wittgenstein, kant, schopenhauer, and critical philosophy

Wittgenstein, Kant, Schopenhauer, and critical philosophy

by

JULIAN Y O U N G (University of Auckland)

Contents

Introduction (p. 73)

11. Wittgenstein (p. 81) 111. The picture theory and “solipsism” (p. 83) IV. The inexpressible (p. 88) V. Ethics (p. 89)

VI. Aesthetics (p. 96)

I. Kant (p. 75)

VII. God, immortality, and the meaning of life (p. 99) VIII. Wittgenstein and Kant on the transcendent (p. 101)

IX. The motivation of the Tractatus (p. 102)

Introduction

ERIK STENIUS’ commentary [S] was the work that first persuad- ed me that the Tractatus is, at least partially, intelligible. My understanding of the picture theory I owe largely to him, and his concept of “yes-and-no dimensions” still seems to me the only way of making the ontology of the Tractatus coherent, given the require- ment that elementary states of affairs must be logically independent of one another.

In the final chapter Stenius is concerned, rather briefly, to give a reading of Wittgenstein’s discussion of solipsism and of such matters as ethics, religion, and the meaning of life, which occupy the closing

I should like to thank Fabrizio Mondadori and Martin Tweedale for helping me to assemble the thoughts expressed in this paper. Although I disagree with him, I have also been assisted by correspondence with Russell Goodman arising out of [GI.

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pages of the Tractatus. I shall try to expand on his work in this area. Stenius insists that the correct perspective on the Tractatus is to place it in the tradition of German metaphysics. At a time at which most people thought of it as little more than a continuation of the work of Locke and Hume this was a novel suggestion. I entirely applaud it. I differ, however, in two ways from Stenius. He points out, and was the first commentator to do so, that Wittgenstein had an appreciative understanding of Schopenhauer. But he views Scho- penhauer largely as a transmitter of Kant’s philosophy. I shall be concerned to elevate Schopenhauer to a powerful influence on the Tractatus in his own right. Secondly, Stenius believes that Wittgen- stein is, above all, a “Kantian philosopher”, that most of the major Kantian themes are reproduced, or at least echoed, in the Tractatus. This approach has subsequently become quite popular; see for example David Pears’ book [DP]. I have reservations about it which I shall be concerned to express.

Kant defines “critical” philosophy as the attempt of reason to determine its own proper limits ([CPR], A xi-xii). As Stenius notes ([S], p. 218), Wittgenstein, like Kant, holds the critical enterprise to be the fundamental task for philosophy. In this important respect he is a Kantian philosopher.

How much of a Kantian is Wittgenstein? Of the several respects in which one might, or might not, find Kantianism at work in the Tractatus I shall consider the three that seem to me central. First, I shall consider the question of motives. Is there, I shall ask, a similarity between that which moved Kant and that which moved Wittgenstein to the critical endeavour? Second, I shall consider method. Is there a similarity between the means adopted by Kant to draw his limit and those adopted by Wittgenstein. Finally, and crucially, I shall consider the matter of the transcendent. A limit is not necessarily a border, to draw a limit is not necessarily to mark a dichotomy. But, as Stenius notes, the limits drawn by both Kant and Wittgenstein have the appearance of providing dichotomies, in Kant’s case between the domains of “theoretical” and “practical” reason, in Wittgenstein-s between what we can speak about on the one hand, and “higher” ([TI, 6.42) or “transcendental” ([TI, 6.421) things on the other. Is there then a similarity between Kant’s

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domain of the practical and Wittgenstein’s domain of the transcendental?

I. Kant

What were Kant’s fundamental motives for undertaking the task of providing limits to “all possible speculative knowledge of reason” ([CPR], B xxvi)? What were the-perhaps not purely philosophical -problems that occupied his mind antecedent to undertaking the critical task? Right at the beginning of the first Critique he tells us: “Criticism alone”, he says, “can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition” ([CPR], B xxxiv). I shall focus, initially, on the first three entries in this catalogue of villains.

Kant was immensely impressed by the power of Newtonian phys- ics, so much so that he believed its fundamental laws to have a priori status: “The principles of possible objective experience are at the same time general laws of nature which can be known a priori” ([PI, 306); at least officially, it is the task of the Analytic of principles to demonstrate this claim. Moreover, the impression was suffi- ciently strong to lead him to a thoroughly mechanistic view of the natural world; his writings abound with the image of nature as a mechanism, and both the Grundlegung and the second Critique make it clear that insofar as human actions are motivated by ordinary “sensuous inclinations” they are but cogs in the overall “mechanism of nature” (e.g. [CPrR], 30-31). If, then, science tells the whole story about the cosmos there is nothing in it but matter in deterministic motion: “materialism” will be true, “fatalism” its consequence, and “atheism” the only intellectually tenable position vis-a-vis the deity. Moreover, God, freedom and an immortal (and hence non-material) soul are metaphysical hypotheses whose non- availability means that “reason would have to regard the moral laws as empty figments of the brain” ([CPR], A 811). That is to say, the idea that science tells the whole story about the cosmos entails, not only the death of religion, but also the consequence that the moral life, the practice of acting according to moral principles over and above “sensuous inclinations”, becomes rationally indefensible, a

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mere habit or neurosis.’ Thus the defence of both religion and a rational morality requires that the threat of science “to make the bounds of sensibility co-extensive with the real and so to supplant reason in its pure (practical) employment” ([CPR], B xxv) be defeated. The real must be shown to exceed the sensible domain of science.

It is important, I think, to see that Kant’s fundamental motive for the critique of traditional metaphysics is of a piece with this protec- tive attitude towards religion and morality. If science threatens them in virtue of its unity of doctrine, rigour, and progress, “dog- matic” metaphysics threatens them in a more subtle way through its pretension to be the science of the “supersensible” together with its scandalous exhibition of precisely those characteristics inimical to a true science - factionalism, dogmatism, lack of progress, lack of agreement on even a method for settling disputes ([CPR], A viii-x, B vii, xiv-xv). Such a combination can only breed cynical “indiffer- entism” ([CPR], A x), agnosticism, and “free-thinking” towards that, “the knowledge of which, if attainable, we should least of all care to dispense with” ([CPR], A x-xi). Thus the pretensions of traditional metaphysics must be exposed as illusory: it, no less than science, must be denied access to the supersensible.

But suppose metaphysics could reform itself. Could it not then be allowed such access? Kant wishes to deny this. Any mode of thinking that mimics the natural sciences must inevitably frame its claims in terms of concepts and principles dervied from those we use to describe and explain the sensible world. Hence it would be a disaster if a (hypothetically reformed) metaphysics could establish claims about the supersensible, for the application of quasi-sensible concepts to “what cannot be an object of experience will always really change this into an appearance, thus rendering all practical extension of pure reason impossible” ([CPR], B xxx). Quasi-scientific metaphysics, that is, could only establish a superpowerful, anth- ropomorphic God, who, “standing before us in . . . his awful majes- ty” would generate actions motivated by fear, not by the moral motive of respect. Such actions would lack not only moral worth but

’ But cf. footnote 2 below.

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also freedom: human conduct would be transformed “into a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures” ([CPrR], 146-147). (In addition to the idea that the kind of God that could be established by scientific modes of reason- ing would spell the destruction of freely moral action, one senses in Kant an almost aesthetic revulsion from vulgar portrayals of salva- tion as “close encounters” with little men of benign appearance descending from high-technology space-ships. Good taste, no less than morality, requires that the transcendent should thoroughly transcend scientific modes of thought.)

