In our last class, we finally turned toward a closer, text-based look at the Investigations, and I finally handed things over to you a bit. The text has a very subtle movement, and it is very easy to miss it, and so we need to look at this movement more closely, and if this closer look is to be meaningful, then you all will need to start taking a more active role in this close looking. Again, it is not easy: one has to read slowly and carefully, but this can be very difficult to do across so many sections. It becomes easier as you get a clearer sense of what Wittgenstein is doing, but, perhaps paradoxically, that sense can only emerge from a close reading in which you might initially miss much. Furthermore, I cannot simply hand you this close reading: you must actively engage in it yourself.
With that in mind, we turned toward the first examination after the metaphilosophical sections. We had looked at those sections in Class 17 (and we worked our way only to §119, with an emphasis on §113 and 114; however, I had introduced some of the §§120s in Class 16). The metaphilosophical sections are usually said to run from §§108-33, but they might be said to begin as early as §103. The claim that they begin in §108 stems from the presence in that section of the claim that we must pivot the practice of philosophical investigation around our “real need” (i.e., we really need to investigate on the basis of a real need); this section thus announces what must be done with one’s philosophical method (it must be turned around on the basis of a real need, implying that the needs that have traditionally motivated philosophy are in some sense not real). Then, in §109, Wittgenstein begins to spell out what such a pivoting is and why it is necessary. However, he had been clearly working up to these statements as he investigated the TLP conception of logic, and so all the §§100s are essential to the metaphysical reflection.
Note also that the investigation of the Tractarian conception of logic is the investigation that precedes the metaphilosophical sections; an examination of the general form of a proposition (GFP) then follows the metaphilosophical sections. Of course, Wittgenstein had been operating with his new philosophical method prior to these sections, but it is only here – between the examination of Tractarian logic and GFP – that he stops to reflect explicitly and in a sustained fashion on what he is doing and why. One should ask, ‘Why does he stop here, of all places, to talk about what philosophy is?’
As soon as the metaphilosophical sections end, a note is inserted that claims that “[t]here is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.” We might wonder at why this note is inserted and how it relates to the examination that commences in the following section: How does it mark a transition from metaphilosophical reflection to an examination of the GFP? At the very least, we begin to see such a philosophical therapeutic method at work in sections §§134ff; of course, that method was already at work in §§1-107. Note also that what we see in §§134ff. is indeed a method – it is not random, as much as it might seem so – and it is a method tailored, or at least most suited, to the nature of the philosophical problem that is being treated (and one must be careful to get the problem right; it’s easy to misread the problem).
§134: We now return to our investigations, and we begin with an imperative: “Let’s examine […]” And what shall we examine? We shall examine a single simple sentence: “This is how things are [Es verhält sich so and so].” Our examination then begins with question: How can I say that this is the GFP?
Why does W start here? It would seem that Wittgenstein, having gone at the TLP in a criss-cross fashion in §§1-108, is now ready to tackle the heart of it, i.e., it’s essence, which is the claim that language has an essence and, furthermore, that that essence can be described with the sentence, “This is how things are.” But note further what exactly he is after: he is wondering about how can one say that a single sentence is in fact the GFP.
The third sentence of this first paragraph of §134 (which, in scholarly notation, would be 134.a.3) then gives us a standard Investigations therapeutic move – indeed, the one heralded in §116: He is bringing this sentence back from its metaphysical to its everyday use. We thus start our examination with a question and we answer that question by turning to what the item under examination “first and foremost [vor allem – literally, ‘before all’]” is: it is a sentence – and a sentence in a particular language, to be more exact. So the second question of the examination might be phrased thusly: What do we have before us?
We must then look and see, and this is what the next question points us toward: “how is this sentence applied – that is, in our everyday language?” (134.a.4) In other words, how is it used in its everyday home? It is from there, he stresses, that he got it. And this implies the nature of the philosophical problem with which he is here dealing: the urge to take some piece of language from its home and do something different with it.
In the second paragraph of this section, he then introduces a possible home: the sentence under consideration is a kind of shorthand sentence referring to accounts of situations that put us in some kind of fix, such as when I need money and I explain that this is how things are (this is why I’ve come and imposed upon you); we could imagine others (‘I know that you’d like it to be otherwise, but this is how things are’). This, then, is the home of the sentence “This is how things are.”
