WITTGENSTEIN'S METAPHYSICS OF CONTINGENCY

METAPHTLOSOPHY Vol. 23, Nos. I & 2, JanuaryiApril 1992 0026-1068 $2.00

WITTGENSTEIN’S METAPHYSICS OF CONTINGENCY

EDWARD MARCO’ITE

( 1 ) In what follows I will be viewing Wittgenstein vis-a-vis the overall purpose of his enterprise. I will be particularly concerned with the question of whether and in what sense his philosophy can be said to constitute a coherent, overall system or theory of the world, and of the way he comes to grips with perennial and fundamental questions. I am concerned with whether Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy can be said to amount to anything that can be characterized as a “metaphysics.” My ultimate conclusion on this matter is that Wittgenstein’s later work promulgates what amounts to a metaphysics.

In treating Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as though it can justifiably be represented in summary form, or as though it can be said to constitute a coherent “system of the world” as I will sometimes call it, or even as though it might harbor what amounts to a metaphysics, I do not wish to ignore or redefine Wittgenstein’s own stated purpose. It is clear, even to me, that Wittgenstein was not at all concerned with developing a philosophical system or metaphysical theory in any recognizably traditional sense. Throughout his later writings he states many times and in many ways that his purpose is to cure philosophers (and the philosopher in all of us, he should have emphasized) of an illness (or an interrelated constellation of illnesses) brought about by certain misleading forms of grammar. It is this therapeutic end that he sees as guiding the proper assimilation of his thought, and not the acquisition of a metaphysical theory or even a set of answers per se to various philosophical problems and questions. Proper assimilation of late Wittgenstein should be rather a process, an accumulative change in one’s habits of thought; relief from certain intellectual torments that are characteristic of philosophers. I do not want to dispute any of this. But I would like to take the position that it is albeit not impossible or strictly improper to represent Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as a systematic position vis-a-vis traditional philosophy and its central problems and issues, or even to undertake to summarize this position either in whole or in its various parts. Further, I will hold that this can be done either more or less adequately - that it is possible to be right or wrong in one’s interpretation. Moreover, we can admit Wittgenstein’s claim not to advance any philosophical hypothesis per se, yet acknowledge numerous metuphilosophical theses advanced by Wittgenstein, i.e., theses not in philosophy, so to speak, but about philosophy.

What I think is really erroneous is to hold that Wittgenstein’s later position cannot be represented in summary form, or as a system of

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ideas. Whether we say that he solved problems or merely dissolved them we are still saying that he addressed them and dealt with them. Whether we are left with a metaphysical theory as such or not we cannot arguably be said to have merely sidestepped the issues; rather, it will be claimed by the Wittgenstein advocate, we have been taken to the heart of the matter (even if, as it turns out, there is nothing substantial to be found there at all). In affirming my preference for attempting an overview of Wittgenstein’s thought - as a “system of the world” - I do not mean to suggest that dealing with particular and isolated problems and topics as has most often been done by commentators of the analytic tradition (when they are not doing sheer exposition) is necessarily distorting or unfruitful. It should go without saying that much interesting work has been done by way of addressing one or another area of Wittgenstein’s thought rather than his philosophy as a whole. (It might be interesting to mention here that Wittgenstein himself admitted to difficulties in presenting his later work in systematic form.) Though his work is as a result quite certainly all the richer for this, it seems to suggest that he did not prohibit the possibility. In his early Notebooks he writes, “Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”’

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes, “Men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symmetrically combined - a priori - to form a self- contained system.” ( T R , 5.4541) Wittgenstein’s strategy is to situate all such matters of questions and answers in terms of what is sayable. Philosophers, of course, want true answers to their questions, and the definitive vehicle of true answers has to be language.

(2) The traditional product of the philosophical enterprise, the artifact if I may call it that, is usually a text, the content of which is depicted as advancing a theory, thesis, hypothesis, doctrine, position, system, metaphysics. Plato’s Republic is such an artifact, and so are Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Spinoza’s Ethics, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, and any number of philosophical texts. What they have in common is that they endeavor to present an overall and more or less systematic explanation of phenomena in accordance with some theory or small set of principles. Philosophy in this sense - metaphysics, first philosophy, speculative philosophy, or however you will have it - inevitably turns on the projecting of some notion of substance, or essence, or datum as fundamental constituent(s) of the world. In this sense, the early Wittgenstein (Tractatus is a metaphysician par excellence.

’ Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks, 191&1916. Translated by G. E. M. Anscornbe. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969. P. 23e.

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Though already his line of focus is language, and though he ends up making some well known disparaging remarks regarding metaphysics, he albeit incorporates a notion of substance in terms of objects as the ultimate constituents of the world - and does it, moreover, by means of traditional a priori reasoning - that in some respects bears more resemblance to the monadology of Leibniz, say, than it does to Wittgenstein’s own later position. His earlier view was that it must be an a priori necessity that inasmuch as analysis cannot go on forever but must come to an end, there must be ultimate simples composing the world, to which elementary propositions apply. Nonetheless, the Tractatus contains much more of what we associate with his later viewpoint than is often recognized. For example, in the Preface Wittgenstein writes, “The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these questions are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood.” Or, consider 5.5563: “In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.” Again, 6.521: “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.”2

Wittgenstein came to hold that what he was doing was not at all what previous philosophers had done, but something new and different that would stand in the place of traditional philosophy (though as I will be showing, his assessment of much traditional philosophy was not always simply dismissive or denigrative as is generally believed). In the Blue Book he wrote, “One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy.’ ’” Philosophy was not to be considered as a body of doctrine, but an activity. As a method this activity takes the form of description; as a process or goal it takes the form of therapy, curing us of philosophical problems by dissolving them:

. . . And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings; in spite of an urge to misunderstand them . . . Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of l a n g ~ a g e . ~

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Pp. 113 & 149. (55.5563 & 6.521)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue und Brown Books. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1958. P. 28.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G . E. M. Anscombe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953. P. 47 (8109).

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In the Tractatus he had written, “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thought^."^ The common belief that Wittgenstein “changed philosophies” in his development from the Tractatus to his later work is only partly correct; indeed, the following quote from the Preface to the Tractatus stands just as well for his later position: “The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood.”6 However, this itself can be misleading. Through the ages philosophers have occupied themselves with explaining the world, bringing everything under some unifying principle, essence, substance, cosmology, ontology, explanatory scheme, hypothesis, and so forth. Early Wittgenstein is no exception to this: the Tractatus contains a systematic exposition of what Wittgenstein then regarded as the essence of language, and the relation of language to reality; there is an ontology of objects as constituting the substance of the world; there is an existential metaphysics of self, though no epistemology and no cosmology or theory of space and time. Within the position assumed in the Investigations (along with Zettel, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, and so forth) there is nothing like a theory, or speculative scheme, world hypothesis, or metaphysics in the traditional sense. There are, indeed, theses about philosophy - but the stance which they embody is a purely metaphilosophical one: philosophy itself, and not the world or reality, is the object of focus. The aim is to have done with philosophy, to come completely free of its hold. As Wittgenstein writes, “the problems should completely disappear .”7

Nor am I aware of any provision, in Wittgenstein’s work, for the construction of new philosophies in the traditional sense, new systems of metaphysics, in which the future philosopher is enabled, thanks to Wittgenstein, to avoid the grammatical entrapments that his or her predecessors succumbed to. Wittgenstein’s work is not in the nature of a prolegomenon.

(3) Wittgenstein has been called a philosopher’s philosopher; his enterprise is directed at philosophers and what he regards as their peculiar problems:

When philosophers use a word - “knowledge,” “being,” “object,” “I,” “proposition,” “name” - and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language- game which is its original home? -

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.8

Tractatus, op. cit., p. 49. (94.112). Ibid. P. 3.

Ibid., p. 48. (9116) ’ Philosophical Investigations, op. cit., p. 46.


And if we were to eliminate metaphysics nothing important would be destroyed, but only “houses of card^."^ Then everything will be open to view and we will see that there is nothing to explain. Philosophical problems are imaginary profundities:

The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as dcep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. - Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And that is what the depth of philosophy is.)”

My reason for drawing attention to these passages from the later Wittgenstein is that they are among the most salient instances wherein he gives us an overall statement of purpose - or, perhaps despite himself, something of the order of a philosophical theory. More accurately, not so much a philosophical theory as a theory about philosophy, about what philosophers have been doing and how they have come to be doing it. At the same time it is the expression of an ideal or goal. The goal is to rid ourselves of all the problems, which are not genuine problems in the first place. Already in the Tractatus Wittgenstein had expressed a similar view:

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only establish that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language . . .