The defence, then, of the kind of religion appropriate to morality demands that not just science, but pseudo-science also, be denied competence in the realm of the supersensible. ‘‘Theoretical’’ reason, in general, whether in its legitimate scientific employment or in it illegitimate “speculative” use, must be denied the ability to acquire knowledge of a supra-mundane kind,

So much for Kant’s motives for undertaking the critical task of limiting the competence of theoretical reason. What now of his method? Fundamentally, it consists simply in the metaphysics of transcendental idealism-the real is not co-extensive with with the sensible for, underlying the mind-created world of spatio-temporal “appearances” or “phenomena”, is the world of “things in themselves” or “noumena”-together with a variety of arguments pur- porting to demonstrate that the competence of theoretical reason is confined to the former. I say a variety of arguments in spite of the fact that Kant sometimes purports to have a single technique for dealing with speculative claims about the an sich-the charge of meaninglessness (of which more in a moment). A cursory glance at the Dialectic, however, reveals that he deploys, in practice, no monolithic technique for disposing of traditional metaphysics, but rather a variety, prominent among which is the case-by-case demon- stration that the arguments used to support traditional speculations are simply bad arguments.

The final matter we need to determine with respect to Kant is that of his attitude to that which lies beyond the limits of theoretical reason. The metaphysics of transcendental idealism establishes an ontological realm distinct from the spatio-temporal realm accessible

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to science. But what kind of access can we have to it? Famously, Kant says that he has “found it necessary to deny knowledge to make room for faith” ([CPR], B xxx). But what kind of faith? Not, and here we come to the remainder of his catalogue of villains, “fanaticism” or “superstition”. By the former he means the claim to have direct experiential access to God, by the latter the idea that one can justify oneself before him by words or deeds of ritual ([R], p. 162). The latter is merely a mistake; the former receives the full force of Kant’s condemnation being, he says, “the moral death of reason” ([R], p. 163). So equally abhorrent as the scientistic world- view is, to Kant, the magical or mystical alternative. The faith he wants is a rational faith, a “theology of reason” not of “revelation” ([CPR], A 631). The latter is as bad as no theology at all.

Kant’s rational theology is of course moral theology, the domi- nant ideas of which are (a) that it is rational to live morally only if there is a God and (b) that we can establish the rationality of living morally independently of knowing there to be a God.’ I shall not comment on the details involved in either of these steps. Instead, I wish to say something about the status which the assertions of moral theology, and the other postulates of practical reason, have for Kant.

One thing that seems to be clearly presupposed by the idea that God, a supersensible kind of freedom, and immortality, can be

Step (b), although not emphasised, must be a part of Kant’s moral theology otherwise he is surely vulnerable to the objection that all he can establish is the disjunction: either the moral life is nonrational or there is a God. But if (b) is part of the argument why do we need a God, and what of the suggestion that unless we can assure ourselves of his existence, “reason” would have to regard the moral laws as “empty figments of the brain”? I think Kant might reply as follows. The rationality of doing one’s duty can be established independently of God’s existence. NOW consider a rational, virtuous, atheist. By reflecting on the duty and its commitments he will come to see that the rationality of duty entails the existence of God. Believing himself to have rational grounds for denying God he ought then to conclude his sense of duty to be an “empty figment”. But by reflecting on the connection between rationality and morality he will see his sense of duty not to be an “empty figment”. So he will be involved in an antinomy. We need then to acknowledge God not to assume ourselves of the rationality of morality, but in order to avoid a “conflict of reason with itself’.

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shown to be objects of rationally defensible belief, is that there should be propositions asserting the existence of such things. That there are such propositions, propositions in the common-or-garden Sense of things possessing truth-values, is implied by the metaphysics of transcendental idealism: there is, ontologically speaking, a supersensible world of which, surely, the postulates of practical reason constitute true or false assertions. Kant agonizes over the epistemological status of such assertions-sometimes they are merely rational beliefs sometimes knowledge (e.g. [CPrR], 135)-but there is no passage where, explicitly considering the postulates of practical reason, he suggests that they have anything but a straightforward logical status. There are, for Kant-both Stenius ([S], p. 127) and I agree-‘transcendent’ proposition^.^

But if that is to be the case, God, supersensible freedom, and immortality, must at least constitute intelligible objects of thought. At this point one has to recognize a fundamental inconsistency in Kant’s philosophy. There is in the first Critique a constant iteration of the theme that concepts without corresponding intuitions are “empty”. For instance:

All concepts . . . relate to empirical intuitions that is to data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation they have no objective validity . . . are a mere play of the understanding. ([CPR], B 298).

And again: “Concepts are altogether impossible, and can have no meaning if no object is given for them . . .” ([CPR], A 139). According to the Aesthetic all human intuition is subject to the

But not Walsh [W] passim. Walsh is to a large part motivated by the desire to minimise the inconsistency I am about to note in Kant’s thought. My own feeling is that one often obtains a clearer perception of a great philosopher’s thought by acknowledging inconsistencies rather than by diluting doctrine to minimise them. Walshs interpretation of the assertions of moral theology gives them a status very similar to the ‘act-as-if , truth-valueless, status of the regulative principles of theoretical reason. But that they have such status is explicitly denied by Kant ([CPrR], 135). I think there is truth in Walsh’s assertion that if we follow part of Kant’s thought to its “logical conclusion” ([W], p. 284) theological utterances become truth- valueless. But that logical conclusion is not to be found in Kant but rather, it will appear, in Wittgenstein.

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forms of space and time, so the only objects we are capable of experiencing are those that occupy space or, at least, time. So we seem to have an empiricist criterion of significance according to which conceptual activity can only achieve significance if it concerns objects in principle perceptible. And officially, although, I suggested, not in practice, this criterion constitutes Kant’s principal weap- on for attacking speculative metaphysics.

But on the other hand, even in the first Critique, he asserts that it is perfectly intelligible to have thoughts of the transcendent. We will show, he says in the preface to the second edition that

all possible speculative knowledge of reason is limited to mere objects of experience. But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely, that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearances without anything that appears. ([CPR] B xxvii).

And this thought is reiterated at the beginning of the second Critique. Is, he asks, the discussion of God, freedom, and immortality about to be initiated an infringement of the first Critique’s prohibition on the “supersensible use of the categories”? Not so;

for in that work the objects of experience as such, including even our own subject were explained as only appearances, though based on things-in- themselves; consequently even in that Critique it was emphasized that the supersensible was not mere fancy, and that its concepts were not empty. W“R1, 6).

The conclusion seems to me unavoidable that Kant’s attempted synthesis of empiricism and rationalism contains, as one might expect, a basic inconsistency. His repeated agonies over the question of whether the postulates of practical reason constitute knowledge or merely rational belief indicate an awareness of the inconsistency, but indicate also, I think, that failing to be clear that the problem concerns the logical, not the epistemological, status of transcendent propositions, he had no approach to a solution. One has, I think, two alternatives. Either one takes the principle of significance to be Kant’s central commitment and dismisses the second Critique, as well as the third section of the Grundlegung [Gr]


as later aberrations from critical philosophy, or else one acknowl- edges his thought to be a unity, albeit an inconsistent one. There are at least two reasons against the first alternative. Firstly, given my account of the religious and moral motivation for the first Critique, it follows that the idea of a supersensible realm of facts about which we can have intelligible thoughts is present at the inception of the critical enterprise. And secondly, the inconsistency is created not merely by the conjunction of Kant’s theoretical with his practical philosophy but is internal to the former alone. Notwith- standing the tortuous distinction between “positive” and “negative” uses of “noumenon”, it seems to me that in the very statement of the metaphysics of transcedental idealism-in the story of noumenal objects “affecting” noumenal minds and producing via the diverse processes of synthesis, phenomenal experience-the principle that talk of the non-perceptible lacks significance is infringed. We are forced, I think, to the second alternative.

