.

7·4.46-4.4661. Note 4.462: Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality. They present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none. In the tautology the conditions of agi"ee­ment with the world"-'-the presenting reJation~cancel one another, so thalit stands in no presenting relation to reality. . ..

1·2.202 ..

24 PHILOSOPHICAL STIJDIES

vacuousness.77 It was a bold and original stroke on Wittgenstein's part to characterise mathematical and logical truths as 'tautologies'. It seemed to solve the problem of how there could be necessary truths, without requiring any recourse to metaphysics. As such, . it was eagerly seized upon by the logical positivists. But the basic doctrine was not new; and in fact, as I argued in the earlier article, it covers exactly the distinction drawn by Hume between the 'comparing of ideas' and the 'inferring of matter of fact'. One is continually finding the author of the Tractatus led by different routes, and unwillingly, to the conclusions of the empiricists and logical positivists.

Necessary propositions are, therefore, ' sense-less' (sinnlos). But they are not' nonsensical' (unsinnig). They have meaning but not factual reference. They belong to the structure of language; they are 'part of the symbolism'. 78 But there are propositions which claim to be both necessary and factual, which claim to be both true and true of all possible reality. These are metaphysical propo­sitions; and these are nonsensical. We have seen already what features of language trick philosophers into asserting such non­sensical propositions. These are words which, because they have the same grammatical form, are falsely assumed to have the same logical form.79 But there lies a deeper disquietude behind meta­physics: it is the attempt to say the unsayable; to say what can only be shown; to speak not in but about the symbolism. Meaning­ful language, as we have seen, has to refer to actually or possibly existing states of affairs. Therefore there can be no meaningful language about the preconditions of there being states of affairs and of our referring to them.

It is a precondition of meaningful language that there be a logical structure common to language and reality; 80 but this logical structure cannot be spoken about; it shows itself in all speaking.s1 To speak about it, we should have put ourselves outside language, outside logic, outside the world.82 A picture can depict a state of affairs; it cannot picture its own picturing of

11 4.462-4.463; cf. 4.063, 4.466. Miss Anscombe illustrates the point by the simile of a globe with surface painted black on which one indicates an island by painting it white. Any' meaningful' globe-map marks differences within the map's surface. But contradiction paints the whole surface of the globe white; tautology paints the whole surface black; the result is, there is no map in either case. (Op. cit., pp. 76-7,)

18 4.4611. They are part of the symbolism, in the same way that .. 0" is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic.

19 3.323-3.325. 80 2.16, 2.17, 2.18, 4.014, 4.12. 81 Miss Anscombe says: • (It) pervades everything sayable and is itself un­

sayable' (op. cit., p. 166). 81 4.12,4.121,4.1212. Note particularly: • That which mirrors itself in language,

language cannot represent. That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language •.•• What can be shown cannot be said'. Compare 2.172, 2.114.

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 25

that state of affairs.s3 There must be logic before there can be a language-picturing of the world. But there can be no 'saying' in or about logic. 'All propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing '.S4 There must be logic, as a condition of there being any experience; but this means that there can be no experiencing of 10gic.sli 'Logic is transcendental' ,S6 that is. ineffable; the preconditions of thought cannot be thought about.

Before there can be language, there must be a world; but the being of the world cannot be spoken about. Meaningful language refers to facts in the world; but existence is not a fact in the world.S? It makes no sense to ask: What must there be in order that everything can be the case? S8 Before there can be language about the world, there must be a Self using language within the limits of the world. This Self cannot be spoken about; to try to speak about it would be to try to get outside the limits of language and the world.89 The limits oflanguage are the limits of the world; the Self is the unsayable, 'the metaphysical subject, the limit­not a part of the world'. 90

All this is the sphere of ' the mystical '-the being of the world, the rationality of the world, the meaning of life, value, the self. In this sphere, there can be no propositions. If someone wishes 'to say something metaphysical " then it can be demonstrated to him 'that he has given no meaning to certain signs in his

834.12. 8e 5.43. Logical propositions are, of course, • tautologies '. See 6.126, 6.22;

Compare 5.551, 6.1222, 6.123, 6.124. 86 5.552. The' experience' which we need to understand logic is not that such

and such is the case, but that something is; but that is no experience. Logic precedes every experience---that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What.

'·6.13. 87 Compare 3.323-5. Compare Urmson, op. cit., p. 19: 'There was no extra

element for the word" is " to name '. This reasoning is obviously in line with the Kantian criticism of existential propositions; it is another way of saying' being is not a predicate'. There is no need to point out the affinity with Russell's Theory of Descriptions. Wittgenstein says: 'How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world' (6.432). This passage is crucial for all discussion of the provability and knowability of God in the context of contemporary British philosophy. This is the point which Wisdom developed in his paper on • Gods'; In what way is empirical evidence relevant to the question of the existence of God? There is some discussion of the point in my article on ' The Knowableness of God " in Philosophical Studies, vol. IX, esp. pp. 102-5.

885.5542. Charlesworth quotes Moore (in his Mind articles on Wittgenstein's lectures in 1930-3) as reporting that Wittgeostein said 'that both Solipsists and Realists would say that they "couldn't imagine it otherwise", and that, in reply to this, he would say, .. if so, your statement has no sense", since, "nothing can characterise reality, except as opposed to something else which is not the case"'. Charlesworth comments: • The test of the meaningfulness of a proposition is, th'!refore, to try to conceive what it would be like for the proposition to be not true. If that is inconceivable, then the proposition is tautologous and says nothing meaningful about" what is the case" at all' (op. cit., pr. 88).

89 5.621-5.641. 90 5.5571-5.62 and 5.641.

'26 . PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

propositions '.91 I have discussed, in the earlier article, this feature of the Tractatus, which makes it so different from the banal anti­metaphysics of the logical positivists. But situating it in the context of the picture theory, better enables us to understand its significance. 92 In particular, we can now see the sense of Wittgen-

. stein's rejection of metaphysical propositions and what makes it plausible. Metaphysical propositions are not like empirical propo­sitions: being is not a 'state of affairs', is not 'one of the categories " is not an empirical predicate. Metaphysical knowledge is not .like scientific or unreflective 'common-sense' knowledge. It is a knowing-by-reflection of what it is to know, to think, to be. There is a sense in which metaphysics 'shows itself'; in which its language is not 'ordinary language' but analogical; because its sphere is not empirical things or objects but the metempirical features shown forth in things and objects, in knowing, naming and speaking.

Wittgenstein has brought out into the open certain features of the nature of metaphysics which it is good for us metaphysicians to be reminded of. Metaphysicians must take cognisance of his thought. The metaphysics of St. Thomas, however, might have been thought out precisely with the Tractatus in view, so success­fully has it anticipated this critique. 93 We can subscribe fully to the judgement of Charlesworth that Wittgenstein is a philosopher 'whose very errors are momentous '.94 We can recognise the greatness of the Tractatus as a book in which nearly 'the whole of subsequent English philosophy is . latent '.95

·4. 'The Blue and Brown Books' There is an important sense in which all of Wittgenstein's later

thought is devoted to 'fighting his way out of the Tractatus '.96 But the continuity of the two periods of his thought must not be neglected. Mr. Rush Rhees has emphasises this recently:

It is wrong: I must say this flatly and I wish I might underline it-it is wrong to suggest that Wittgenstein ever turned away from the interests and the questions which had occupied hini particularly in his early days.9Sa

916.53. 92 Compare Miss Anscombe, op. cit., pp. 150-5, 161-173, G. von Wright says:

, Wittgenstein's Tractatus may be called a synthesis of the theory of truth-functions and the idea that language is a picture of reality. Out of this synthesis arises a third main ingredient of the book, its doctrine of that which cannot be said, only shown' (Memoir, p. 8.)

9S We return to this point in a later section. 94 Op. cit., p. 125. 95.0p . cit., p. 93. 9.6 von Wright, MemOir, p. 14.

. SSa In a broadcast whose text is printed in The Listener, 4 February, 1960. Re­ferring to Russell'scriticismoLWittgenstein's later thought, he said: 'In all this, he was going more deeply into the problems he had studied at the time when Russell admired him '.