And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all. (TR, 44.003)

It is grammar that leads the philosopher astray: the occurrence in language of grammatically similar yet functionally different terms, expressions, idioms. Philosophers, following the lureof thesegrammatical asymmetries, get ensnared in a network of dilemmas. The philosopher (and the philosopher in all of us) needs to retreat to the high ground where he or she can command a clear view of language. (“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” ( P I , 9115) ) Unlike ordinary houses of cards, however, the problems arising out of this failure to command a clear view of our language cannot simply be blown away, but have to be dismantled by painstaking process. In Zettef, Wittgenstein writes, “In philosophy we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important.” (2, P382)

’ Ibid., p. 48 ($118) ”’ Ibid., p. 50. (8126)

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Nonetheless, Wittgenstein, no less than the traditional metaphysical philosopher (though seemingly in much more pedestrian fashion), conducts his operation under the notion of a final and definitive wrapping up - a full and exhaustive pursuance and exploitation of the initial wonder: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.” (PI, 9133) At the surface this seems a modest goal compared with the overview announced in the Preface to the Tractatus that “the truth of the thoughts that are here set forth seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems.’”’ Albeit, though the rhetoric is different the goal is just as sweeping, and Wittgenstein, like the traditional philosopher of previous ages, wants to effect a coup that will settle our metaphysical wonderings. We stop inquiring in any case - or do we? (4) More than any other philosopher, Wittgenstein is resistant to

generalization. Study of his work comes with ample warning that to summarize his philosophy or attribute to him a metaphysical theory (and remember, I am discounting the ontology of the Tractatus because Wittgenstein himself abandoned it) is bound to distort if not misinterpret him altogether. Wittgenstein tells us that philosophy cannot advance any theory, that for the philosopher there are only the facts of language, and the only reason previous philosophers concerned themselves with notions like substance, meanings, the metaphysical subject, or being is because they were seduced by grammar, which seemed to offer metaphysical vistas and hidden depths. And so, philosophers - at least those of the Anglo-American analytic tradition - have tended to focus their commentaries on Wittgenstein to what take the appearance of isolated strains of inquiry going under designations like “the private language argument ,” “philosophy of mind,” “Wittgenstein’s notion of a criterion,” “following a rule,” “family resemblance”; and to pat theses like “meaning is use,” and “language has no essence.” One outstanding exception to this is David Pears’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, in which both Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophy are given ingenious and systematic treatment. A more recent tendency is to see Wittgenstein as a phenomenologist in disguise, as Nicholas F. Gier does in his interesting but I think misguided Wittgenstein and Phenomenology.” The usual view of late Wittgenstein, however, is of someone who did interesting work in many areas of philosophy - philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and so forth; that he had much to say on a lot of different philosophical topics. Fann, for example, states, “The Investigations is completely unsystematic in both

” Tractatus, op. cit., P. 5 . Gier, Nicholas F. Wittgenstein and Phenomenology. Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1981.

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its form and its ~ o n t e n t . ” ’ ~ Moreover, most writings about the later Wittgenstein - even those relatively few that do not confine themselves to separate issues, such as the private language argument, criteria, rules, and so forth, but instead undertake to more or less systematically tackle the whole range of questions that preoccupy Wittgenstein - do not, in my mind, sufficiently emphasize Wittgenstein’s central concern: to be rid of philosophy, not to offer a new philosophy. Of course, in a sense, we might want to say that every philosopher wants to be rid of philosophy or a certain philosophical problem or group of problems, by proffering a theory or solution that claims the last word. This could indeed be said of the author of the Tractatus. I n his later philosophy, however, Wittgenstein does not (or at least claims not to) offer a theory or a solution - not within philosophy, at least, though he does advance theses about philosophy, i.e., metaphilosophical theses, to which I have already alluded. Wittgenstein’s aim of stopping philosophy is not like that of previous philosophers who wanted to finish things up. Instead of the completion of an edifice Wittgenstein aims for the unraveling of an obsession. Yet it is a fact that Wittgenstein himself never did manage to stop. The obsession turned out to be stronger than his will to stop; the unraveling became an end in itself. The process of curing the disease became its own justification.