To summarize then the answers to my three questions about Kant. The fundamental motive for undertaking the critical task of defining a limit to the competence of scientific and pseudo-scientific thought is to allow as at least possibly true, as possible objects of rational belief , those metaphysical assertions which are made by theology and which he sees as commitments of a rational morality. The strategy is to establish an ontological dualism of phenomena and noumena, with the competence of science confined to the former. And what lies on the other side of the limit drawn by critical philosophy are propositions that have a transcendent subject matter and which, while they can never be the terminus of a scientific inquiry, can nonetheless be rationally held to be true.

11. Wittgenstein

I turn now to Wittgenstein. To determine whether he is a Kantian in the respects under consideration we have three questions to ask. First, can we find the desire to protect religion and morality from a threat posed by science to constitute a basic motive for his undertaking the limit-drawing task performed in the Tractatus? Second, does his method of drawing that limit involve an ontological dichot- 6 - Theoria 2-3:1984

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omy between a domain which is and a domain which is not accessible to science? Third, is there on the other side of his limit something at least reminiscent of Kant’s propositions about the transcendent?

Wittgenstein states that “the aim” of the Tractatus “is to draw a limit to thought” by drawing a limit to what can be expressed in language ([TI, p. 3): in a letter to Russell he identifies the task of drawing this joint limit as “the cardinal problem of philosophy” ([RICM], p. 71). Now it turns out that the limits of thought and language coincide with the limits of science-“The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science” ([TI, 4.11)-so that there are no truths left over for a speculative metaphysician to enunciate: as Kant wants to say some of the time, a person who says “something metaphysical” has failed “ to give meaning to certain signs in his propositions” ([TI, 6.53). But science itself is limited: “philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science” ([TI, 4.113). Can science yield knowledge concerning God, the soul, or morality? Only if there are significant propositions concerning such matters. But it turns out that there are no ethical propositions ([TI, 6.42), that “God does not reveal himself in the world” ([TI, 6.432) that science can talk about, and that “the philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul with which psychology deals” ([TI, 5.641). In general, science is limited by the fact that “propositions can express nothing that is higher” ([TI, 6.42). So it begins to look quite seductive to suppose that a Kantian desire to protect religion and morality from a perceived threat by science, a desire to place them beyond the limits of its competence, motivated the writing of the Tractatus.

Now I shall ultimately want to reject this account of Wittgen- stein’s motives. But the matter cannot be settled by reference to any self-disclosure on Wittgenstein’s part: unlike Kant he does not explicitly state why he thought the critical task to be the “cardinal” undertaking for philosophy. I shall therefore postpone discussing this matter until I have answered my other two questions about the Tractatus. It will then be possible, I shall suggest, to infer my negative thesis concerning his motives from those answers.


111. The picture theory and “solipsism”

wittgenstein’s method of drawing his limit is, of course, the “picture” theory. To think, either covertly or in overt language, is to picture or model the facts. Mental or linguistic structures that fail to meet the specifications of the picture theory fail to be thoughts or fail to be significant utterances. For while they may be in (at least superficial) order syntactically, they are incapable of a semantic interpretation.

I must, at this point, register a disagreement with Stenius. It is, of course, an intrinsic part of Kant’s transcendental idealism that human experience is limited or ‘formed’ by the subjective constitution of the mind: we are incapable of experiencing anything but that which is spatio-temporal and which “falls under” the categories. Stenius sees language as playing an analogous role in the Tractatus. He quotes “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” ([TI, 5.6) and asserts that, for Wittgenstein, experience has an a priori form which is “ ‘subjective’ in the transcendental sense” ([S], p. 226). So that corresponding to Kant’s transcendental idealism we have in Wittgenstein a “transcendental lingualism” or “lingualistic idealism” (ibid). An implication of this would be that as transcendental idealism implies a dichotomy between appearance and an sich so does linguistic idealism.

Now I think this is wrong. As I see it, the metaphysics of the Tractatus is thoroughly realist. The first point is this; that the principal by-product of Kant’s transcendental idealism is to allow him to assert the existence of synthetic a priori truths: mathematical truths, universal causality, the permanence of substance are for us (although not unconditionally) necessary, since the constitution of our mind renders us incapable of experiencing counter-instances. But (as Stenius recognizes) Wittgenstein rejects the synthetic a priori: “the only necessity that exists is logical necessity” ([TI, 6.375), and so, “the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is . . . logically impossible” ([TI, 6.3751) (my italics). It is not simply, as Stenius suggests ([S], p. 219), that synthetic a priori truths are inexpressible on Wittgen- stein’s theory of meaning, for he goes out of his way to reject the

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Kantian metaphysics on which it is based. The relevant passage occurs in the discussion of solipsism that

occupies the 5.6s. Wittgenstein thinks that some kind of truth is contained in the thesis of solipsism but that whatever it is it is compatible with “realism”. The first question to be asked is: what does Wittgenstein mean by “solipsism”? It is clearly, as Stenius notes, some kind of linguistic solipsism, a doctrine that connects “the limits of my world” with the “limits of my language”.

Russell, in [ONA], p. 134, written during the period of his collaboration with Wittgenstein, formulates (and later rejects) a version of linguistic solipsism concerned with the present moment. “Every word we now understand must have a meaning which falls within our present experience; we can never point to an object and say: ‘This lies outside my present experience’. We cannot know any particular thing unless it is part of present experience . . . Hence we may be urged to a modest agnosticism with regard to everything that lies outside our momentary consciousness.” Now there is no evidence that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was concerned with the linguistic solipsism restricting objects of reference to present experience. But if we drop that restriction, and formulate linguistic solipsism as the thesis that I can only talk meaningfully about objects that, at some time or other, fall within my experience then we obtain, I suggest, the thesis Wittgenstein is discussing: certainly the idea that I cannot meaningfully say “The world has this in it, and this, but not that” ([TI, 5.61) links Wittgenstein’s thesis with that discussed by Russell. Is this thesis incompatible with anything the realist wants to assert? It depends, presumably, on the status of the objects of my acquaintance, whether they are mind-dependent or mind-independent.

We have now reached the passage that is the source of my disagreement with Stenius. It begins with a Schopenhauerian (and Kantian) point that is made in Schopenhauer’s language: the thinking, representing subject ([TI, 5.631) does not belong in the world it experiences any more than the eye belongs in the visual field ([TI, 6.33) (cf. [WR], I1 p. 491). But for Kant and Schopenhauer one can infer the existence of a transcendent self from the fact that there is an a priori order to our experience. This inference Wittgenstein


disallows: “nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is Seen by an eye” (ibid.). The inference is unsound because the premiss is false: “no part of our experience is at the same time a priori. Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things” ([TI, 5.634). This I take to be an emphatic rejection of the metaphysics of transcendental idealism, an assertion (which is surely how Hume would have responded to the first Critique) that it is constructed out of false assumptions.

Thus there is neither an empirical nor a transcendent self. So the objects of our acquaintance can be the contents of neither an empirical nor a transcendent mind. They must therefore be mind- independent: the truth of “solipsism” places no restrictions on what the realist wants to say.