NEW LIGHT ON WITfGENSTEIN 27

It" is not only that the basic problems remain the same, but also that certain fundamental principles of the Tractatus are never renounced. 97 One of these is the conception of the nature of philosophy itself as being somehow elucidatory but not inde­pendently informative. The Tractatus had said:

4.112. The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of ' philosophical propositions', but to make propositions clear.98 Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

In it sense it can be said that Wittgenstein spent the rest of his life in s~arch of a definition of philosophy; and every one of the definitions which British philosophers have successfully tried can be traced back to him.

Another constant of the later thought is reflection on the Tractatus theme that 'philosophy is not one of the natural sciences'.99 The primary function of philosophy in the Tractatus had been precisely to delimit 'the disputable sphere of natural science' 100 and thus to 'limit the unthinkable and thereby the thinkable', to 'mean the unspeakable by clearly displaying the speakable '.lOl This will mean distinguishing what can be thought and said clearly from what cannot be thought or said at all: for 'everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly; everything that can be said can be said clearly '.102 It will mean distinguishing that about which questions can be asked-and therefore answered-from that about which questions cannot even be asked. loa The result of philosophical elucidation

., Malcolm tells us: 'Wittgenstein frequently said to me disparaging things about the Tractatus. 1 am sure, however, that he still regarded it as an important work. For one thing, he was greatly concerned in the Investigations to refute the errors of the former book. Also he once told me that he really thought that in the . Tractatus he had provided a perfected account of a view that is the only alternative to the viewpoint of his later work' (Memoir, p. 69). Compare Miss Anscombe, op. cit., p. 78.

88 Wittgenstein frankly accepts the implication that his own philosophical propo­sitions are senseless (6.54); and the conclusion has often been held to be a reductio ad absurdum of the Tractatus. But there is no reason why sentences which are strictly unprovable within a system of thought should not represent illuminating insights; and this is what Wittgenstein held his propositions to be.

··4.111. He continues: '(The word" philosophy" must mean something which stands above or below but not beside the natural sciences) '. 4.11 had said: • The totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences) '.

100 4.113. 1014.114"5.

' 18°4.116 ... Cfr; 5.61. 103 6.5. For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too .cannot be

expressed. .. .. " The riddle does not eXist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

28 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

will be, therefore, 'to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., the propositions of natural science, i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy'; and then 'when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him' that his propositions were meaningless, because they attempted to say the unsayable.104

A central theme of the Blue and Brown Books is that metaphysics is an attempt to say the unsayable; it supposes itself to be a science of the same kind as the natural sciences and purports to discover objects and properties analogous to those of which the sciences treat. But all this is a great confusion. When philo­sophers ask' What is the object of a thought', they think that the answer must be like the solution of a problem in physics. Whereas the problem really arises from a confusion over the grammar and logic of words. We are misled by the similarity between 'to say something' and 'to mean something', into thinking that 'meaning' must have a detectable ' object'. This is a 'typically metaphysical' confusion; 'the characteristic of a metaphysical question being that we express an unclarity about the grammar of words in the form of a scientific question '.105

Philosophers who have talked about ' sense data' have imagined that they were making some kind of ' experimental proposition " , expressing a kind of scientific truth. Whereas they were being deceived by the verbal similarity between 'sense data', and 'physical data '.106

What then are metaphysicians doing when they talk about, for example, 'sense data'? They are trying to find a new phraseology to describe sensory appearances; but they falsely model this new language on the established common-sense and scientific language of physical things and objects. They' forget the differences between the grammar of a statement about sense data and the grammar of an outwardly similar statement about physical objects'. They thus come to discuss 'sense data' as if they were 'things'. They become deluded into 'thinking that they had discovered new entities, new elements of the structure of the world, as though to say "I believe that there are sense data" were similar to saying "I believe that matter consists of electrons" .. .'.107 Metaphysical theories are really not assertions about facts and are really not provable or disprovable by factual evidence; they are linguistic proposals, pleas for a new way of

104 6.53. We must of course remember that' even if all possible scientific questions be answered the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer '. (6.52)' Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' (7).

105 The Blue Book, p. 35; cfr. pp. 6, 26. 1080p. cit., pp. 55: 61, 64, cfr. p. 109 (from The Brown Book). 107 P. 70; cfr. pp. 6, 26.

NEW LIGHT ON WITIGENSTEIN 29

describing familiar and universally agreed facts. Such a plea reflects a dissatisfaction, on the philosopher's part, with existing ways of speaking; a desire to call attention to differences which he sees as important but which ordinary language obscures. One has only to read Wisdom, the later Ayer, Ryle, to see what fortune British philosophers made of the hint that' linguistic recommenda­tion' might be the characteristic method of philosophy. Wittgen­stein was, however, fully conscious of the important psychological and other effects of philosophical redescriptions of facts; he was well ahead of C. L. Stevenson in recognising the persuasive power of definitions.los The Blue Book speaks of ordinary language as causing the philosopher to feel 'cramped' because it forbids ways of speaking which he desires; his new phraseology gives him a sense of liberation, loosens his 'mental cramp '.109 More fre­quently, Wittgenstein will speak of metaphysical, mathematical, scientific, technical languages as ' cramping', and will see the return to ordinary language as the necessary remedy. But the idea remains throughout the Investigations.

Whatever about some of the followers, usually men in more of a hurry than the Master, Wittgenstein did not conclude that philosophical theories were therefore psycho-pathic, or trivial, or unarguable and groundless. The subjective idealist, who will call only ideas • real', is arguing that statements about states of experience are more primary, more certain, more 'real', than statements about extramental matter. He expresses this dramati­cally by saying that matter is not 'real'. His reasons are not empirical, and empirical refutations are irrelevant. 11 ° Berkeley is not refuted and not disconcerted by Dr. Johnson's kicking a stone; for he too has kicked stones, only he describes the situation differently. Berkeley's theory claims to account for all possible states of affairs; it cannot be refuted by appeal to any particular states of affairs.

But neither, apparently, can it be proved by appeal to any particular states of affairs; and all metaphysical doctrines seem to be in the same case. How can statements about the world be necessary? In what way can statements be descriptive of reality if they claim that every situation in reality is compatible with them, that no situation in reality would refute them? Wittgen­stein says 'a typically metaphysical way' of using words is 'to use them without antithesis '.111 This is the problem Wittgenstein poses. We have seen that it was the problem of the Tractatus;

loa See pp. 48, 57; Compare Philosophical Investigations, 88. 109 Pp. '7·9; efr. p. 28. 110 Pp. 46 If., 53, 55, 57·9. On p. 58, Wittgenstein says:

• There is no common·sense answer to a philosophical problem'. 111 P. 46; cfr. p. 169.

30 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

w.~~~have __ !lrgedtb:at: it: :i~-!l r~~J p-l'ol'?l~m_fQr JR(L~ta,plly!!:i.Q.i3..n, Wittg~ns~in does no.t s~ hqw_~uc:h pbilPs'QPhi~l:.49~mn~ ~_.},~ statements about the worId or can be validated; But-· he -has· ,.at ieast themerltof c1aiifyhtg Jheir -(listinctioJ) froiii-or.c;i;.nary ~tat~ ments of fact. And he seems never to be able .to" abandon the notion that metempirical doctrines can be important, and illumina~ ting even though he never arrives at a satisfying solution of the problem of their nature and meaning. But just as, in the Tractatus, metaphysical questions are transferred into the realm of the mYstical; so there are here suggestions that these questions, mis­placed when they are put in the guise of scientific questions, . can be meaningful only if transferred to some new context. 1 suggested, in the earlier article, a comparison between Gabriel Marcel's distinction of ' problem' from 'mystery' or.' the metaproblem­atical ' and Wittgenstein's distinction of 'the sayable' from ~ the unsayable '. Marcel's is in fact only a new way of stating ~t. Thomas's distinction between metaphysics and the other. sciences, between metaphysical concepts and empirical concepts. This com­parison is still valid of the post-Tractatus writings. There is a quite Marcel-ian ring about the sentence: .. . ...

The very word' problem', one might say, is misapplied when used for our philosophical troubles. These difficulties, so long as they are seen as problems, are tantalising and appear insoluble.1l2 .