Wittgenstein’s addressing of the metaphysical task of dealing with all our questions and perplexities concerning truth, knowledge, and reality is unique in the history of thought: instead of providing definitive answers to questions, instead of solving problems, instead of providing a hypothesis, a theory of the world, a metaphysical superstructure, he wants, as much as possible, to create a void where philosophical questioning had stood, and elimination instead of a solving of problems or answering of questions; instead of a metaphysical superstructure a blank space (or perhaps not even that); instead of questions with answers an absence of all questioning; instead of a grand narrative the exposure of a grammatical joke. It is a dissolution for which there is no compensating replacement; not even, perhaps (and in the final analysis), anything so firm and substantial as an injunction against creating a metaphysical theory. It intends to be a philosophy of such fine transparency that the effect it lays upon phenomena, upon our cognitive topography, shows no measurable weight: everything is left in place. Certain questions, problems, to be sure, do suffer denaturement - “other minds’’ for instance, but even here it is not as though something were actually taken away, for, properly considered, there never was any such problem; were there really such a problem then it would have to be solved, not dissolved. To remove a question or a problem is to deny its

l 3 Fann, K . T. Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. P. 105.

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veritable existence. What is denied is the right or ability to promulgate senseless questions. Beyond this, philosophy leaves everything alone.

However, though the systematic and metaphysical nature of Wittgen- stein’s philosophy is what I will eventually be concerned about, it is undeniable that terms like system and to a greater extent metaphysics are hackneyed words that have meant different things and been used in many different ways by different philosophers, drawing more than their share of confusion and ambiguity. My personal view is that every major philosopher advances the concept of metaphysics (and the concept of philosophy, for that matter), so that what metaphysics means is largely what a philosopher makes of it. However, in this article I will try to circumvent some of the confusion by sometimes applying the term “system of the world” to the main enterprise of every philosopher who ever undertook a general and comprehensive account of things. Main promulgators of systems of the world by my definition would include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Quine - and Wittgenstein. I borrow the term from Quine, who attributes it to Newton. In adopting it I do not mean to sidestep any issues pertinent to my own inquiry but only to avoid being caught up in those that are not.

( 5 ) Philosophers undertake to dispose of or at least come to terms with their predecessors and rivals by presenting a superior truth, a more comprehensive account of phenomena. In our Western tradition philosophy’s medium is words - discourse, texts, arguments. This might seem trivially obvious; however, certain activities like yoga and meditation do not ultimately rely on verbalization (setting aside mantras and the like), yet are sometimes designated as philosophy. The fact that what I choose to call philosophy is essentially a verbal enterprise brings up another fact about philosophy: in our time it is largely linguistic. That is, philosophy, already bound to the medium of language, has in our time shifted its focus overwhelmingly to the thematic investigation of language itself, a phenomenon characterized by Richard Rorty as the “linguistic turn.” This bears special mention here because Wittgenstein is one of the main promulgators of so-called linguistic philosophy (it bears mention also that some philosophers would distinguish between linguistic philosophy and philosophy of language, and that neither designation should apply to philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida who are otherwise equally as preoccupied with language). Wittgenstein holds that there are only the facts of language. He holds also that both language and philosophy are activities, and that philosophy is descriptive. My suggestion is that once the implications of the view that philosophy is descriptive - and in particular descriptive of linguistic activities - are fully grasped, then we have forged a key to understanding late Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein language is a spatio-temporal phenom-


enon (as contrasted to, say, the Chomskian theory of permutations of a universal grammar). The instance, I want to argue, holds primacy over the rule or standard. Out of this I propose to derive what I regard as the central underlying notion of late Wittgenstein: contingency, a notion whereby Wittgenstein comes close to one other philosopher (whom it appears Wittgenstein never read): David Hume. The point 1 want to work out is that language-games are not fetched from a pre-existing index: we just cite them as though they were because of the following restriction: The actual language-games are only games of fact, and, primarily speaking, they are real only inasmuch as they are actuated at a time and in a situation. The “type” is an abstraction from the instance. Or - instance precedes type. The accreditation of language-games is not in virtue of their being standard entries in a catalogue of types, but rather their historically taking place: their reality is sheer facticity. Contingency (not Wittgenstein’s term but mine), it will be noticed, has an air of being about it, say, in Heidegger’s sense of Being. But here, I propose, is the difference between Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Wittgenstein does not appear to be concerned with straining himself, philosophically, against ever-elusive ontological vistas. At the level of contingency everything is indeed dissolved: there is nothing to be got or practiced besides silence (and this holds as much or even more for the later philosophy of the Investigations as for the Tractatus). The contingency of linguistic activities is to be taken as a genuine transparency. Existence is not a predicate or anything else. While Heidegger tortures sein with relentless obsession, Wittgenstein specific- ally disallows questions of ontology, being, substance, and the like. There is nothing that Wittgenstein would want to say of contingency as a concept (even had he used the word): it just pushes us back to the facts of language.

