August 30, 1999 [Info] [Contents] [Welcome] [Syllabus] [Resources on Wittgenstein]
The Tractatus is a work of great difficulty, over which controversy still rages. Almost the only points on which commentators agree are that it is subtle and complex and of great importance. I can set out only a few of the major themes, omitting complicating details. Even regarding the points that I will present here, there have been, and will probably continue to be, major disagreements.
All philosophical concerns since the time of Kant cross, diverge, and cross again within the context of an attempt to escape from the Kantian paradigm. Kant attempted to avoid the difficulties of Cartesian dualism. Descartes said that a mind experiences only itself directly; it experiences objects only indirectly by means of mental states (ideas). But if the mind knows only its own states, then its own states are all that it knows; thus, if we have access only to ideas, we can never know that an external world exists. Kant tried a new hypothesis (Copernican Revolution) that minds and objects are mutually involved in each other and that truth consists in the agreement of objects with minds. Knowledge of nature is possible because the mind constructs the form of the world of its experience. It follows that, of whatever lies wholly outside our experience, we can know nothing; it is possible only to say that it exists. For Kant, the mind was not a “thing” at all, but an active, creative process, which actually constructs experience. Likewise, the external world is a construction of the organizing process of the mind. It is only a short step from there to Nietzsche: all history is interpretation. Still philosophers sought certainty, and tried to break through to knowledge of things in themselves.
The influence of the Kantian paradigm can be seen in these three seminal writers. Marx wrote that all history is the history of class struggle: the oppression of the poor by the wealthy. All science, art, and even religion are dictated by the ruling class to justify their rule over the poor and weak. Darwin also saw struggle at the heart of life: individual species exist because they had managed to survive and reproduce. God did not design the giraffe’s long neck, but the giraffe has a long neck because it allowed this species to survive. Nietzsche insisted that there are no facts, only interpretations. We can never know what happened to the Native Americans, because white people wrote the history books. But even if Native Americans wrote their own history, it too would be biased. You cannot escape personal bias, says Nietzsche; the quest for absolute truth is doomed to failure.
Loss of Confidence: rise of dictatorships, two world wars, genocide, the deterioration
of the environment, Vietnam War, all undermine the old beliefs in progress , in
rationality, and in people’s capacity to control their destiny and improve their lot.
We live in a world that has no center: nature is hostile, even indifferent, to human
beings. There is a disproportion, an absurdity, between human hopes and fears and the
silence of the universe.
Concern with Science: Some blame science: what am I--the me that I experience in
introspection and observation, or the complex structure of amino acids and polypeptide
chains that I am told I am? Am I responsible for anything--is there any moral
responsibility, or is human behavior as predictable as a solar eclipse? Technology has
created whole new sets of moral problems with which we have had no prior experience.
The Dissociated Sensibility: the divided self; we are too self-conscious; separated from
nature and within ourselves. More and more people wish to return to an unconscious
existence inseparable from the world of nature.
The Linguistic Turn: language as a distorting lens through which we peer in vain. Reality
is independent of mankind; if we can purify language, we will be able to see the
thing-in-itself. Others say this is impossible. All agree that language determines the way
we see the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born in Vienna, Austria, into a wealthy and cultivated family. After studying engineering in Austria, he went in 1911 to Manchester, England, to continue his studies and to do research in the design of airplane propellers and engines. Soon his interests shifted to mathematics and logic, and he moved to Cambridge, where he was a pupil of Bertrand Russell’s. While serving in the Austrian army during the First World War, he finished his Tractatus.
Although at the time he thought he had solved all philosophical problems, he gradually came to question many of the doctrines of the Tractatus. Accordingly, after teaching in Austria for a few years, he returned to Cambridge in 1929 and resumed the study and teaching of philosophy. He had given away the fortune he had inherited from his father and lived in great simplicity. He published nothing but dictated notes to his pupils. These notes circulated widely in an unauthorized form and began to have a great influence in Britain and the United States. A corrected version appeared after his death under the title Philosophical Investigations.
At the beginning of this century, Gottlob Frege was working with the fundamental principles of math, and discovered several new logical relationships. Bertrand Russell was also working to unify the principles of math and logic. There was a wish among several British and American philosophers to purify language of its distortions, in order to create a logically perfect language which would allow us direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was in many respects the culmination of the logical route out of the Kantian paradigm. Kant had distinguished between what we can know and what we cannot know. Wittgenstein distinguished between what we can say and what we cannot say.
August 30, 1999