It must be recognised, however, that Wittgenstein seems draWn towards the idea that philosophical ' puzzles ' arise from cotUusions of grammar and can be ' dissolved' or ' cured' by clearing up the grammar.ll3 Enthusiasm seems to have led Wittgenstein,early in his second period, into exaggerated claims for the importance of his new method. There is a note of arrogance in the claim that his subject is 'one of the heirs of the subject which used to. be called "philosophy" '; 114 even that it is ' the only .legitiniate heir of the different activities which had this name in fonner times, '.116

This seeming arrogance is completely absent from the Inve.stigations. Wittgenstein, however, has now begun to reflect on the nature of

philosophy, not in the abstract, but in his own personal experienc:e. He has pondered on what it was for himself, in the Trac(atus, to feel ' mentally cramped' in ordinary language and to seek liberation from it in logically corrected language. This reflection is the source of the most original and powerful concepts of the. second period. In the Tractatus, he had already traced the errors of philosophers to false analogies drawn between similar but different terms, false assimilations of grammatically similar but logically diverse expres­sions. This remains an important part of his later armoury. '. We

111 P. 46. 118 Pp. 58-9; for' .dissolving· of philosophical. problems,. see: Ill). 47 •. and- 55. 11' P. 28. '. -, .. lUP.62.

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTETN 31

find him tracing puzzles about time,abQut . mental acts, mental objects, to grammatical-logical confusions ~ to' the .. fascination which the analogy between· two similar structures in our language can exert on us'.1lu

But now he has come to see that the Tractatus fell into precisely the same error. It did so when it spoke of 'objects' as the ultimate elements of reality-thus assimilating philosophy to science, and confusing the grammars of ' object of thought' and , fact '.116 The Tractatus erred again in looking for the meaning of knowledge, of language, of meaning. This results in our choosing one definition of these processes and forcibly assimilating all other uses of the terms to this single use which we have allowed to , fascinate' US.ll7 'Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us '.118

The escape from ordinary language cramp had been only into a new cramp of special languages. Wittgenstein still thinks that these have a value in philosophy; but he speaks of them in the plural, rejecting the notion of one Logically Correct Language; 118a

and he makes their value relative to the 'cramp' which they 100sen.119 He also suggests that our ability to create new languages at need will 'cure' linguistic 'cramps' as they arise.120

But, in particular, it is attention to the variety of the ways in which we actually use the word in question which will keep us from monopolistic definitions and hence from monistic theories. Here is the beginning of the famous and much misunderstood appeal to ordinary language as 'all right '.121 The slogan' don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use', is, however, latent already in the Tractatus. He had said there:

In philosophy the question: 'Why do we really use that word, that proposition? ' constantly leads to valuable results.124

1l5a Pp. 5-6, 26, 48. 116 Pp. 31-2. On p. 64, speaking of sense data, he says that we cannot even say

that sense data are' different kinds of objects' from physical objects; because this is like saying that • a railway train, a railway accident, and a railway law are different kinds of objects '.

m Pp. 26-8. The notion that words have one circumscribed • real' definition is rejected.

118 P. 27jcfr. pp. 31, 43. USa Op. cit., p. 25: • Remember that in general we don't use language according

to strict rules-it hasn't been taught us by strict rules either. We in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus proceeding according to exact rules. This is a very one-sided way of looking at language. In practice we very rarely use language as such a calculus'.

Ut P. 28. 110 Ibid. Mr. Rhees suggests in his Introduction that in the Blue Book, Wittgen­

stein's appeal to • simple language games' is still influenced by the. Tractatus idea of arriving at a complete analysis of language:; whereas in the Brown Book and Investigations it is meant rather to. exclude the possibility of such an analysis.

121 P. 28. 1.la 6.21 \.

32 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

We saw also, in connection with the problem of negation and the logical constants, that Wittgenstein interpreted these as corres­ponding to what we do with propositional pictures, rather than as elements in the picture. Appeal from meaning-as-referring to meaning-as-use showed up all talk about 'negative facts' and , subsistent universals ' as nonsense. In the later period, Wittgen­stein is still concerned with the problem of negation. 'How can one think what is not the case?' is seen as 'a beautiful example of a philosophical question '.l2lb

Wittgenstein's appeal to use is in fact an appeal to return to the facts to which monistic and dualistic theories blind us. The attention to use and grammar 'weakens the position of certain fixed standards of our expression which had prevented us from seeing the facts with unbiased eyes '.122 A typical example of this philosophical blindness is the tendency of philosophers to take over from mathematics their concepts of 'proof', 'discovery', etc., and imagine that there are no other kinds of proof and discovery.I23 But the tendency thus to 'monify' (if the word may be coined) meanings and reality has deep roots in the human mind; it requires a constant fight against its fascination. Early in the Blue Book, Wittgenstein speaks of it as ' the craving for generality' and assigns to several causes. There is (a) , the tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term ',124 thus ignoring their differences and forgetting that they have only , family likenesses' amid these differences.I26 Thomists will say that the error of monists is to ignore the analogous nature of metaphysical terms. Then (b) and (c), there is the tendency to think that general terms are generalised images, which leads us to suppose that their ' objects' are mental images or states of consciousness; which in turn leads us to invent a whole shadow world of mental entities.I26 Finally (d), 'Our craving for generality has another main source, our preoccupation with the method of science. . .. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency

l2lb Pp. 30-1, 61. The' enormously complicated' character of our • colloquial language', as • a part of the human organism' (4.002), are further Tractatus ideas about language which (not developed in the earlier work) receive powerfUl develop­ment in the later writings.

112 P. 43. Philosophical difficulties and theories arise • when we look at the facts through the medium of a misleading form of expression' (p. 31).

128 pp. 25-6, 28-9. 12& P. 17. Wittgenstein thinks that this is the error underlying the Platonic doc­

trine of Forms. I am sure that this is a mistake; but this is not the place to argue the point. Much of Platonism could in fact be invoked as the example of how good metaphysics survives Wittgenstein's critique.

116 P. 17; cfr. p. 20. The idea of' family likenesses' is much more prominent in the Brown Book: see pp. 87. 117, 125, 145, 152.

1H pp. 17-18.

A

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 33

is the real source of metaphysics '.127 It is curious that the last point drops out entirely in the Brown Book and the Investigations; for surely it is a great and continuing source of mistaken meta­physics, of the empiricist, positivist and mathematico-idealist varieties. It seems, however, that Wittgenstein came to see it as a symptom of a more deep-seated malaise, which is the monistic tendency of the human intellect as such.

Against all this, Wittgenstein's remedy is the return to ordinary language in its variousness, which is one and the same with the return to facts in their diverseness.128 Wittgenstein speaks of it sometimes as a return to common-sense. Thus the suggestions of popular scientists that ' the floor on which we stand is not solid' is refuted by returning to the ordinary usage of the word ' solid '; which return assures us that 'floors' are precisely the sort of things which give their meaning to the word 'solid'; and that scientific theories of particles in thinly filled space cannot conflict with the common-sense notion of solidity because they are precisely introduced' to explain the very phenomenon of solidity '.128a Thus Wittgenstein tosses off, as it were, in passing, an idea-the Paradigm Case Argument-which kept many philosophers' pots boiling for years.

Here, then, Wittgenstein has found a method for his new philo­sophy-it is that of reminding ourselves continuously of the multiplicity, complexity, diversity of language and of the real. He sees philosophies of explanation as ineradicably monistic. True philosophy must abandon explanation for description. 'I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is purely descriptive' .129

'Our method is purely descriptive; the descriptions we give are not hints of explanations '.130 It is at the same time a method of humility. Philosophers could with profit take for motto Wittgen­stein's words: 'The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know'.131 Here again Wittgenstein is presenting us with a real problem: what is the nature of explanations in metaphysics? We feel that Thomist metaphysics can accept the challenge and that, as a metaphysics of analogous explanation, of common experience, of enlarged empirical description and of humility before being, it has nothing to fear, and something to gain, from Wittgenstein.

127 P. IS; cfr. pp. 2S-9. 128 P. IS: • Instead of .. craving for generality", I could also have said" the

contemptuous attitude toward the particular case" • . .'; cfr. pp. 66, 149-150, 170.

B

1'8a Pp. 45-6; cfr. p. 48. 129 P. IS. 130 P. 125. 131 P. 45.