(6) Wittgenstein’s overall view can perhaps be characterized so: philosophy is the outcome of a certain suggestiveness inhering in the conventions of our language (any language, presumably). This factor sets the philosopher off trying to solve what appear to be profound mysteries concerning the world, its ultimate nature, and our knowledge of it. Substantives are particularly hazardous, inasmuch as they might have widely different functions while sharing their grammar. This state of affairs sets the philosopher on a quest for essences. But any project based thereon is illusory, as we would see if we could only obtain a clear view of how our language really operates (when it has not been disengaged by the philosopher). Once one attains this clear overall view of language the problems disappear (though there is ever the possibility of relapse, and only the slow cure is really effective: we do not attain this clear view all at once: rather, the process is a painstaking and piecemeal one.) From this overall vantage point there is really nothing to prove or form substantial theories about; from this vantage point we can only

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describe. Since description is impartial with regard to laws and theories, questions and proofs, there is only contingency.

The real error here is Wittgenstein’s insistence that everyday language is all right just as it is. If language is all right then how is it that it traps the philosopher? - or, perhaps more accurately, how is it that language traps people in the misleading forms of its grammar, who as a result become - in the most extreme instances - what we call philosophers? Wittgenstein actually goes against his own thesis when he wants to hold (1) that everyday language is all right as it is; and (2) philosophers are misled by grammar (or the forms of expression).

In setting the matter straight I should say with Wittgenstein that language is pretty much okay as it is (because we are after all making it our ultimate court of appeal), but that there exist nonetheless certain hazards inherent in the grammar - having to do with the logic of substantives, including the notions of meaning and mental processes - which, if we are not on guard, can lead us down a slippery slope of trying to answer unanswerable questions, of wrestling with spurious problems, and working out baseless metaphysical schemes. The full-fledged philosopher or metaphysician is the person who has lost his or her bearings on this slope. However, there is no absolute line of demarcation between language-games that do not succumb to this slippery slope and those of the full-fledged metaphysician. What Wittgenstein should have allowed is that there are gradations of entrapment: many, perhaps most people, are sometimes and to some degree caught in the snares of grammar. The differences here - the differences, that is, between ordinary discourse and philosophical discourse - are only a matter of degree. This is what Wittgenstein should have made more clear. There can be no absolute split between the ordinary speaker actuating ordinary - i.e., non-philosophic - language-games, on the one hand, and the hopelessly trapped metaphysician wallowing in the confusions of grammar: because, for one thing, there has got to be passage; i.e., the philosopher is no different species, and does not emerge fully confused in his or her characteristic way overnight or from nowhere. “Philosopher,” in Wittgenstein’s designation, should not be seen as applying to the few philosophers as such and so called, but to anyone who shares the philosopher’s problems, inasmuch as they do.

(7) If Wittgenstein expected that he would have advocates who would stop doing philosophy he was obviously - as the historical record shows - mistaken. As I have already suggested, he himself, in his endless preoccupations with philosophical questions, cannot, shall we say, be regarded as exactly the ideal role model. Moreover, it seems that Wittgenstein, like all others, passes on to the history of philosophy. His philosophy, in the final analysis, may be seen as a transparency through which all things filter, Philosophy- that is, metaphysics, or whatever takes the place of something once filled by something called metaphysics -


can be seen as acting out of the goal of reducing as far as possible our system of general concepts for understanding the world. Wittgenstein purports not to advance any concepts of this kind; and what could possibly be simpler than saying that when we take the broadest, most general view, all we can say is that all that is so is contingently so? Of course, this is so minimal, conceptually speaking, as to be next to saying nothing at all.

If the late philosophy of Wittgenstein is to be characterized as a metaphysics, then it is a low-profile metaphysics, a metaphysics, albeit, without any superstructure, as it were. In this respect it is obviously different from the works of Whitehead, Leibniz, Hegel, Aristotle, Spinoza, and so forth. What it reveals is not the essence of something - language least of all - not the comprehensive structure of the world or reality, not an ontology as such. Rather, it reveals a topography of forms of life. And it does not explain them but opens them to view. If we are looking for knowledge concerning the structure of space and time, the essence of human life, the nature of the mind or of God, we are simply referred to various extant linguistic practices which feature these notions.

SUNY at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA

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WITTGENSTEIN'S METAPHYSICS OF CONTINGENCY