Seeing Wittgenstein

Looking back over this it is clear to me that too much was left unsaid.

In the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein says:

... what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

He concludes the Tractatus by saying the same thing:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

(7)

He attempts to draw the limits of thinking by an examination of its expression in language. Passing over is silence does not mean to disregard. He is not denying that there are things that are important to us, things that cannot be expressed in words:

Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

(T 6.42-6.421)

These are things we encounter in experience. We must pass over them in silence because the attempt to articulate them in words renders them nonsense.

For the early Wittgenstein it is the world seen aright when one transcends propositions. (Tractatus 6.54) The later Wittgenstein comes to reject the idea that there is a logical scaffolding underlying both language and the world. The problems of philosophy are not solved by understanding the logic of language. (T preface). He comes to reject scientism:

... philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does’

(Blue Book, p. 18).



Rather than the attempt to theorize and explain away, it is an invitation to open your eyes and mind.

Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again’

(CV 5).

[Added]

He no longer regards thinking and seeing as being on opposite sides. Philosophy is not simply a matter of conceptual clarification.

Work on philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)

(CV, 24)

Reply to Fooloso4
Welcome back to the Forum.

Your comment puts the one I just made in Sam's thread in a larger context. I will try to come back to your points after pulling together some other thoughts I have about responses to the Tractatus.

Quoting Fooloso4

Passing over is silence does not mean to disregard.

[quote=Thomas Short]The ineffable is not something mystical or mysterious; it is merely that which evades description. But while It evades description, it pervades experience. [/quote]

Reply to Wayfarer

Nice.

Wittgenstein said:

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.

(Culture and Value)

Among the many questions this raises is whether the Tractatus is a form of poetry. The form is deliberate and intentional. It stands in contrast to the standard method of discourse.

In her book "Wittgenstein's Ladder" Marjorie Perloff quotes from a letter from Wittgenstein to his student Norman Malcolm:

I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life ...

She then quotes from the Tractatus:

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. But of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. (T #6.52)

One way of interpreting these remarks is to conclude that philosophy does nothing to improve our thinking about the important questions of life. This might be the case if work in philosophy was limited to making and evaluating propositions. But Wittgenstein says that there are no philosophical propositions, only the clarification of propositions (T 4.112) Philosophy limits "the disputable sphere of natural science" (T 4.113) The propositions of natural science have nothing to do with philosophy. (6.53)

Rather than pointing away from philosophy, he points evocatively away from science to a whole other sphere beyond its realm. The clarifications of the propositions of natural science helps clear the way from what blocks our ability to "see the world aright" (T 7) .

Reply to Fooloso4 Right - unlike many of his acolytes, he is concerned with reality as lived, not as a set of abstractions. Real questions of meaning, not just semantics. He has that in common with existentialism, although his style is very different to existentialism.

Reply to Wayfarer

I agree.

Quoting Wayfarer

Real questions of meaning, not just semantics.

The unthinking reflex reaction is "meaning is use", But meaning does not always mean use. To say that my life has meaning is not to say that my life has use, That is not how the term is being used when we talk about such things as the meaning of life or the meaning of something to me, that is to say.it hassignificance as opposed to a signifier.

In the Tractatus this follows the distinction between saying and seeing, that is, the difference between propositional meaning and ethics/aesthetics. The failure to distinguish between these uses of the terms is the source of a great deal of confusion.

Reply to Wayfarer
Thinking in terms of existentialism does evoke the personal "my world" spoken of in the Tractatus. The work in the Philosophical Investigations reflects the idea from a different point of view. The speaking part is described as:

PI 337:. But didn't I already intend the whole construction of the sentence (for example) at its beginning? So surely it already existed in my mind before I said it out loud!—If it was in my mind, still it would not normally be there in some different word order. But here we are constructing a misleading picture of 'intending', that is, of the use of this word. An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions. If the technique of the game of chess did not exist, I could not intend to play a game of chess. In so far as I do intend the construction of a sentence in advance, that is made possible by the fact that I can speak the language in question.

The silence is now presented as a personal choice:

ibid. 338:After all, one can only say something if one has learned to talk. Therefore in order to want to say something one must also have mastered a language; and yet it is clear that one can want to speak without speaking. Just as one can want to dance without dancing. And when we think about this, we grasp at the image of dancing, speaking, etc. .

As the work proceeds, the relationship between thinking and speaking becomes more difficult. One has to wrestle with the following:

ibid. 340, 341:340. One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that.

But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice.

341. Speech with and without thought is to be compared with the
playing of a piece of music with and without thought.

We have travelled some way from being told what can be said or not.

Quoting Fooloso4

For the early Wittgenstein it is the world seen aright when one transcends propositions. (Tractatus 6.54) The later Wittgenstein comes to reject the idea that there is a logical scaffolding underlying both language and the world. The problems of philosophy are not solved by understanding the logic of language. (T preface). He comes to reject scientism:

... philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does’
(Blue Book, p. 18).

What I took away from the Blue Book is that the problem of natural science is that it engages with the hidden where Wittgenstein claims the consideration of language is a way to deal only with what is evident:

Quoting Blue Book, pg 10

We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can’t look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive “time” which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction

The two modes are not satisfactory grounds for the other.

Reply to Paine

Wittgenstein's complaints against scientism often hold up, but his criticisms of science often do not. He does not, for example, regard the question "what is time" as a question of natural science because the questions of natural science have answers and we cannot answer this question (PI 89) The nature of time, however, is a question that physicists and cosmologists do address, and have addressed even prior to Wittgenstein's first Notebooks.

Time is not a substantive in the way a cow or a radio is. We cannot point to it in order to give an ostensive definition, but it is not nothing. The problems we have with it are not because we think there is something hidden.

In addition, there are new facts that concern us in our attempt to understand time. Facts related to gravity, distance, velocity, and observers for example.

Reply to Fooloso4
The Blue Book recognizes the validity of the scientific method while distinguishing its work from Wittgenstein's investigation:

Quoting Blue Book page 10

Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind. This model would be part of a psychological theory in the way in which a mechanical model of the ether can be part of a theory of electricity. (Such a model, by the way, is always part of the symbolism of a theory. Its advantage may be that it is seen at a glance and easily held in the mind. It has been said that a model, in a sense, dresses up the pure theory; that the naked theory is sentences or equations. This must be examined more closely later on.)
We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities; and on this ground we might call the mind a queer kind of medium. But this aspect of the mind does not interest us. The problems which it may set are psychological problems, and the method of their solution is that of natural science.

This decoupling of what can be compared in language from what must be sought through phenomena avoids the double vision of Kant (as an example) where time as a matter of cosmology is entangled in his system of representation.

Reply to Paine )

For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.

(PI part 2, 371)

As opposed to philosophy where are no experimental methods and conceptual confusion.