34 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

We have been referring mainly to the Blue Book, whose main concern is with the nature of philosophical problems. These reflections will reappear, but with more concreteness and more assurance, in the Investigations. The rest of the Blue Book and the Brown Book give many instances of the applications of these principles to particular philosophical puzzles. The familiar discus­sions of the Investigations are here first tried out: the puzzles of time; the grammar of ' I '; the grammar and logic of knowing, meaning, thinking; the language of 'mental processes'; the language of 'can'; the 'curious superstition of "mental acts" .. .'. In each case, the trouble is traced to 'fascination with forms of expression'; and the force of philosophy is liberation. 'To show a man how to get out you have first of all to free him from the misleading influence of the question'.132 Where the earlier dis­cussions throw light upon the later, reference will be made to them in the analysis of Philosophical Investigations.

5. The' Philosophical Investigations' The essentials of what was said in the earlier article about the

Philosophical Investigations seem to me still valid. It was, however, both over-optimistic and inaccurate about Wittgenstein's readiness to admit metaphysics; and it did not bring out adequately either the point or the inter-connectedness of the detailed investigations undertaken in the work. I shall try to remedy some of these defects now. But first it would be well to clear away some per­sistent misconceptions about the work.

5.1. On Mr. Gellner: or The Wittgenstein that Never Was Mr. Gellner's book, Words and Things, will serve for long as a

thesaurus of errors about Wittgenstein. We are here interested in it only in so far as it indicts Wittgenstein personally.

Mr. Gellner names 'four pillars' of what he pejoratively calls 'Linguistic Philosophy'. These are (1) the Argument from the Paradigm Case; (2) the fallacy of identifying what is said with what ought to be said or ' of inferring the answer to normative, evaluative problems from the actual use of words'; (he calls this a generalised form of the naturalistic fallacy); (3) the Contrast theory of meaning, 'to the effect that any term to be meaningful must allow at least for the possibility of something not being covered by it'; (4) Polymorphism, or the doctrine that the uses of words are so various 'that general assertions about the use of words are impossible' .133

We have met with the Paradigm Case argument in the Blue Book. It does not 100m large in Wittgenstein's work. He invokes it in the Investigations when dealing with induction, in order to

mp. 169. 138 Pp. 29-30.

B-2

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 35

make the point that inductive inference does not need deductive or logical reasoning to justify it. Past experience provides good and sufficient grounds for inductive conclusions, because past experience is what we mean by 'good grounds' in inductive cases.134 This has nothing to do with arguing that, because a term exists in a given society, it therefore legitimately exists po Wittgen­stein's argument calls attention to the distinction between induction and deductive logic; its efficacy lies in the fact that many fallacies about induction have come from ignoring this distinction. Much of what Professor Popper writes about the rationality of induction is in the same sense as Wittgenstein's argument; 136 and Professor Popper is 'all right' with Mr. Gellner.

The 'naturalistic fallacy' charge is made a main gravamen against Wittgenstein also by Mr. Pole.137 It rests on a complete misunderstanding. The O.E.D. settles no philosophical problems for Wittgenstein. He is interested in uses of words, not for their own sake but in order to prevent their distorting our understanding of concepts; and in concepts again in the interests of commanding a right and full view of the facts.13s Mr. Gellner thinks that Wittgenstein canonises the linguistic status quo, on the basis that whatever is said, is right. He thinks that Wittgenstein denies the possibility of criticising language systems. He protests that philo­sophy is ' the asking, not of specific questions within a category, but of questions about categories as a whole, about the visibility, possibility, desirability, of whole species of thinking '.139 One sometimes wonders, reading Mr. Gellner, whom he is arguing against! Wittgenstein's philosophy is just what this definition desiderates. His philosophy is one prolonged calling in question of 'whole species of thinking' about mental acts, about knowing, perceiving, believing, intending, willing; about the self; about proof; about truth. And always, for Wittgenstein, 'commanding a clear view of the use of our words' is a means to insight into 'the way we look at things '.140 He is interested in the corres­pondence between concepts and very general facts of nature.14l The task of philosophy is unending, because each problem raises all the rest.142 Somewhat similarly, Mr. Gellner, joined in this by

13. 472-486. 135 Gellner, op. cit .• p. 34. 136 See e.g., his paper' Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report', in British

Philosophy ill the Mid-Century, ed. C. A. Mace, Allen and Unwin, London, 1957, pp. 155-191.

137 The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein, pp. 38-9, 60, 81-4, 98. Everett W. Hall makes a similar criticism in What is Value? Routledge, London, 1952, pp. 216 If.

138 See 122, 125, 370, 373, 383, II, 11 (p. 203). 13& Pp. 38-9. 140 122; efr. 79. 141 II, xii. i<2 133; efr. The Blue Book, p. 44.

36 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Mr. Pole,143 accuses Wittgenstein of prohibiting linguistic advance, excluding the creation of new languages, e.g., new scientific or mathematical languages.144 This is totally wrong. Wittgenstein says:

. . . Ask yourself whether our language is complete;-whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated into it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. . . . Our language can be seen as an ancient city . . . surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.145

Mr. Gellner misses Wittgenstein's whole point when he criticises what he calls the Contrast Theory of Meaning.l46 Had he under­stood that this is a Wittgensteinian way of eliminating metaphysics, he might have been more kindly disposed.147 We have met the point already and have seen that what in fact Wittgenstein is doing here is drawing the distinction between scientific and philosophical enquiry. His method is remarkably like Professor Popper's prin­ciple of ' demarcation' between science and metaphysics.148 To this Mr. Gellner would not object.

What Mr. Gellner attacks under the head of Polymorphism is the supposed repudiation of generalising. 'Generality per se is treated, either as an index of falsehood, or at least as harmful in philosophy.' 149 This charge rests on a confusion. By the' craving for generality' which he attacks, Wittgenstein means to describe specific' errors' of which he gives copious examples. We have met many already in the Blue Book. His main objection is to the monistic, myopic insistence that only one definition is the ' real', , essential' definition of a thing, and that all discrepant facts must be explained or explained away by assimilation to it; or that there is an essential definition of a thing which is the complete and final truth about it. Again, this is what Wittgenstein means when he warns against our postulate of clarity, 'our preconceived idea of crystalline purity'.149a It is by no means, as Mr. Gellner thiJ?ks,

1430p. cit., pp. 56-62, 81-4, 91-2. 1440p. cit., pp. 44, 99 ff., 120 ff., 180. 1&6 18. Compare 23: 'There are countless kinds of sentences. . . and this

multiplicity is net something fixed, given .once fer all; but new types .of language . • • ceme inte existence, and ethers become .obsolete and get forgetten (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)' Cfr. 79. See alse the Blue Book, pp. 17, 81.

146 Pp. 40-3. 147 Fer Gellner's epinien en metaphysics and in general en ' unprogressive and

weolly squabbling in non-scientific fields such as philesophy and theolegy '-as contrasted with' the .overwhelming, manifest success of natural science', see p. 233 and compare pp. 50, 110, 196, 201-2, 233-6.

148 See the paper cited above, and compare his paper, • Three Views concerning Human Knowledge', in Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. H. D. Lewis, Allen and Unwin, Lendon, 1956, pp. 357-388.

148 P. 45. lUa 107-8; cfr. 71, 91-2, 97-100.

NEW LIGHT ON WITIGENSTEIN 37

that he makes a cult of 'unclear and indistinct ideas' .1Ub But Mr. Gellner seems never to recognise his friends. This part of Wittgenstein's thought is in fact the critique of rationalism, which parallels Popper's critique of 'essentialism' -different though Popper's assumptions and conclusions were.150 But Wittgenstein does not exclude the generality which Mr. Gellner desires. He studies, as we have seen, the correspondence between concepts and the most general facts of nature, the facts 'which mostly do not strike us because of their generality'.151 He tries to open our eyes to the whole range of our language and concepts; to put every­thing before us; to force us to take into consideration all the facts.152

Mr. Gellner taxes Wittgenstein with substituting a Third Person approach for the First Person approach to the problem of know­ledge, seeing the knower and his language as natural processes or events in the world and denying any privilege or priority to thought. This, he thinks, involves the view that all problems of knowledge can be solved in an armchair.153 This is nearly the opposite of the truth. What Wittgenstein is concerned to do is to refute the notion that thinking is a 'hidden inner process' which can be attended to by introspection. 1M He is precisely denying that the problem of knowledge can be settled by introspecting in an arm­chair. (There was no armchair in Wittgenstein's room.) He is saying that thinking is as various as living, as wise as language, as large as being. We will not be distorting him if we say that for him, knowing is not 'attending' but 'intending', not 'looking in' but 'looking out '-upon the world. Wittgenstein wants precisely to prevent us from supposing that the problem of knowledge can be evolved by inspecting cognitive acts. For him, concepts are tools for investigating reality.

Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments. . . . Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, direct our interest.154a

We may recall that, for St. Thomas, who was no introspectionist, the mind is known through its acts, and mental acts are known through their objects. 1Mb

It is not Wittgenstein, but Mr. Gellner's friend Russell who wishes to deny the First Person character of knowledge and make

U9bP.44. 150 See Contemporary British Philosophy, pp. 366-9; The Open Society and its

Enemies, Routledge, London (1945), 1957, vol. I, pp. 31-4, vol. II, pp. 9-26; The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge, London, 1957, pp. 26-34.

151 II xii, cfr. 129. 16. 79, 124, 126-9. 16. Pp. 81-6, 123, 127-8. 164 33, 36; 327-374 et saepissime. 164a 569, 570; cfr. 11. 16'b S. Theol., 1, 87, 1-3.

38 PIDLOSOPIDCAL STUDIES

knowing a natural process in the world.155 Wittgenstein saw that this is the result of confusing philosophy with physics.

, I ' is not the name of a person, nor' here' of a place, and ' this' is not a name. . . . It is also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.155a

Mr. Gellner accuses Wittgenstein of promoting a lazy philosophy of acceptance of the world as it is, language as it is, knowledge as it is, common-sense as it is. The world is ' wholly unmysterious '. Each thing in it is what it is and is ' all right' as it is. Philosophy ends in platitude. It sanctifies unworriedness. It erects Hume's , backgammon into a system '. 'It is simply an attack on thought', no less! 156 This is ludicrous. Few philosophers ever had so high a conception of the duty of thinking as Wittgenstein had, or sacri­ficed themselves more totally to the search for understanding and for truth.157

155 See • Logical Atomism " in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901-1950, Ed. R. C. Marsh, Allen and Unwin, London, 1956, pp. 329-330, 343; • Mind and Matter', in Portraits from Memory, Allen and Unwin, London, 1956, pp. 137-8, 147-153; History of Western Philosophy, Allen and Unwin, London, 1946, p. 589. In a broadcast, • The World and the Observer " printed in The Listener, 6 February, 1958, Russell said: • I reverse the process which has been common in philosophy since Kant. It has been common among philosophers to begin with how we know and proceed afterwards to what we know. I think this is a mistake because. . . it tends to give knowing a cosmic importance, which it by no means deserves and thus prepares the philosophical student for the belief that mind has some kind of supremacy over the non-mental universe. . . . It would appear that there is no evidence of anything mental except in a tiny fragment of space-time'.

155a 410. 156 Pp. 99, fo11. 138-9, 148, 198-201, 215-7, 239 ff. 157 See Malcolm, Memoir: • Wittgenstein's severity was connected with his

passionate love of truth. He was constantly fighting with the deepest philosophical problems. The solution of one problem led to another. [He] was uncompromising; he had to have complete understanding. He drove himself fiercely. His whole being was under a tension. He strained his will, as well as his intellect, to the utmost. This was one aspect of his absolute relentless honesty. . . . his ruthless integrity, which did not spare himself or anyone else '. He was exhausted by his lectures, and' felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself'. He of len rushed straight to a cinem<! after them, to try to get distraction and peace from thinking (pp. 27-8). • As he struggled to work through a problem, one frequently felt that one was in the presence of real suffering. . . . In talking about human greatness, he once remarked that he thought the measure of a man's greatness would be in terms of what his work cost him' (p. 55). He felt that • a human being should do the thing for which he has a talent with all of his energy, his life long, and should never relax this devotion to his job merely in order to prolong his existence' (pp. 68-9). In the broadcast already referred to, Malcolm found Russell's remark about the later Wittgensteins having given up serious thinking, • amusing because it is 180 degrees from the truth '. This is the explanation, too, of his abomination of teachers of philosophy, and of his concern that his own pupils should become anything rather than professors. This was perhaps somewhat of a neurotic idea with him, but its reasons were not that he thought that' he alone had somt:thing to teach'. Let us again recall what he must have suffered from not only the plagiarisms but above all from the outrages perpetrated on his thought by alleged Wittgensteinians. Dr. Drury m~kes one of the best comments on his mind in this matter: • (He) knew from his own experience that in philosophical thinking there are long periods of darkness and confusion when one just has to

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 39

At the bottom of all Mr. Gellner's wrath against Wittgenstein is the belief that Wittgenstein is indifferent to, if not opposed to science.158 This is plausible but inexact. Wittgenstein says that scientific discoveries cannot solve philosophical problems.1s9 He never says that they do not create philosophical problems or stimulate philosophical advance. He himself was constantly pre­occupied with problems posed to philosophy by logic, mathematics, psychology. What he is concerned to do is to distinguish philosophy, as conceptual enquiry, from science as factual discovery.16o But though philosophy is not a search for scientific causes, it is still an enquiry bearing upon facts. Sometimes we see the facts better when we suspend the search for causes.

It often happens that we only become aware of the important facts. if we suppress the question 'why?'; and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to an answer.l6l

Surely no philosopher could avoid the task of somehow distinguish­ing philosophy from science. And yet, one suspects, it is really for having made this distinction that Mr. Gellner cannot forgive Wittgenstein. It does not seem that for Mr. Gellner philosophy has any meaning, value or function except to collaborate with the natural and social scientists.162

The one criticism Mr. Gellner makes which does seem to have a foundation is that of the 'neutrality' and 'doctrinelessness' which Wittgensteinianism allegedly claims for philosophy.163 But, in so far as this is different from the criticism of Wittgenstein's distinction between philosophy and science, even this is misplaced; for Wittgenstein did not think that philosophy , made no difference

wait. Wittgenstein had a great horror of what Schopenhauer once described as .. professional philosophy by philosophy professors"; people having to go on talking when really they know in their own heart that they had nothing of value to say' (The Listener, 28 January, 1960). Compare Malcolm, Memoir, pp. 30, 36,43.

158 Pp. 110, 213, 239 ff. Mr. Gellner says: 'Most of the interesting general human problems now arise from the impact of the natural and social sciences on our customary ideas and rightly so' (p. 264). I do not find in Wittgenstein any reason to suppose that he would want to deny this.

169 89, 124-5. 160 89, 109, 120, 124-5, 126, 401-2, II 11-12. He says: 'The analysis oscillates

between natural science and grammar' (392). 161 471. 162 See pp. 110-1, 213, 239. Miss Iris Murdoch, reviewing his book in The

Observer, said: 'I suspect that Mr. Gellner, who twice uses the phrase" the sterility of philosophy" in speaking of past not present philosophy, is ready to jettison the whole business in favour of science, helped out perhaps by a certain amount of moralising pragmatism '. Russell, of course, has expressed the doubt 'whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and possessed of a method of its own is any more than an unfortunate legacy from theology' (' Logical Atomism " in Logic and Knowledge, p. 325). The thought does not seem far removed from Mr. Gellner's.

163 Pp. 135-6, 152-4, 190, 240-1.

40 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

to life '.164 Some of his disciples do. But-and it is Mr. Gellner's big mistake not to have seen this-Wittgenstein is the best refuta­tion of the Wittgensteinians.