There is another route to this conclusion, another reason why Wittgenstein must hold this view regarding the objects of our acquaintance or reference, and that is via like picture theory. A thought, like any kind of representation of the world, is a “fact” ([TI, 2.141) which stands to pictured fact in the special relations of isomorphism defined by the picture theory: “a Gedanke is a Tat- sache . . . I don’t know what the constituents of a thought are but I know that it must have such constituents which correspond to the words of language . . . a Gedanke consists o f . . . psychical constituents that have the same sort of relation to reality as words” ([RKM], p. 72). But if this is so, it follows, on pain of an infinite regress, that there must be objects outside the knowing mind if there are to be any thoughts or representational experiences at all. The picture theory in fact, precisely reverses the solipsist’s picture of a mind containing the world. The world is the totality of facts a proper subset of which are picturing facts. The knowing mind is, for Wittgenstein, a complex of picturing facts so that rather than containing the world, it is a proper part of it. (It should be noted, however, that Wittgenstein is unwilling to call this knowing mind a mind: anything that is a “soul” in a philosophically interesting sense must be simple ([TI, 5.5421), the knowing mind as a complex entity in the natural world is a topic for “psychology”, philosophically uninteresting ([TI, 5.641, [RKM], p. 72).

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Given this affirmation of realism this thoroughly naturalistic account of the relation of the knowing mind to the world, why does solipsism “coincide” with realism ([TI, 5.64) rather than simply being false? And why does the self of solipsism “shrink to a point without extension” (ibid. ) rather than disappearing altogether? I want to pay particular attention to this question because, it seems to me, Wittgenstein’s treatment of the self of solipsism provides the clearest case of his sympathetic, yet dismissive, attitude to the putatively transcendent entities of traditional metaphysics.

The first point is that the self of solipsism does disappear as an entity: Wittgenstein repeatedly asserts that there is no such thing ([TI, 5.631, [NB], p. 80, p. 86). It survives however as a “limit of the world” ([TI, 5.632). Now in Kant and Schopenhauer there is a kind of equivalence between the idea that there is a transcendent limiter to the world and the idea that the world has a limit, form, or universally pervasive features. Schopenhauer, for instance, writes as follows:

. . . with an object determined in any way the subject is also at once assumed as knowing in just such a way. To this extent it is immaterial whether I say that objects have such special and inherent determinations, or that the subject knows in such and such ways. It is immaterial whether I say objects are divisible into such and such classes, or that such and such different powers of knowledge are peculiar to the subject ([FR], pp. 209-210).

Wittgenstein preserves one half of this equivalence and rejects the other. There is something important which the solipsist wants to say (namely, that the world is limited) and insofar as the idea of a “metaphysical subject” ([TI, 5.641) is the idea of there being such a limit it is an important one. But the solipsist or, as Stenius says ([S], p. 221 fn.), idealist, spoils his point by postulating a transcendent limiter. The point is wrong because the world is not limited from the outside by the constitution of a transcendent mind, but from the inside by what, on the most fundamental level, there is: “Empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects. The limit also makes itself manifest in the totality of elementary propositions” ([TI, 5.5561). Elementary facts, Wittgenstein defines as “combinations of objects” ([TI, 2.01), and objects, the fundamental atoms in the

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world of the Tractatus, have possibilities and impossibilities of combination “written into” them as their “internal”, that is, essential, properties. Thus the totality of objects determines the range of possible elementary facts, and hence of possible facts ([TI, 2.0121-2.014). The world is the toality of facts, to the totality and nature of objects, the “substance of the world” ([TI, 2.021), limits the world in the way in which the vocabulary and formation rules of a logical system limits the (potentially infinite) set of well-formed formulas in that system. How does one discover the limits of the world? Elementary propositions picture elementary facts so the substance of the world determines the range of elementary propositions. Significant utterances are analysable into combinations of elementary propositions, so the limits of the world will manifest themselves in the fact that certain utterances are nonsense, incapable of a semantic interpretation. Thus the limits of the world cannot be anticipated a priori, as the Kantian wants to say, but must be discovered a posteriori by seeing which utterances are, and which are not, significant. Language does not limit the world: it is rather that the world limits language.

The metaphysical subject of Kant and Schopenhauer is, I have suggested, dislodged from its status as an entity and dissolved into an “extentionless” limit. But the limit to the world created by objects would seem to be entirely objective, impersonal. How then is it that Wittgenstein asserts at the end of the discussion of solipsism that (a) the philosophical self is the limit of the world but that (b) what brings the self into philosophy is “the fact that ‘the world is my world”’ ([TI, 5.641)? Surely this implies that the limits of the world are somehow subjective. The matter is obscure and I must confess to a speculative element in the following interpretation.

At [NB], pp. 85-86 Wittgenstein notes that in spite of the fact that there is no experiencing (erkennende) subject one always finds oneself at a particular point in one’s visual space so that it is perspectival, has a “shape” (Form). Now no two experiencing beings can occupy exactly the same point of view so there will be systematic differences between different perceivers. Moreover, each perceiver’s experience of the world will be incomplete: there will be facts about, by way of illustration, the backs of three-

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dimensional spatial objects at points in time, with which one will be experientially unacquainted. So, and perhaps this is the element of subjectivity Wittgenstein has in mind, since you and I can only talk or think about what we can picture, the limits of my world, that is, the world from the point of view of my language and thought, will be different from the limits of yours. For we do not have access to the same set of objects. There is some support for this interpretation in P.58 of the Bemerkungen [B] where Wittgenstein connects the idea of my being the “centre” of my language with the idea that certain items, in this case your mental events, are experientially inaccessible to me. If it is this sysematic incompleteness that under- lies the notion of the subjective variability of the limits of the world, it would also explain how to differentiate one complex of picturing facts from another-a matter otherwise left indeterminate in the Tractatus. Needless to say, this interpretation is entirely consistent with my view of Wittgenstein as a realist: any realist can, and should, admit that different representers possess systematically incomplete representations of the world.

IV. The inexpressible

I turn now to my third question, the question of what, for Wittgen- stein, lies beyond the limits drawn by the picture theory. Since these limits are limits, not just of science, but of significant language and thought, it follows, as he says, that “what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense” ([TI, p. 3). And this invites the traditional interpretation of the Tractatus as an essay in logical positivism, an interpretation apparently supported by the motto on the title page of the work: “and what a man knows, whatever is not mere rum- bling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words”. This makes the “nonsensical” sound trivial, and makes the project of discovering anything analogous to Kant’s important domain of practical reason appear unpromising. But on the other hand we have: “There are things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” ([TI, 6.522). This seems to give the nonsensical a rather positive connotation. As Stenius notes ([S], p. 223) the adjective Wittgenstein uses here,

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unaussprechliche, means not only “inexpressible” but also “ineffable”. Thus the identification of the Unaussprechliche with the mystical might suggest an affirmation of the traditional idea that the mystical is ineffable. Perhaps, then, Wittgenstein believes that there are religious or other transcendent facts which, while they cannot be captured in language, are available as objects of mystical experience. Or perhaps he believes that while such facts cannot be de- scribed in the language of science they can be indicated, “manifest” themselves, in another kind of language. Wittgenstein, we know from Paul Englemann ([El, pp. 79-81), was deeply impressed by Tolstoy’s moral parables written with the intention of communicat- ing a version of pacifist Christianity. Might the point then be that it is via the indirect communication of the language of art, rather than the direct communication definitive of the language of science, that we are to discover truths of religious and moral import?

