Class 3: Stepping into the TLP

Yesterday we had our first class on the TLP. You’d been reading it already, but up to this point in class we’d just introduced ourselves to the syllabus/course (Class 1) and to Wittgenstein’s early biography and some pertinent ideas that can be pulled from it (Class 2), but we began in earnest yesterday in Class 3. And overall, I felt that things went well and that we’re off to a good start.

We did three things. The first two things sought to help us to begin to get a sense of the text as a whole: it can, not surprisingly, be difficult to read any systematic philosophical text without knowing the system first. The idea here is that you can really only understand proposition 1 if you know all the other propositions with which it connects, but you can only know those if you have already read the other propositions, which, when you read proposition 1 for the first time, you have not done (excepting Joe Panda, who skipped the first proposition the first time he read the text and who read it only after reading all the others, such that he was the first to read proposition 1 with some understanding the first time that he read it; of course, Joe Panda doesn’t exist). Thus, it is helpful, as we begin to discuss the initial propositions in class, to get some bearing with respect to the textual context for these (and all other) propositions.

By “textual context” I mean that context provided by the text itself and by those documents that played a role in the text’s construction, and by those documents I mean the letters and notes and journals that he wrote as he worked through the ideas that have their final form in the text. It is typically necessary to understand both the general gist of the text as a whole and even some of the background of its development in order to understand any part of the text. Schroeder will provide us with the background material that we need, although other excellent sources are Ray Monk’s exemplary biography of Wittgenstein, Duty of Genius, and Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914-1916.

Schroeder provided us with two crucial sets of ideas for understanding the text as a whole. The first has to do with the nature of the TLP as whole. The second set is four fundamental ideas – in the areas of the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language – that shaped Wittgenstein’s early thought.

With respect to the nature of the TLP as whole – an issue that is the source of much heated debate in Wittgenstein scholarship – the problem is twofold. The first is that Wittgenstein claimed that the point of the book is ethical. Given that it is primarily focused on logic and semantics, it is not clear how this is so. Further, he says that ethics is unsayable, which suggests that if this is an ethical text, it is not saying anything. And this leads to the second fold of the problem: given the logic and semantics that Wittgenstein develops in the TLP, some sentences that we write in our language have sense (meaning that they depict possible facts; these logically legitimate sentences are called “propositions” in order to distinguish them from sentences that look legitimate but are not) and some have no sense (meaning that they do not depict a possible state of affairs). The TLP clearly seems to contain only sentences of the latter sort. Thus, it is nonsense and it says nothing. Finally – and this might be a third fold – this means that there are no thoughts in the TLP, and yet in the Preface Wittgenstein clearly claims that the TLP contains thoughts (and that their truth is unassailable).

With respect to the four fundamental ideas – referentialism, logical analysis, determinacy of sense, and bipolarity – we said a bit, or at least enough so that we were then able to have a very fruitful first discussion of the TLP. What is still missing for us is a sense of why those ideas are important and of the questions/problems that those ideas answered/solved. We’ll get more into that tomorrow or next week.

We then ended with a very good discussion of three propositions. The first two I chose and placed together in order to illustrate some important things about how to read the TLP. The third was offered up by Emerson and strongly seconded by Heather. All three are connected in important ways.

The two propositions that I put together were 1 and 2.06a. (2.06a means ‘the first sentence of 2.06’). Proposition 1 claims, “The world is all that is the case.” Right off the bat, one should have questions. The implicit question that the first comment on 1 answers is, ‘What is meant by ‘the case’?’ The answer given there in 1.1 is ‘the totality of facts,’ with the added specification that facts are not things. (At the very end of class, and so at the tail end of our discussion of Joe the crack-smoking Panda, I noted that this distinction between facts and things is important insofar as if sentences mean in virtue of pointing to things, then we have serious ontological problems when it comes to thoughts of non-existent things. However, we have no such problem, Wittgenstein is claiming, if we argue that the meaning of a sentence – its sense – is a matter of facts (with ‘facts’ understood in a bipolar sense as something that could obtain or not obtain; the thought itself does not require that the fact that is thought actually obtains)).

But one could easily ask another question: Is “all that is the case” all that there is? In other words, is reality exhausted by “the case” – and so by this conception of “world.” I picked out the first statement where reality is mentioned: 2.06. (Note that I did this by simply looking in the very useful index; also, this was not planned – it’s tough to plan a Wittgenstein class too carefully since so much depends on how you all are reacting to it.) In the first sentence of 2.06 (i.e., at 2.06a), we read, “The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality.” Noel helped us to work through this quickly: If “all that is the case” is the existence of states of affairs, and if this is the world, then reality is more than the world, since reality also includes all non-existing – but logically possible and so thinkable and ergo sayable – state of affairs (called ‘atomic facts’ in Odgen’s translation; the German is Sachverhalt, meaning ‘the way that things (Sache) stand or hang together or are related (verhalten as a verb means ‘to behave’ and as noun means ‘behavior,’ and so it’s a matter of how things are behaving)).

Why this distinction between world and reality is important became clearer when connected by Emerson to a troubling concept introduced in comments 3.01-03. There, we get the idea what is thinkable is possible and that there is no illogical thought. The entirety of possible thoughts would give us a picture of the whole of reality; the entirety of true thoughts would give us a picture of the world. But thoughts of things that are entirely empirically unlikely, like a crack-smoking panda, are still logically possible. The thought brings, as it were, a picture to mind – a picture of how things might stand if the thought were true. A thought can depict possible states of affairs in this manner because it has logical form: the thought is, at the deep level for which logical analysis aims, organized in the same way as the world would be if the fact existed. What exactly logical form is remains a question for us, but whatever it is, it is what enables thoughts to picture facts (whether they exist or are merely possible (even if monstrously implausible)). But the key point is that what is thinkable goes far beyond what is empirically plausible or even what we tend to imagine or to have ever actually thought. And this world/reality distinction will – like the fact/thing distinction – be important for Wittgenstein’s logic, semantics, and ethics.

A final note: What we saw at the end of class was what I was after when I had you jump into the TLP without any lectures to help set things up for you. You need to flounder and react, since you can engage the TLP only from where you stand right now. Right now you have various assumptions and certainties and faulty ways of thinking, and the TLP will elicit those for you as you struggle with it, such that your struggle with the TLP becomes a struggle with the limits of your own thinking. This is perhaps one of the primary reasons that the TLP has so far had lasting (and ethical) value.