5.2 The Critique of the Tractatus The thought of the Blue and Brown Books is taken up again in

the Investigations and carried further. The picture theory of language is rejected because it neglects the importance of use in language and the endless varieties of uses we can make of one and the same picture: a picture can be used to assert that things are so as the picture depicts, or to state that they are not so; to order someone to act as the picture describes or to order him not to act thus.165 Language has not only one function, to name objects.l65a

It is an illusion that thought must be one unique thing, that , thought, language [must be] the unique correlate, picture, of the world'; that' proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other each equivalent to each '.166 There are not just a number of kinds of sentences; 'there are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call "symbols ", " words ", " sentences" ... -and new types of" languages" are being created every day '.166a Sentences do not do just one thing­, represent' or ' picture' reality. Like a collection of tools, words have endlessly diverse functions. 166b They do countless things, have countless uses. The error of logicians-and of the Tractatus -is to privilege the logic and the type of meaningfulness of descriptive sentences; and then try to try to analyse all other

164 Compare Malcolm, Memoir, pp. 32-3, 39. Wittgenstein was extremely angry with Malcolm for using the phrase' British National Character', which he thought dangerously muddled. Years later, he wrote to Malcolm: 'What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of every-day life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any. . . journalist in the use of dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends. You see I know that it's difficult to think well about "certainty", "probability", .. perception ", etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives'.

16. The addendum inserted on p. 11; compare 1-3, 32, 444, 520. The word • slab' could be used to name an object, or ask a question, or give an order. Its meaning depends on its • use in the language' (21). Malcolm tells us that the • breaking of the hold' of the picture theory on Wittgenstein's mind was precipitated by a banal incident: Piero Sraffa (the economics lecturer to whom, in the Preface to the Investigations, he pronounced himself so indebted) made a Neapolitan gesture of contempt and asked: • What is the logical form of that?' Wittgenstein came to see that there was some absurdity in the view that a proposition and what it represents must have the same form (Memoir, p. 69),

1··a 1, 21, 26-8, 32, 37, 40, 46, 560-1. In 43 we find the often-quoted sentence: • For a large class of cases-though not for all-in which we employ the word .. meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language '. Compare the Brown Book, pp. 173, 181.

166 96; efr. 108. 166a 23. 166b 11. 14; efr. 569-570.

NEW LIGHT ON WfITGENSTEIN 41

sentences in terms of descriptive sentences.167 Instead of saying: 'The general form of propositions is: This is how things are .. .',168 Wittgenstein will henceforth speak of 'language games', to emphasise the variety and elasticity of living language, as con­trasted with the rigidity of logical symbolism.169

This latter point touches on the fundamental error which Wittgenstein attributes to the Tractatus-the error of thinking that ordinary languages are logically respectable in the degree to which they approximate to a calculus, or to an ideal language. All this shows a confusion in our 'concepts of understanding, meaning and thinking'. Clarification of these is necessary to show what can lead us (and did lead Wittgenstein) 'to think that if anyone utters a sentence and understands it, he is operating a calculus according to definite rules 'po The mistake of the Tractatus is one instance of a deeply ingrained 'twist' in philosophical thinking, by which we are led to merge all philosophy into logic. Wittgen­stein calls it ' a tendency to sublime the logic of our language '.171

This arouses the presumption that we can 'understand the basis or essence of everything empirical " penetrate to the' possibilities of phenomenon', grasp the essences of things, and determine a priori the conditions of existence of the world.172 Philosophers who make logic the essence of philosophy feel that they have grasped the clear, hard, compelling and infallible conditions to which experience and language must: conform.173

Wittgenstein's words here are a perfect description of the approach to philosophy of the great logico-metaphysicians, particu­larly Leibniz; the great logico-empiricists, such as Russell and Carnap; and of the philosophical conclusions usually drawn from the work of the great formalised-language-constructors, such as Frege. Wittgenstein had himself known the compUlsiveness of this requirement for logical clarity and rigour.173a Now he sees

167 See 23-4, 108, 139. 168 114, quoting Tractatus 4.5. 169 7, 11, 14-15, 19-21. The idea of language as playing games with words

occurred to Wittgenstein on the occasion of seeing a football match, according to Malcolm, Memoir, p. 65.

170 81; cfr. 91, 98, 100, II 11. Compare the Blue Book, p. 29. 171 38; cfr. 94. 172 89_92, 97. 173 97: • It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no

empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect. it-It must rather be of the clearest crystal. But this crystal [appears] as something concrete, indeed as the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is '. (Wittgenstein refers to Tractatus 5.5563.) In 437, he speaks of' the hardness of the logical must '. In the earlier article, I completely misinterpreted sections 89-90 and 97.

173a It is worth noting that Camus felt the same fascination for and the same recoil from rationalism. • I demand that all shall be explained to me or nothing. And reason is helpless before this cry from the heart. . . . To be able to say, just once, .. That is clear"; then all would be saved. . . . But nothing is clear ..•• One of the only coherent positions in philosophy is revolt. . . . Revolt is the demand for an impos~ible transparency' (I.e my the de Sisyphe, Gallimard, Paris, 1942, pp. 44, 77). The language is strangely like that ()f 'f/vestigations, 10()-7.

42 PlDLOSOPHICAL STUDIES

the need to escape from it, and the means of escape. The remedy is to stop prescribing what must be, and begin describing what is. Wittgenstein is henceforth suspicious of the' logical must '.174 He henceforth campaigns against Russell's notion of 'Logic as the Essence of Philosophy' .174a Frege had wanted to 'break the dominion of the word over human minds'.176 Wittgenstein wants to return to the word in order to break the dominion of formal logic. For as formal logic turns further and further away from reality and life and language, it becomes more and more empty, incapable of helping us to understand the real, which is the purpose of all thinking. Our thought loses contact with reality; it becomes form without content. We must return to the concrete in its variety, that is to say, to language in its multiplicity. Then our thought shall get its ' grip' again. Wittgenstein speaks of ' turning our whole examination round'. The result will be that, instead of forcing the facts and all sentences into the single mould of a , preconceived idea of crystalline purity', we shall find our logic in the facts and respect the logic in our sentences.176 For our sentences are' in order' already, they do have' a quite unexcep­tionable sense', they do communicate.177 We did not need a logician to show us ' at last what a proper sentence looked like'.178

It is worth noting that Wittgenstein does not object to or deny the value of, formalised or ideallanguages.179 He only objects to the suggestion that every-day language is inferior to and less reliable than them. And he reminds us that formal languages are after all only a means to the understanding of ordinary language as scientific languages are to the understanding of the facts of ordinary experience.180

174 112-4, 295, 352, 437, 599. In 50, he says: • What looks as if it had to exist, is part of the language. . • . a paradigm in our language-game; something with which comparison is made '.

114a The title of one of the chapters of Our Knowledge of the External World. 115 W. C. Kneale' Gottlob Frege and Mathematical Logic', in The Revolution

in Philosophy, p. 32. 116 106-8. 111 98; compare 120, II 11 (p. 200); the Blue Book, p. 28. u88l. ue This is, as we have seen, one of Mr. Gellner's charges. Compare Everett

W. Hall, What is Value? pp. 195 fT. Professor Hall, however, makes the charge against the neo-Wittgensteinians with whom we are not here concerned. What he says about the • ideal language method' (which he uses himself to try to elucidate the language of value) would be entirely accepted by Wittgenstein. • The ultimate test, for the ideal language method, whether some supposed statement or set of statements is absurd, is not the ideal language but every-day language' (p. 196). On p. 222, he tells us that, in the past, advocates of • ideal languages' have not recognised a three-fold dependence of • ideal languages' on ordinary language. Namely, ordinary language sets the problems; it provides the test (Does the' ideal language' enable us to say everything ordinary language can say?); it supplements the • ideal language' by saying things the latter cannot say, including statements about the ideal language.

180 81, 98, 120. • Your very questions were framed in this (ordinary) language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask' (120).

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 43

As well as the 'ideal language' misunderstanding, Wittgenstein criticises several other fallacies of the Tractatus, particularly con­cessions it made towards the thought of Russell. The idea of , this' as the 'logically proper name'; 181 the idea of ostensive definitions; 182 the doctrine of sense data; 183 the theory of descrip­tions; 184 the method of reductive analysis 185 are all criticised­and the criticisms became the common-places of philosophical papers and discussions long before a line of Wittgenstein's later work was published. The basis of the criticism is that these doc­trines attempt' to sublime the logic of our language'; the answer is to return from logical univocity to linguistic 'open texture'.