“Is there no domain outside the facts?” Wittgenstein asks himself at [NB], p. 52 and never gives an explicit answer. The attitude of the Tractatus to the inexpressible “higher” things seems, as Stenius notes, ([S], p. 225), ambiguous. But I think that considerable progress can be made towards resolving this ambiguity by placing the closing papers of the Tractatus in the context of a deep, but by no means uncritical, reading of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. That Wittgenstein was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer is, by now, widely recognized. But what is insufficiently recognized is that the Schopenhauerian sentences, phrases, and images that frequent- ly appear in the Tractatus and even more predominantly in the Notebooks, very often acquire a new, and quite un-schopenhauerian, life of their own. So that these linguistic parallels must be used with caution: one should not, for example, succumb to the temptation, as does Hacker ([HI, ch. 3 ) , to read a Schopenhauer-inspired solipsism into the Tractatus. Wittgenstein is not, I have argued, a solipsist.

V. Ethics

Armed with my Schopenhauerian key, I shall now attempt to decipher the problematic, closing pages of the Tractatus. The first of

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the things that “cannot be put into words” ([TI, 6.421) discussed (sic.) at considerable length by Wittgenstein, is something he calls “ethics”. As will become clear, however, Wittgenstein’s understanding of the subject-matter of ethics bears very little relation to Kant’s: it has nothing to do with duty, nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of particular actions. Moreover, it is eudae- monic-“the happy life . . . is the only right life” ([NB], p. 78)- whereas Kant holds that virtue and happiness are entirely distinct. A reasonable synonym for “ethics”, as Wittgenstein uses it, is, I think, “the study of the practically correct way of living”.

At [TI, 6.422 Wittgenstein initiates a long discussion of ethical reward and punishment. There “must” be such things, the former pleasant the latter unpleasant, but they must not be “consequences of an action”, at least, not temporal consequences, “events”. They must rather “reside in the action itself”. It seems that they do this because, depending on “the good or bad exercise of the will”, “not the facts-not what can be expressed by means of language”, but rather the “limits” of the world alter. The world must “wax or wane as a whole”, that is, become a happy world or an unhappy one: “the world of the happy man is a different world from that of the unhappy man” ([TI, 6.43).

In a recent article, Russell Goodman ([GI) has argued that the doctrine expressed here is taken from certain aspects of Schopen- hauer’s ethical theory.

Schopenhauer has a rather straightforward moral philosophy that is almost entirely concerned with the nature of virtue of “moral worth”. Human action is naturally egoistic for human beings naturally identify themselves as particular, embodied, individuals in the world and so act, that is “will”, solely in what they take to be the interests of that individual ([WR] I, pp. lo@-103). Such action can never possess moral worth. Virtuous action, a rare exception to the norm of human behaviour, is simply altruism, action in the interests of another that is motivated by a compassionate identification with the (generally miserable) condition of that person ([BM], p. 143).

What difference does it make, for Schopenhauer, whether one adopts an egoistic or altruistic stance to the world? Here is one contrast (not, in fact, part of his main doctrine of reward and


punishment) that he draws. Through the altruist’s sympathetic identification with the lot of others his “heart feels itself enlarged just as by egoism it feels contracted”.

Egoism concentrates our interest on the particular phenomenon of our own individuality and then knowledge always presents us with the innumerable perils that continually threaten this phenomenon whereby anxiety and care become the keynote of our disposition. ([WR] I , p. 373.)

Altruism, on the other hand, extends our interest in all that lives . . . Thus through the reduced interest in our own self the anxious care for that self is attacked and restricted at the root; hence the calm and confident serenity afforded by a virtuous disposition. ([WR] I, p. 374.)

The close parallel between the expansion-contraction and Wittgen- stein’s waxing-waning metaphor suggests that this passage made a strong impression on Wittgenstein. What interpretative help do we get from it?

The passage, I believe, provides the key to understanding the idea of ethical rewards and punishments consisting, not in facts or temporal consequences of action, but pertaining rather to the “limits” of the world. There may, of course, be consequential benefits that accrue to the Schopenhauerian altruist but there is another reward that is independent of them. For his world is a friendly world whatever the facts: however others behave, and in particular behave towards him, he will sympathise, understand, excuse, and forgive. Similarly, the egoist will be paranoid whatever the facts. No matter how others behave towards him, he will always find their politeness a mark for contempt, their seeming benevolence a dis- guise for deeply sinister, manipulative plots. Ethical reward and punishment, on this line of thought, will consist, not in any change in the facts, but rather in how one construes the facts, in a “limit” or gestalt one imposes on them. (Notice, by the way, that in the Kantian tradition “universal characteristic”, “limit”, “condition”, “form” (which, taken literally, becomes “shape”) are interchang- able notions.) Furthermore, the Schopenhauerian passage shows how rewards and punishments can “reside in the action itself”. The “action” in question is one’s conception of one’s own identity, whether one identifies exclusively with the person and welfare of a

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particular individual, or manages to avoid this identification. And the point is that the “shape”, the overall character the world has for me is a function of which alternative I take.

Having deciphered Wittgenstein’s notion of non-consequential punishment and reward via the above passage, the temptation becomes almost irresistible to take the further step, as does Good- man ([GI, pp. 44-45), of identifying Wittgenstein’s contrast between the good and bad exercise of the will with Schopenhauer’s contrast between altruism and egoism. But I am going to resist the temptation.

The first point to make is this. Although, for Schopenhauer, the altruist lives in a friendly world and escapes the egoist’s punishment of living in a hostile one, he does not achieve happiness, for his “knowledge of the lot of man generally” prevents his disposition being “a cheerful one” ([WR] I, p. 374). Paradoxically, in fact, the altruist lives in an ever more unhappy world than the egoist since, because he identifies not just with his own welfare but with the welfare of the world at large, “no suffering is any longer strange to him”, the miseries of the whole world “affect his mind just as do his own’’ ([WR] I, p. 379). But, for Wittgenstein, the man of good will lives in a happy world. Therefore, the good will is not, or at least not exactly, Schopenhauerian altruism.

Given his general principles, Schopenhauer must, in fact, deny that the altruist achieves happiness. For the life of altruism, even though it has a different character from the life of egoism, is still a life of willing, of wanting things-the good of others-and striving to achieve them. But it is a fundamental axiom of Schopenhauer’s that to will is to suffer ([WR] I, p. 196) since (roughly) our desires are generally unsatisfied. Happiness can only be achieved by a rejection of willing, withdrawal from the world, a retreat from action. Here, in fact, lies the real reward of altruism. Through his sympathetic identification with the lot of others the altruist becomes aware that it is not just his life, but that life and the world generally are permeated by willing, sin and suffering. And this brings about a “denial of the will”, a “transition from virtue to asceticism” ([WR] I, p. 380). Virtue then is just a stage on the journey to the practically correct way of living.


So the fundamental contrast in Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not between egoism and altruism but rather between willing and not willing. This raises the possibility, which I shall argue to be in fact the case, that the same contrast is the fundamental one in Wittgen- stein.

“Fear in the face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. bad, life” ([NB], p. 75). What I want to focus on here is the equivalence between falsehood and badness. It seems to me a profound theme that runs through the history of philosophy, through Plato, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer that the correct life from a practical point of view, is the life that is in harmony with the metaphysical character of the cosmos. In Schopenhauer it is particularly prominent. The lives of the egoist, altruist, and ascetic are inarticulate expressions of three grades of metaphysical insight. The egoist in deeds, though not in words, expresses the metaphysical illusion that only his embodied self is an “objectification” of will, only he has desires capable of frustration, the capacity for experiencing pleasure and pain ([WR] I , p. 104). The life of the altruist expresses the metaphysical knowledge that the identical will that is objectified in his body is objectified in all natural objects, the life of the ascetic the additional knowledge that the world-will is evil.