Wittgenstein then makes a small jump from 134.b.2 to 134.b.3: the sentence offered in 134.b.1 is said, in 134.b.2, to show that the sentence used as the GFP is in fact ‘some such statement’ (my translation). 134.b.3 then jumps to the claim that we use (verwendet, which is usually translated in this text as “use” but is here, for some reason, translated as “employ”) this ordinary language sentence as a “propositional schema” (in other words, as the GFP, as the essence of something – and so in a metaphysical way), but when that is done (and it can be done, although it is clearly something that the later Wittgenstein would not recommend) it is only done “because it has the construction of an English sentence.” What W means by this can be misleading, because it might make it seem like any sentence with a subject and predicate will do. It is not as if we could say, “The book is red” is the general form of propositions. (Note also that he now says “propositions” in the PI and not “proposition,” as in the TLP: the simple use of the plural makes it clear that we are talking about something that is multiple, plural, varied, and not some one thing.) Thus, Wittgenstein notes that other specific sentences – different in their outward form but not in the thought that they express (to use Tractarian talk) or their use (to use PI talk) – could have worked just as well.
But Wittgenstein’s point here is not that other specific sentences could work, such that the mistake was to use this specific sentence as opposed to others. Yes, other sentences could work, and “[o]ne could also simply use a letter, variable,” such as the letter “p” – and this is in fact what W did in the TLP. However, W then claims that “surely no one is going to call the letter ‘p’ the general form of propositions.” So what is the point that W is making here? I believe that it is this: The particular sentence “This is how things are” is used not because of the exact, specific words and the order in which they are put – other words in different orders would have worked just as well (and this is just, in Tractarian talk, the sensible form of the thought, and thoughts can indeed be expressed through different vehicles, as the thousands of human languages make clear) – although it is worth noting that there is something vital about the level of generality of this particular set of ordinary language sentences (and W glosses over this, but that is largely because it is not relevant to his current point). Why then are they being used? This is where the comparison with p comes in: we would be disinclined to say that p is the essence of language; however, we would be inclined to say that something like “This is how things are” gets at that essence. Why is this, i.e., what does the ordinary language sentence have that the symbolic logic variable p does not? The answer: It has, in its favor, the fact that is in fact an actual ordinary language sentence. That is essential to what W elsewhere calls our “bewitchment” by language (§109).
But how – or why – does this particular sentence bewitch us? That is the question with which this examination began: “How can I say that this is the general form of propositions?” It is, after all, just an ordinary language sentence, and one among many that have same basic use. Others would have worked – whereas a simple symbol would not have worked. So what is it about this sentence that leads one to think that it can stand in for the essence of language? Wittgenstein’s answer is: it has the construction of an English sentence, and in emphasizing this he is emphasizing the fact that it is, grammatically (meaning here ‘syntactically’), the most basic sentence: a subject plus a predicate (a point he highlighted in the first paragraph of §134). Indeed, in the handbook that I use for Composition (ENGL 1101), the subject-predicate sentence is the first kind of sentence introduced in the ‘sentence’ chapter – it is the most basic possible grammatically correct independent clause. (“I think” is a possible example. Of course, “I think” would not work for the GFP, so there is more to “This is how things are” and its ilk than just its grammatical form.) He repeats this observation to emphasize his point: “To repeat: ‘This is how things are’ had that role only because it is itself what one calls an English sentence.” In other words, the sentence ‘This is how things are’ was used to stand for the GFP because of its role as an example of a standard independent clause. (But again: it does not seem that this is the only reason behind its being given that metaphysical use.)
Wittgenstein then writes two further sentences, which help to tease out what he is after just a little bit more. First, he writes, “But though it is a sentence, still it gets used as a propositional variable.” I take this to mean, roughly, the following: ‘Although the sentence “This is how things are” is in fact just an ordinary language sentence with an everyday home in the ordinary situations in which it is used, it nonetheless does get used in a different context to serve a very different function: it is used to stand for the essence of language. And this leads me to wonder not so much about why we do this as to why we think this will work and what we are in fact really doing when we do this (when we give everyday words and sentences a metaphysical use, which is no use at all).’ Wittgenstein doesn’t say too much about why we are tempted in this fashion, although it is possible to tease out (from what he says throughout the PI and from what is implied in what he says and does throughout the PI) the belief that we are naturally tempted (most likely by language itself, but also by a desire to explain and know – a desire that language makes possible) to metaphysics. His much greater concern, however, is to perform therapy on this urge, and he does this by trying to get a sense of (a) why we think that the metaphysical use that we give to some language is in fact doing anything and (b) what is in fact happening when we give some words or sentences a metaphysical use.
