The younger Wittgenstein (‘LW’) famously suggested at the
end of his first book (The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus or ‘TLP’ (1922))
that the propositions of the book were a ladder that should be thrown down
after climbing them.
6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he
has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away
the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
One way to explain this – though, as will soon become
obvious, a way that is already highly theoretically charged – is that TLP sets
out an account of how language is able to represent the world in virtue of a
shared pictorial form. Linguistic sentences and worldly facts are isomorphic.
There’s a story that he came up with his theory of language after hearing that
Italian road traffic court cases used models to show where all the cars had
been. The model depicts the accident by sharing its spatial form albeit in
miniature.
But one consequence of that is that meaningful sentences, or
propositions, must have ‘bipolarity’.
4.023 A proposition must restrict
reality to two alternatives: yes or no.
In order to do that, it must describe reality completely.
A proposition is a description of a state of affairs.
That is: it should be capable of both truth and of falsity,
depending on circumstances. (Tautologies – being true under all circumstances –
lack this but are allowed as a special case that drops out as the limit case of
the logical form of the sentences that have bipolarity.) However, the claims in
TLP about language are supposed to be non-tautological but still necessary
truths. They could not have been false. Thus they lack bipolarity. And
thus, by the account of TLP, they are strictly nonsense. So the book is impossible
by its own lights. (To repeat, this is just to sketch the interpretation.)
On a traditional reading, it is assumed that even when one
recognises that, one can still somehow grasp the intent of the nonsensical
sentences and achieve insight. Nonsense may sometimes be mere gibberish.
But it can sometimes also convey an important, substantial insight which it
somehow shows though the content cannot be said. (The philosopher Frank Ramsey
dismissed this view (which he assumed LW held) thus: ‘what you cannot say, you
cannot say. And neither can you whistle it.’)
This, so far, is the traditional interpretation or reading
of the early Wittgenstein.
The ‘resolute reading’ says that there’s no such thing as
such ‘substantial nonsense’. If the sentences are nonsense they fail to express
anything. There’s no intent they could have or substantial insight offer
(by whistling, as it were). So the book is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. It
is not that offers a picture of how language works, albeit one which has to be
hinted at. No, the apparent picture is a chimera, a mere nothing. But the
reader gets to understand LW’s point – and note that in the quote above he
talks of understanding him not his propositions – only when
he/she sees that the seductive picture sketched in TLP is in fact nonsense,
gibberish. We think we know what it means but then we come to see we do not. It
really is ‘ad absurdum’. No specific thesis (about language, eg.) is ruled out
because, to repeat, if the sentences – ruled out – are nonsense, they fail to
express anything.
That bold claim is fairly clear. Whether it is plausible
that LW wrote an entire book to make such a negative point about philosophy has
seemed, to some, far fetched. Other questions remain. Since 6.54 seems ‘sincere’
on this reading, what other statements of TLP are meant sincerely even if most
are, as it, were ironic? And if nonsense is gibberish, surely any bit of gibberish
would do for any other? So why does the book have the form of a highly
structured argument? How could its author structure the ‘regnant’ gibberish without
some grasp of its purported sense? Given that he did, how should we regard our
attitude to ‘pregnant’ gibberish, by contrast with just hitting shift and all
the keys on the top of a qwerty keyboard?
***
The resolute reading is also ascribed to the later
Wittgenstein which is more difficult to do because in Philosophical
Investigations (1953) he is explicit that nonsense is just gibberish. In
other words, he seems already to agree explicitly with the resolute readers’
view of nonsense so surely all readings of the later Wittgenstein were always
resolute? There cannot be a contrast, it seems. He says:
§500. When a sentence is called
senseless, it is not, as it were, its sense that is senseless. Rather, a
combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from
circulation. (Wittgenstein 1953)
It looks, in other words, as though a resolute reading is
forced on the reader. LW himself says that all nonsense is gibberish. But there
is something akin to a traditional reading in how nonsense fails to be
sense. The theory goes, if I say ‘green ideas sleep furiously’ this is nonsense
because it violates logical syntax. The concept or meaning of green cannot
be used to qualify the abstract noun idea. Likewise sleep cannot be adverbially
qualified furiously. These concepts are immiscible. Thus there’s a violation of
the grammatical rules. Thus nonsense.
But later resoluteness denies this explanation. The signs or
squiggles or sounds: ‘green ideas sleep furiously’ remain merely signs, not
symbols (ie not things with content or meaning). They symbolise nothing. No
meaning has been assigned to them. It’s because ‘green’ is appended to ‘idea’
that it does not mean green (or ‘idea’ mean idea). As a matter of fact,
we have provided no use for this sign combination. That’s all. To think that
there is a deeper explanation of the nonsense is to think that something is
ruled out, or that there is something we cannot do. One may want to say: “But
no one could think that ideas are green! That thought is impossible.” But as
the ‘resoluters’ say: sense has limits but no limitations. That ‘thought’ isn’t
even a thought.
One consequence of this view is that it changes the quick way to describe what LW is doing. For example, traditionally people have identified an argument in the section ֻ§§243-315 and called it the ‘Private Language Argument’. The idea is that here, LW rules out the idea of a private language, or a language understandable by only one person. But that’s to say that there is something we cannot do: form a language like that. Resoluters deny that LW’s philosophy can offer us any such policing. The reason for thinking that there cannot be a private language is that we can make no sense of it. (If sentences – ruled out – are nonsense they fail to express anything.) But what’s the ‘it’? It, too, vanishes.
Tim