The Tractatus, as the quotation indicates, belongs to this tradition: the good life must be the metaphysically ‘true’ one. What then are the metaphysics of the Tractatus?

Not Schopenhauer’s, but rather Hume’s. The world of the Tracta- tus is a world in which there are no logical connections between distinct existents ([TI, 2.061), in which causality is a “superstition” ([TI, 5.1361) and induction without “logical justification” ([TI, 6.3631). The consequence of this for practical philosophy is that “The world is independent of my will” ([TI, 6.373). From this it follows, firstly, that the fulfilment of one’s wants (wiinschen) is a “grace of fate” (Eine Gnade des Schicksals) ([TI, 6.374), and, secondly, that if I were to try to identify myself as an object in the world I experience by identifying myself with that part of the world which is “subordinate to my will”, this would be “a method of . . . showing that . . . there is no subject” ([TI, 5.631).

Let me look at these two implications of the Humean character of

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the universe in turn. Because “there is no logical connection between the will and the world ([TI, 6.374), because, that is, I have no logical purchase on the future, it follows that from the point of view of correct metaphysics, I must regard the fulfilment of my wants as a grace of fate, something which is pleasant, but which is bestowed on, not achieved by, me. And this fact makes asceticism4 the right life from a practical point of view. Metaphysically, “I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely power- less”. So practically, “I can only make myself independent of the world-and so in a certain sense master of it-by renouncing any influence on happenings” ([NB], p. 73). Only the ascetic can be happy in a Humean universe: “The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate” ([NB], p: 81).

But why should the lack of a logical guarantee that what we want to happen will happen require the ability to renounce the amenities of the world? Because of the very special way in which Wittgenstein conceives of happiness. Happiness is defined as “being in agreement with the world” ([NB], p. 75). Now one fulfils this condition, presumably, just in case there is no disjunction between how one wants the world to be and how it is. This is what the ascetic achieves: since he wants, wills, nothing, there can be no disharmony between himself and the world. But are there not other ways? Could it not just happen to be the case that one’s wants were satisfied, and could one not have reasonable grounds for believing that one’s present harmonious state is not, in the future, goint to be disrupted? The short answer is that, in the absence of logical guarantees, all beliefs about the future are groundless. But even if they were not, even if causality and induction were not “supersti- tions”, I do not think Wittgenstein would have regarded a non-

I am using the term ‘ascetic’ somewhat broadly. Wittgenstein does not, I think, advocate the self-mortifying asceticism that Schopenhauer does. His position seems to be that it’s permitted to want things as long as one does not strive to satisfy those wants, as long, one might say, as they are wishes rather than willings. At [NB], p. 78, for example, it seems permitted to want things provided one will “not be unhappy if the want does not attain fulfilment”.

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ascetic kind of happiness as possible. For he seems to regard logical security from fear as an essential ingredient in happiness. At [NB], p. 74 we are told that being happy implies “living in the present” which implies, according to [NB] p. 76, living “without fear or hope”. And in the Lecture on Ethics ([L], p. 8) he mentions “the experience of feeling “absolutely safe . . . the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens” as one or two examples of that to which he would attribute “absolute or ethical value”-were it not for the fact that talk of such experiences is nonsensical. Wittgenstein wants, in fact, not merely agreement with the world but a logical guarantee that one will never be in disagreement. And only the ascetic can achieve that. It is to be noticed that the epithets Schopenhauer uses to describe the character of ascetic beatitude-“calm” , “unmoved”, immunity to “fear”, “alarm”, “distress” ([WR] I, pp. 396391) “oceanlike calmness of the spirit”, “unshakable confidence and serenity” ([WR] I, p. 411)-all belong to a single family to which “feeling absolutely safe” belongs also.

I have traced one route from the idea of the practically correct life as the one that accommodates itself to Humean metaphysics to an advocation of asceticism. But there is a second one contained in the idea of [TI, 5.631 that were I to try to identify myself with that part of the world that is “subordinate to my will” this would be a method of showing that there is “no subject”.

Wittgenstein speaks, at [NB], p. 88, of a “popular” view of the world according to which some of the things that happen in it are one’s own actions and some are not: we feel “so to speak responsi- ble” for some bodily movements and not for others; it seems that “my will fastens on the world somewhere and does not fasten onto other things”. So “considerations of willing make it look as if one part of the world were closer to me than another”. Imagining oneself to be an agent, that is, one identifies oneself as that particular bodily individual in the world through which one seems to act. But the “popular” view is a mistake: since there is no logical connection between volition and bodily movement, and since the idea of a causal connection is a superstition, the idea that one is an agent is an illusion. The only difference between willed and un-

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willed movements of the body is that the former are “accompanied” by a volition ( ibid.) .

Since, therefore, no part of the world is subordinate to my will it is a mistake to identify myself as a “subject” in the world. Now in Schopenhauer’s philosophy there is an equivalence between what one is concerned about, in whose interests one wills, and what one identifies with. The egoist wills selfishly because he identifies with a particular individual. altruistic willing is explained in terms of identification with the world at large. Wittgenstein, I think, accepts this equivalence: at [NB], p. 82, for example, he speaks of realising one’s non-identity with a bodily individual as bringing it about that one will “not want to procure a pre-eminent place for his own body”. If now we conjoint the equivalence with the metaphysical truth that it is wrong to identify oneself with anything in the world, we arrive at the conclusion that the life that is in harmony with correct metaphysics in the life that abandons willing: if it is a general truth that one wills only on behalf of what one identifies with, and one identifies with nothing, then one wills nothing.

VI. Aesthetics

I have been arguing that the good will, Wittgenstein’s recommended stance (SteZEungnahrne) ([NB], p. 87) to the world, is exemplified in a life closely modelled on that of the Schopenhauerian ascetic. There are, I have suggested, two routes by which the idea that the practicially right is the metaphysically correct life leads him to that conclusion. A third way of arguing the point emerges from an examination of the discussion of aesthetics.

“Ethics and aesthetics”, says [TI, 6.421, “are one and the same”. In the Notebooks, p. 83, this is expanded to:

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen pub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics. The normal way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis, from outside.

Now Schopenhauer also asserts that the work of art is the object seen sub specie ueternitutis ([WR] I , p. 179). Wittgenstein, so far as I

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can see, accepts without modification Schopenhauer’s theory of art. My evidence for saying this consists not just in the linguistic parallels here and elsewhere in the Notebooks, but also in the satisfying way the Schopenhauerian account of the aesthetic stance coheres with the idea of the identity of the aesthetic and ethical stances, where the latter is explained as I have explained it in $ V above.

Schopenhauer’s theory of art occupies the whole of the marvel- lous Book I11 of [WR] I; all 1 can offer here is a brief parody of it. To him art, or rather aesthetic experience, is a manifestation, or at least intimation, of genius. For it represents an extraordinary tran- scendence of our usual way of experiencing the world. Normally we perceive objects as belongning to a unified spatio-temporal system of which one finds one’s own body to be the centre: one perceives them “from the midst”. The point is the Strawsonian one (cf. [I], ch. 1) that spatio-temporal identification is egocentric, ultimately relative to a here and now which derive their reference from the location of the identifier’s own body. Since objects are always placed in relation to our bodies they are inevitably placed in relation to our wills, that is, becoming “interesting” ([WR] I, p. 177) to us. Normal experience is universally, if sometimes subtly, conative. This being so our normal condition is a miserable one since to will is to suffer.