5.3. The' Disorders' of Philosophy Wittgenstein retained enough respect for the Tractatus to recog­

nise it as an important type of philosophical thinking.185a Reflec­tion on it would, therefore, give insight into the way the mind of philosophers work-and are led astray. Much of the value of the Investigations comes from the fact that it is self-examination by a philosopher of the thought processes of philosophers.185b

Wittgenstein came to see a common pattern in the errors of philosophers. They come from a passion to unify the multiple, to assimilate the diverse, to neglect the concrete, to ignore differ­ences. He once thought of using as motto for the Investigations a quotation from King Lear: 'I'll teach you differences' .186 The monistic tendency is deep-seated in the human mind. The prob­lems caused by it 'have a character of depth'; 'they are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language '.187 The danger is indeed inherent in the very working of language. Language does unify the diverse; it tempts us with the thought of a unity that abolishes diversity. The success of

181 38_40. 182 410-3, 444. The latter place makes the important point that, if I wanted to

explain 'he' and ' is coming' by ostensive definitions, the same definitions would go for both sentences. 261 remarks that philosophy (alone the line of ostensive definitions, 'protocol sentences', etc.?) would lead one to wish' just to emit an inarticulate sound'. But the sound would have meaning only in a • language game', and thus we are thrown back again to ordinarY language.

183 401, II 11 (p. 202). 184 79. This makes the important point that no description or set of descriptions

can ever replace a proper name. No number of descriptions will ever exhaust the • use' of the name ' Moses'; for a name has not • got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all possible cases'. Compare 87.

185 46, 60-4, 87, 90-1. 185a Malcolm (Memoir, p. 69, cited already) quotes Wittgenstein as saying that

• he really thought that in the Tractatus he had provided a perfected account of a view that is the only alternative to the viewpoint of his later work'.

18·b See 295: 'When we look into ourselves as we do philosophy. 186 So Dr. DrurY in The Listener, 28 January, 1960. m Ill. Compare 340, 387, 664,

44 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

language, but also its peril, is that ' it makes everything alike' .IS7a

The assimilative, unifying urge is like a 'bewitchment'; we become , dazzled', 'fascinated'; we are 'caught' like a fly in a bottle; we are' calloused', 'cramped " unable to move freely; it is like the compulsive behaviour of someone mentally sick, we are , tormented' by iUsS But the malady is not recognised as such: the theories that are its symptoms seem exactly the theories we must and should construct. It is, for Wittgenstein, the very sign of the philosophical a priori that ' it is a form of account which is very convincing to us '.lssa

This interpretation of 'classical' philosophy determines the whole orientation of Wittgenstein's new philosophy. Malcolm quotes from a lecture of 1946:

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is to suggest or even invent other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.l89

Malcolm again tells us that, in a work apparently written about 1930, and not yet published, Wittgenstein says:

Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that we have, in a senseless way, put there. To do this, it has to make moves as complicated as these knots are. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its method cannot be, if it is to succeed. The complexity of philosophy is not its subject matter but our knotted under­standing.190

Most of the Investigations is taken up with showing this ' philo­sopher's complex' (as we might call it) exhibited in various philosophical theses and methods of his predecessors and contem­poraries as, in some cases, of his former self. In all these cases, we shall see a common syndrome. Philosophers become obsessed

187a II xl (p. 224). Hence' we remain unconscious of the prodigious diver~ity of alI the every-day language-games '.

188 109. • Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language '; cfr.299. 115: • A picture held us captive '; cfr. 112-4, 116, 295, 352: • OUf inability to turn our eyes away from this picture '. 100:' Dazzled by the ideal, we fail to see the actual use '. 309: ' [My] aim in philosophy-to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle'. 348: • Everyone who has not become caJlqused by doing philosophy notices that there is something wrong here. . .'; cf ... }93. 133: • The real discovery is the one. • . that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented .. .'; cfr. 255, 593. We shall return later to Wittgenstein's notion of his' philosophy as • therapy'. .

ISBa 158. 189 MemOir, p. 50. 100 See The Listener, 4 February, 1960.

NEW LIGHT ON WITTGENSTEIN 45

with one word, one definition, one function of language, which they separate from its natural use in language and life, which they isolate from its family of related words. Thus, mesmerised by an abstraction, they become blinded to the concrete; in the name of the One they deny the Many; in the name of a theory they ignore the facts.

Definitions which seek to 'explain' a manifold are often, Wittgenstein declares, so abstract as to be vacuous. As he had said of tautologies in the Tractatus, so he says here of high-level generalisations, that they do not indicate a direction.19oa What do we know, for example, when we say that' all tools serve to modify something. . Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions'? 191 This may be thought harmless; but when we find philosophers declaring , All sentences assert . . . or picture .. .',192 or that' language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts . . .' p~ then we have a whole erroneous philosophy. Similarly if we say

, that all sentences are reports of mental states.193 We are misled by thinking that there must be some one thing which ' knowing' is, or 'talking', or 'thinking' , or 'meaning' or 'believing', or 'negating', or 'being certain', or ' reading', or 'intending', or 'ordering' or 'willing' ,194 Many of our philosophical misunder­standings are caused by 'certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language '.195 We speak of , describing' the objects in a room and of ' describing' the state of our mind; and we can come to think of our mind as a container of mental furniture. 196 We can equally be misled by applying to , mental objects' the logic of physical objects; 197 or by construing , expressing an opinion' on the model of ' expressing a feeling' .198

We sometimes err by giving a word an absolute sense, whereas it has sense only in a context and only when the conditions of its use are specified. This is so of such pairs of correlatives as simple-

190a Tractatus 4.461: 'Tautology and contradiction are without sense (Like the point from which two arrows go out in opposite directions). Investigations 454: , The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it '.

191 14. In the Brown Book, Wittgenstein thinks that' most general philosophical propositions' are vacuous from excess of abstraction and, • though [they] sound as though [they] had some very clear and deep meaning', they are 'meaningieis except in very special cases' (see p. 117).

192 Compare 23-4. 19'a 304. 193 24, 33, 303. 194 See 148 If. (' knowing '); 65-6, 304 (' talking '); 327-374 (' thinking '); 33-6,

560, II ii (' meaning '); 574-580, II x (' believing '); 547-557 (' negating '); II xi (' being certain '); 156-168 (' reading '); 337-8 (' intending '); 458-460 (' orderinl: '); 611 If. (' willing '). There are many similar passages in the Blue and Brown Books: see pp. 5 If. (on' mind' generally); 24 If. (' knowing '); 34-6 (' meaning '); 37 fr. (' thinking '); 120 if. (' reading '); 167 (' understanding '); 172-3(' narning ').

19. 90. 198 290_3. lO. 293, 304. 198 243 If.; 317.

46 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

composite, exact-inexact. The Tractatus erred in speaking of , simples' absolutely, without specifying the context or giving the word a contrast. It erred in setting an absolute standard of , exactness' of language without settling the question, 'exact in what context, for what purpose? '199 A similar error was that of trying to determine what ' naming' is, by forgetting all about what we ordinarily mean by , naming' and concentrating on the search for one unique name for one unique thing. Philosophers in this frame of mind can ' say the word " this" to the object as it were address the object as "this "-a queer use of this word which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy '.200 The same mystifica­tion occurs when a philosopher ' says the word " self" to himself and tries to analyse its meaning'. 201

What is happening on these cases is that we are losing contact with reality; we are as it were drugged with logical abstractions. , Fascinated' by abstract ideas, by words, we make them real and become unconscious of the reality of things. Wittgenstein expresses this by two famous similes. 'Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday'. 202 'The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing its work'. 203 Wittgenstein speaks in the same connection, as we have seen, of ' subliming logic'. 204 The idea is the same, that of trying to enter a domain where our thought communes with Thought, becomes Thought Itself; where our mind knows no limitation or restriction of ' empirical cloudiness or uncertainty' ;205 where our minds no longer learn from fact but dictate to fact; where our minds become Creator and' I have become God '. Wittgenstein warns that this is an attempt at the impossible, an attempt to get outside thought and language. When people sup­posed that they were soaring in the super-rational realm of pure logic,206 they were instead floundering in the sub-rational realm of nonsense.2()6a

199 Cfr. 46-7, 50, 88. 200 38; cfr. 39. In the same connexion, he says in the Brown Book that' we are

most strongly tempted to imagine that giving a name consists in correlating in a peculiar and rather mysterious way a sound (or other sign) with something. How we make use of this peculiar correlation then seems to be almost a secondary matter. (One could almost imagine that naming was done by a peculiar sacramental act, and that this produced some magic relation between the name and the thing) , (p. 172).