It is with both (a) and (b) in mind that he offers the final sentence, with the first independent clause speaking to (b) and the second independent clause speaking to (a): “To say that it [the sentence ‘This is how things are’] agrees (or does not agree) with reality would be obvious nonsense [Unsinn], and so it illustrates the fact that one feature of our concept of a proposition is sounding like one.” In other words, what we are doing (in thinking that a single ordinary language sentence can stand for the essence of language) is nonsense (and it should be obvious once we have a clear (surveyable) view of what we are doing. And so what are we doing in this situation? We are bewitched by how language sounds to us. We have, as proficient language users, a built-in sense – such that it almost seems innate – for what a proper sentence sounds like (although my experience in teaching Composition suggests otherwise). We have an ear for language, so to speak. And here is part of what happens: we wonder at how language can work as it does, and so we go investigating what it (language) is (we look for its essence), and an implicit standard by which we judge this essence, once we have it, is whether it sounds like what we already take the essence to be. However, insofar as we are bewitched by the primacy of the simple independent clause (which by no means exhausts what language is), we unconsciously assume that kind of clause as the standard that that the supposed ‘essential standard of language’ must meet (ignoring the fact that such a clause is just a part of language and not the whole of it).
As for what is obvious nonsense, however, it is the idea that reality agrees (or does not agree) with the sentence “This is how things are.” This turn to nonsense and agreement seems like yet another jump. How did we get here? Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that the final question we should have as a result of this initial bit of examination is this: ‘What exactly is obvious nonsense about all this (a question that implies that it is not so obvious yet), and why do we engage in such nonsense anyway?’
It would seem that he means this: The idea that this sentence (“This is how things are”) can be the GFP is obvious nonsense. But if this is so, why does Wittgenstein not just say this? Why does he instead suddenly use Tractarian language? And how is the notion of agreement nonsense? In one sense, it seems like it is completely possible for reality to agree with this sentence: I might attempt to describe how things are, and it is quite possible that things are in fact that way. Perhaps, then, he means to emphasize the oddness of the concept of ‘agreement’ here. Indeed, it would sound odd if, upon hearing someone describe how things are, I were to say, ‘Reality agrees.’ But Wittgenstein does not emphasize this strangeness, and, given how frequently he emphasizes the strangeness of things in the TLP, it would seem that, if that was the point he was trying to make, then he would make it more clearly. So what is he trying to say?
The key is indeed the sudden use of the concept of ‘agreement.’ There has been no talk of agreement throughout the whole section. Whence, then, comes this concept? For the one keyed in to the ever-present background context provided by the TLP, the answer is clear: proposition 2.21! That proposition says, “The picture agrees with reality or not [übereinstimmt oder nicht]; it is right or wrong, true or false.” (Other uses of übereinstimmen, whether in verb or nominal form, are at 2.222, 4.2, 4.4, 4.42, 4.43, 4.31, and 4.462.) Thus, we have, for the one who is reading and listening carefully, a clear reference to the Tractarian notion of logical isomorphism. A proposition is essentially a picture, and it can picture only insofar as it can potentially ‘agree’ with reality, meaning that it has the same logical form as the fact that it pictures. This seems to be what is dismissed as obvious nonsense – this idea of logical isomorphism – and if this logical isomorphism is not present, then there is nothing that makes the sentence “This is how things are” seem like a plausible candidate for the GFP other than the fact that it sounds the way we think a proposition in essence should sound. And note that Wittgenstein seems to be saying, even more strongly, that it is the idea of ‘what a sentence as such must sound like’ that leads one to believe in such obvious nonsense as ‘logical isomorphism is part of the essence of language.’ In this way, our language bewitches us and leads us into metaphysical temptation.
As for why the idea of agreement is obvious nonsense, we can offer two reasons. First, it might be that the sentence, on its own, is too vague: we have no sense of that with which reality is said to agree. To get that clearer sense, the Tractarian would say, we have to go into the mind of the speaker and get at the thought that is being expressed. It is to this idea (that the key to ‘agreement’ is in the mind) that W will turn next, and he will use the language game offered in §143 to examine and critique that idea. However, it would seem that a different reason is at work here, and it is this: the whole edifice of logical isomorphism has by this point been dismantled (this was the point of sections §§1-107), and so we are supposed to now be in a position to see the obvious nonsense of this Tractarian idea of ‘agreement.’ And this is not Tractarian nonsense – it is not something that is necessary and so that cannot be said but can only show itself. Rather, it is Investigations nonsense: it just doesn’t make any sense, and that is because we have given a sentence a role (a function, a use) that is idle. It doesn’t do anything (except frustrate us).
One final note on this section: In case it caused confusion, one should note that the sentence here translated as “This is how things are” is in fact a translation of the German “Es verhält sich so and so,” which is exactly the sentence given as the GFP at TLP 4.53. Thus, Wittgenstein is directly quoting the TLP here at §134. However, in the Pears-McGuiness translation that most of you are using for the TLP, that sentence is translated as “This is how things stand.” In the Ogden translation, it is “Such and such is the case.” That same Odgen sentence is used by the translators of the PI here in §134 to translate “So und so liegen die Sachen,” which, more literally, is “The things lay so and so.” (As for the translators of the PI: the original translator is Anscombe, and Hacker and Schulte have revised her translation; thus, I refer to this as the AHS translation of the PI.)
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