Aesthetic experience, by contrast, shares none of these features. “Lost” ([WR] I, p. 179) in contemplation of the object, the artist ceases to be self-conscious, ceases to be aware of hs identity as a temporal object in the world: he experiences sub specie aeternitutis (ibid.). From which it follows that the object is removed from relation to his body and hence from relation to his will. His stance becomes that of the contemplative knower rather than the manipulative doer for his experience has lost the conative character of ordinary experience. And so, by ceasing to will, the artist achieves a kind of happiness that is unavailable to the conative perceiver, a “painless state” (ibid. ) which constitutes the nature of aesthetic satisfaction and which is a fleeting intimation, even a transitory form of the permanent happiness achieved by the ascetic’s “denial of the will” ([WR] I, p. 390, 11, p. 369).

Thus the Schopenhauerian artist is characterised by (a) a tran- 7 - Theoria 2-3 1984

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scendence of our usual identification with an embodied individual in the world (b) a consequent escape from our normal conative, active, stance to the world, and (c) an achievement of a kind of happiness “always sought but always escaping us on the . . . path of willing” ([WR] I , p. 196). Since these. are precisely the characteristics we have discovered in Wittgenstein’s ethical stance we find a satisfying consonance between the explanation of Wittgenstein’s ethical stance as asceticism, and his identification of the ethical with the aesthetic stances. And notice that the idea of an identity between the aesthetic and ascetic stances is an idea anticipated by Schopenhauer himself.

I have now concluded my case that the fundamental contrast Wittgenstein intends between the good and bad exercise of the will is between, not altruism and egoism, but between rather the active, willing, life of someone who identifies with something in the world, and the non-identifying, contemplative, “life of knowledge” ([NB], p. 81) of he who abandons the life of willing.

The stance Wittgenstein advocates seems to have very little to do with ethics in the normal sense of the term so that one wonders why he uses the term ‘ethics’ at all. At least part of the answer is, I think, that the discussion does have an ethical dimension to it. For, typically, identification with a part of the world is identification with a particular bodily individual. Typically, that is, the identifying life is the life of the Schopenhauerian egoist. And Wittgenstein is concerned to reject egoism: when he describes the apparent consequence of “considerations of willing” that one part of the world is “closer” to myself and my concerns than another as “intolerable” (cf. p. 27 above) he means, I think, morally intolerable. So the egoist version of the identifying life is rejected. But equally rejected is what some philosophers call “self-referential” altruism: wanting to secure pre-eminence for “the human body” is as much a mistake as is wanting to secure pre-eminence for my own. We are to “regard humans and animals quite naively as objects which are similar and belong together” ([NB], p. 82) not by identifying with all of them, but by identifying with none of them.


VII. God, immortality, and the meaning of life

Once it is seen that Wittgenstein’s recommended stance to the world is the disengaged life of the ascetic, the concluding para- graphs of the Tractatus, 6.431-7, fall into place fairly readily as, in the main, a phenomenological description of the world of someone who adopts that stance.

The man of good will lives in a happy world. But of course, so far as the facts are concerned, he lives in the same world as the unhappy man. Happiness and unhappiness are not in the world (konnen nicht zur Welt gehoren, [NB], p. 79) but consist rather in the difference between waxed and waned “limits”.

What is it like to live in a world possessing the happy man’s limits? We have already noted the importance Wittgenstein at- taches to feeling absolutely safe. The discussion of death and immortality in 6.431-6.4312-which, the numbering indicates, is in- tended as a comment on the happy man’s world-continues this theme. I mentioned earlier Wittgenstein’s equation between living in the present and living “without fear or hope” ([NB], p. 76). In 6.4311 living in the present is identified with living “timelessly”; that is, possessing “eternal life”. The ascetic, who identifies with nothing in the world, who is unconcerned about anything that happens in the world, unconcerned in particular about the fate of any temporal, destructible, individual, will, of course, have no “fear in the face of death, the best sign of a false, i.e. bad life”.

Moreover, being in happy agreement with the world he will see the solution to the problem of life “in the vanishing of the problem” ([TI, 6. 521), in the realisation that “the riddle does not exist” ([TI, 6.5). The idea of the world as a riddle comes from Schopenhauer (e.g. [WR] 11, p. 170) who explains that while Aristotle was partly right in saying that men philosophise on account of “wonder or astonishment”-right because it is astonishing that as contingent an entity as the world should exist-it would be more accurate to describe the philosophical emotion as dismay, astonishment tempered by horror, since it is the misery of living in a wicked and unhappy world that creates man’s quest for a metaphysical solution ([WR] 11, pp. 160-161). The world is a tormenting, morally offensive riddle

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demanding a metaphysical “deciphering” ([WR] 11, p. 182). But Wittgenstein disagrees with Schopenhauer’s assessment of the world as objectively unhappy and evil. The world, in itself, is “neither good nor evil” ([NB], p. 79), “in it no value exists” ([TI, 6.41). The sense of the world as an evil riddle is nothing but a subjective interpretation consequent upon adopting the incorrect stance to the world, a sense which vanishes for the happy man together with the feeling that there is any metaphysical problem to be solved. For him all that remains is the Aristotelian emotion of wonder at the existence of the world-the second experience to which, in the Lecture ([L], p. 8) Wittgenstein wants to attribute “absolute or ethical value” but refrains because, as [TI, 6.44 inti- mates, the experience is “mystical” not describable in meaningful language.

The emotion of wonder at the existence of the world seems to be the root of both the happy man’s sense of beauty and his sense of divinity. The artist, the man who, freed of the anxiety and suffering instrinsic to the conative stance, sees the world with a “happy eye” ([NB], p. 86), will find “that the world exists” an “aesthetic mir- acle” (kunstlerische Wunder) (ibid.). He will experience the world not in the ordinary way, as a mundane matter of face, but as beautiful, as astonishing, sparkling, freshly created. Concerning God, [TI, 6.432 tells us that “how things are in the world is irrelevant. But both the Notebooks (p. 79) and the Prototractatus ([Pr], p. 84 of the manuscript facsimile) state that “HOW things stand is God. God is how things stand”.’ The way to read this is, surely, however things stand is divine. What the happy man finds wonderful is that there are any facts at all. So how things are, what particular facts there are, is irrelevant to his sense of wonder. Similarly with his sense of beauty and divinity: he will perceive the world as beautiful and flooded with divinity whatever the particular facts turn out to be. On this line of thought there would seem to be very little, if any, difference between God, beauty and, presumably, goodness.

It is worth noticing that in the Prutotrucfutus these sentences immediately succeed the discussion of ethical reward and punishment.


VIII. Wittgenstein and Kant on the transcendent

What now can we say by way of comparing the attitudes of Wittgen- stein and Kant to that which lies beyond the limits established by their critical enterprises-limits which, in both cases, coincide with the limits of science? “Is there no domain beyond the facts?” In Kant’s case the answer is a firm affirmation of such a domain, a domain about which, moreover, we can have intelligible thoughts. In Wittgenstein’s case we can certainly not have thoughts about the transcendent. Are we then prisoners of language, is there something there we are incapable of grasping, except, perhaps, mystical- ly? The answer, I think, as does Stenius ([S], pp. 224-225), is that there is not.

A number of apparently transcendent entities put in an appearance at various places in the Tractatus. The first is the knowing, representing subject of Kant and Schopenhauer. That, we have seen, is dissolved into an “extensionless” limit: the claim that there is such an entity is reduced to the (true but unsayable) claim that the world is limited, from the inside, by objects. And this provides the model for the treatment of the transcendent things that appear later, God, immortality, moral and aesthetic value. These things are not in the world but neither are they outside, for they, too, are dissolved into limits of the world.