201413; cfr. 94; 428. 202 38. 203 132; cfr. 291, 428. 20' 38. 205 97. 206 Compare the references to a • super-order' of • super-concepts', to • super­

expression " • philosophical superlative' in 97 and 191-2 . • 06a See 119: • plain nonsense and bumps'; see also 500, 520, 464, 524. Miss

Anscombe points out the use Wittgenstein makes of the term • senseless' evolves in the course of the Investigations. From' meaningless' or • unintelligible' it comes to mean • what should be excluded from the language' because it violates some rule of la11JUage (see Intention, Blackwell, Oxford, 1957, p. 27).

NEW LIGHT ON WI'ITGENSTElN 47

Wittgenstein has here accurately diagnosed a state of mind which has been at the basis of rationalistic metaphysics and of naturalistic mysticisms-and has been thought by many critics to be at the basis of all metaphysics and all mysticism. The phrase, ' subliming logic', is apt to describe the metaphysics of people like Spinoza and Leibniz.207 The description of a philosopher' staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word " this" innumerable times' 208, reminds one of nothing more than of the soliloquy of Roquentin in Sartre's novel La Nausee, as he sat in the park staring at a tree-trunk, until the meaning of ' being' revealed itself to him. Evidently, Sartre thought that this was the experience and the concept from which metaphysics takes its rise. Again we are reminded of certain Yoga-experiences, in which the subject concentrates on one object, no matter what-' say, a cow' -or on a diagram of concentric lines, until he becomes ' liberated' from selfhood and thought, 'beyond words and their meanings, knowledge and memory, opinions, comparisons, reasonings ',209

and is absorbed in the All which is the Nothing. What grandness, what joy, to feel and understand that some day we shall be part of the ruling, not of the ruled, when our life ... will itself be the glory of the being [of the Law] ....

-A state which is anticipated in the Yoga trance, in which Mind and all its works are transcended and the consciousness of man communes with the laws to which it is fundamentally akin.210

A sober scientist, when he ' goes on holiday' from science and plays at metaphysics, can write similar nonsense, as does SchrOdinger :

The only possible inference (from my experience of my body and its controlling mind) is, I think, that I-I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt' I ',-am the person, if any, who controls the' motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature. . .. The mystics of many centuries . . . have described . . . the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: Deus factus sum (I have become God). 211

How little all this has to do with religion or with philosophy is perhaps sufficiently shown by the fact that one can enter these heavens and have these insights by simply 'taking four-tenths of

'07 Could not part of Spinoza's error be described, in the language of the Blue Book (p. I), as the effort • to find a substance for a substantive'; for much of Spinoza's metaphysics is contained in the initial definition of substance, to which thereafter reality must conform.

208 38. 209 Ernest Wood, Yoga, Pelican Books, 1958, pp.235-6. 2100p. cit., pp. 44, 149. 211 What is Life, Cambridge University Press, 1945, pp. 88-9. Schrodinger invokes

the • early great upanishads' with their recognition that • Athman Brahman (the personal self equals the omnipresent all-comprehending eternal self.)' Compare his Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, 1958, pp. 52-6, 62.

48 ,PHILOSOPIDCAL STUDIES

a gramme of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sitting down to wait for the results '.212

The mysticism of Wittgenstein's own Tractatus had some affinity with all this; he understands the urge, he accords value to it. 213

Some have spoken of Wittgenstein's second philosophy as a new kind of mysticism and have compared it with Zen-Buddhism.214

Nothing could be further from the truth. In this sense of the term ' mystical " Wittgenstein's later philosophy is precisely , anti­mystical'; it is a plea for the return to earth, to facts, to common sense. Wittgenstein summons illuminist philosophers back to 'words and their meanings, knowledge and memory, opinions, comparisons and reasonings '. This is the force of Wittgenstein's

212 See Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Pelican Books, 1959, p. 13. The main' result' was that Huxley saw • what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle moment by moment, of naked existence. . . • Istigkelt (" Meister Eckharts" word) ... Is-ness. The Being of Platonic philosophy .. .' etcetera (op. cit., p. 17).

213 See Investigations, HI, 119, 340. Given the influence of Schopenhauer on the youthful Wittgenstcin, we should expect some traces of Buddhist mysticism to have come through. In fact, some passages of the Tractatus, chiefly those con­cerning • the metaphysical subject' and solipsism can be closely paralleled in Buddhist writings and in accounts of Buddhist mystic states. In 5.64, Wittgenstein says: • Solipsism strictly carried out, coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it'. Ernest Wood in his book on Yoga (pp. 240 ff.) shows how the aim of Yoga is to suppress individual self-consciousness so as to commune, beyond • the illusion of individuality', with the Real Self, common to world and self, which is not mind nor object but No-mind and No-thing. When this state of no-consciousness has been achieved there is no awareness of self as distinct from world: in Wittgenstein's words, the self has • shrunk to an extensionless point and there remain~ the reality co-ordinated with it'. According to Wood (p.23) Nirvana can be described as: • The Universe grows I '. Similarly, at the teaching of Buddha, • all understood that each one's mind was co-cxtensive with the universe ..•• And Buddha speaks: • This unity . . . is boundless in its reality and being boundless in yet one . • • pervading all things ..• including the infinite worlds in its embrace ... it is one with Divine Knowledge, it is manifested as the effulgent Nature of the Divine Intelligence of Tathagata .•• .' See The Compassionate Buddha, introd. by E. A. Burtt, Mentor Books, 1958, p. 194; Compare E. Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, Penguin Books, 1958, pp. 147-150, 190. Just as Wittgenstein ends the Tractatlls with the words: • Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'; so the last word of Buddhism is: • There are not different kinds of mind and there is no doctrine which can be taught. As there was no more to be said, everybody went away' (The Compassionate Buddha p. 204). One grasps, I think, an aspect of the later Wittgenstein's • return to ordinary language' when one reads, about the. Yogi: • There is no gas for this ballooning. Nothing on earth or in mind can help him. He must make no comparisons or contrasts, no definitions, no categories' (Wood, Yoga, p. 72). On Schopenhauer and Buddhism, see H. de Lubac, La rencontre du Bouddhisme et de l'occident, Aubier, Paris, 1945.

21< Margaret Masterman speaks of the Wittgensteinian movement as having for part of its enterprise' the Zen-Buddhist-like endeavour to gain illumination of truth by construction of and exclusive meditation on a paradox'. She speaks of Wittgen­stein as sharing' the kind of prohibition against generalisation which is characteristic of Zen-Buddhism' (see The Cambridge Review, 14 November, 1959). This is all wrong. What Wittgenstein meant by the • generalisation' which he was against, was precisely the sort of thing Zen-Buddhists practice. Mr. Gellner finds a mystical streak in • Wittgenstein II' as well (pp. 53, 148, 187); but differently from Miss Masterman, he does not like it.

NEW LIGHT ON WITIGENSTEIN 49

appeal to ' ordinary language' and ordinary usage.216 This is why he says: 'What we do is to bring words back from their meta­physical to their every-day use'. 216 This is the point of his saying: 'Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one '.217 It is mystification he wants to exclude, and not mystery, when he says: , if the words "language", " experience ", "world", have a use it must be as humble a one as that of the words" table ", " lamp ", "door"'.218 It is to exclude illuminism that he repeats, with a naturalism that 1S only apparent, that language is ' as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing'. 218a

It cannot be too much emphasised that the return to ordinary language is not 'O.E.D.-ism', but a return to reality, to facts. It is the means to getting the ' engine' of thought back in motion again; 219 making the disconnected wheel 'engage' again with the rest of the machinery of experience; 220 getting ourselves' off the slippery ice', where the conditions looked ideal' but where also, just because of that, we are unable to walk', and 'back to the rough ground' where we have the indispensable' friction' of hard fact. 221

The Queen's University, Belfast

216 38, 77, 98, 100, 120, 370. 218 116; efr. 182, 248. 217 90; efr. 109, 251, 314, 360, 449. 218 97; efr. II x. USa 25, 454, 491. 219 See 132. 220 See 136. 221 See 107.

C. B. DALY