The world, as one apprehends it, has a metaphysical ‘shape’ that is created by objects, or by the set of objects one has access to. But it also has an ethical shape dependent on whether or not one lives in harmony with the Humean metaphysics of the universe. For the happy man this shape is collective constituted by a sense of the world as divine, beautiful, and morally good, a sense of it as an absolutely safe place in which death is an absurd impossibility. For the unhappy man, the world is a fearful, evil, ugly, god-deserted riddle. These shapes have nothing to do with facts, either immanent or transcendent, but are rather (somewhat monolythic) emotional structures one projects onto the (immanent) facts, structures which vary subjectively depending on whether one lives the correct or incorrect life.

One might raise the question as to what follows from this con-

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cerning nature of religious and evaluative language-apart from the fact that, in terms of the picture theory, it is meaningless. Some- thing like an emotivist theory, I think. Religious, moral, and aesthetic utterances will, surely, “manifest” things. But what they manifest will not be supernatural truths but rather the emotional structure of the utterer’s world. Affir.mations of God, beauty and goodness will be expressions of happiness, celebrations of a happy world, denials, expressions of misery. This kind of view of the language of religion and value, it is worth noting, can reasonably be represented as a logical outcome of that part of Kant’s thought which holds talk of the non-perceptible to lack significance.

If my interpretation is right then the logical pointivists were, after all, correct, at least in their understanding of Wittgenstein’s attitude to the “mystical”. There is no Kantian domain of supersensible facts: the things that manifest themselves in ‘nonsensical’ religious, moral, and aesthetic utterances-and also, presumably, in life-are not facts but rather feelings. The only divergence between Wittgen- stein and the positivists is that, for them, the all-important task was that of arriving at true beliefs, whereas, for him, solving the problems of philosophy is trivial ([TI, p. 5 ) compared with the practical task of developing right feelings, of gaining access to the happy man’s world.

IX. The motivation of the Tractatus

Wittgenstein, I have suggested, believed in no ontological domain beyond the facts. It follows from this that he cannot have been moved to undertake his critical endeavour by a Kantian desire to protect a cherished domain of religion and morality from the pretensions of science to make “the sensible co-extensive with the real”. The “sensible” is, for Wittgenstein, co-extensive with the real: the world is all that is, scientifically, the case. But this in no way threatens ethics, for ethics starts only where science stops. “The facts”, accumulated by science, provide only the “setting of the task (Aufgabe)” of investing them with the happy man’s “limits”; they have nothing to do with its “performance (L6sung)” ([TI, 6.4321).

W I ~ G E N S T E I N , KANT, SCHOPENHAUER, AND CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY 103

What were Wittgenstein’s motives for writing the Tractatus? Not, certainly, an interest purely in the philosophy of language: the “whole business of logical propositions” is “only a corollary” to the “main point” of distinguishing between what can and cannot be expressed “by propositions” ([RKM], p. 71). But why is that task of such importance? “The book’s point”, Wittgenstein writes to von Ficker, “is an ethical one”. To grasp it we are to read only “the preface and conclusion because they contain the most direct expres- sion of the point of the book” (quoted in [J&T], p. 192). If one does that one finds that the “whole sense of the book” ([TI, p. 3) is contained in proposition 7: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. But how does this express an ethical point? By being, I take it, no mere tautology but rather a moral prohibition on nonsensical talk. Wittgenstein shared with the positivists, I think, the feeling that metaphysical utterances are morally obnoxious. This interpretation receives support from Janik and Toulmin’s ([J &TI passim.) location of the Tractatus as an episode in a general movement todards the austere in both language and art: a reaction, occurring in early twentieth-century Vienna, against the baroque excesses of a collapsing Habsburg culture.6 But it suggests that among the paradoxes contained in the Tractatus is the following. Nonsensical utterances sometimes “manifest” important things- that the world has metaphysical limits, that a certain life is the right life. But one should not make such utterances. Thus, so it would seem, one and the same utterance may manifest something important but also be something one should not make.

References

[El ENGLEMANN, P. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a memoir. Ed. B. F.

[Gal GABRIEL, G . Logik als Literatur? Merkur 32, Heft 4, 1978. Cited in fn. 6. McGuinness, tr. L. Furtmuller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Cited on p. S9.

My preoccupation in this essay has been to establish the negative thesis that the motivation for the Tractatus is radically un-Kantian in character. This is the reason for the sketchy nature of these gestures towards a positive account of that motivation. For a fuller treatment to which I am sympathetic, see not only Janik and Toulmin, but also Gottfried Gabriel’s Logik als Literatur? Merkur 32, Heft 4, 1978.

104 JULIAN YOUNG

[GI GOODMAN, R. B. “Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on ethics”. ~~~~~~l of the history of philosophy, Vol. 17, 1979. Cited on pp. 90, 92, and in unnumbered footnote.

[HI HACKER, P. M. S. Insight & illusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, Cited on p. 89.

[J&T] JANIK, A. & TOULMIN, s. Wittgenstein’s Vienna. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Cited on p. 103.

[Gr] KANT, I. Foundations of the metaphysics of morals. Tr. L. W. Beck. Indianapo- lis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959. Cited on p. 80.

[CPR] KANT, I. Critique of pure reason. Tr. N. K. Smith. London: Macmillan, 1964. Cited on pp. 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80.

[CPrR] KANT, I. Critique of practical reason. Tr. L. W. Beck. New York: Bobbs- Merrill, 1956. (References are to the standard Prussian Academy edition pagination given by Beck within square brackets.) Cited on pp. 75, 77, 79, 80, in fn. 3.

[R] KANT, I. Religion within the limits of Reason alone. Tr. T. M. Greene & H. H. Hudson. New York: Harper, 1960. Cited on p. 78.

[PI KANT, I. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics. Tr. L. W. Beck. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950. (Reference is to the Prussian Academy edition pagination.) Cited on p. 75.

[DP] PEARS, D. Wittgenstein. London: Collins, 1971. Cited on p. 74. [ONA] RUSSELL, B. “On the nature of acquaintance” (1914) reprinted in Logic &

knowledge. Ed. R. C. Marsh, London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. Cited on p. 82. [WR] I SCHOPENHAUER, A. The world as will and representation, vol. I. Tr. E . F. J.

Payne. New York: Dover, 1966. Cited on pp. 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98. [WR] I1 SCHOPENHAUER, A. Vol. I1 of the same work. Cited on pp. 84, 99, 100. [BM] SCHOPENHAUER, A. On the basis of morality. Tr. E. F. J. Payne. New York:

[FR] SCHOPENHAUER, A. The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. Tr.

[S] STENIUS, E. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Oxford: Blackwell, 1964. Cited on pp. 73,

[I] STRAWSON, P. F. Individuals. London: Methuen, 1959. Cited on p. 97. [W] WALSH, W. H . “Kant’s moral theology”, Proceedings of the British Academy,

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McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1961. (Departures from the translation are accompanied by the German text in parentheses.) Cited on pp. 74,82,83,84,85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 103.

[NB] WITTGENSTEIN, L. Notebooks 1914-16. Eds. G . H. von Wright & G. E. M. Anscombe, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969. (Departures from the translation are accompanied by the German text in parentheses.) Cited on pp. 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100.

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[RKM] WITTGENSTEIN, L. Letters to Russel, Keynes & Moore. Ed. G . H. von

[Pr] WITTGENSTEIN, L. Prototractatus. Eds. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg. & G. H.

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